Prescription for Peace: The Biological

Basis of Man's Ideological Conflicts

By Trigant Burrow

I

     The situation in which we are all engrossed today, and about which, as students of behavior, all of us are deeply concerned, is the cause of the conflict and dislocation we are witnessing throughout the behavior processes of mankind. We see these behavior dislocations in political, economic, and social disorders. We see them in the conflict between communism and democracy, in the widespread dichotomy presented in the opposed ideologies of East and West; in short, in the schizophrenic division that now exists between one half the world and the other half. (1) We see the presence of conflict and disorder clearly enough, but what is the remedy for it? In this Symposium volume a few of us have sought to bring together our ideas and to state our position with respect to disorders in man's behavior. We have been invited to propose, from our different backgrounds, the needed remedy -- to provide the suitable "prescription," as Professor Sorokin has expressed it -- for a disorder that sorely besets and deeply troubles us all.

     But if we are to remedy a disorder, we must first locate it. We must define the area or organ that is the seat of the disorder. With regard to the disturbance that everywhere affects man as a species today, we have failed to approach our problem scientifically because we have failed to recognize that the disorder is man's disorder. As I have tried to point out for more than thirty years, it is society that is the patient. With the individual patient, as we know, our procedure is to restore the disordered function of the organ or area affected, by reestablishing in this organ or area the function common or normal to it throughout the species. Similarly, in our attempt to restore deviate behavior within the sick society of man, we must restore the behavior of that sick society in accord with the biological norm of behavior that characterizes the human species throughout. But, as in the case of the individual patient, our first obligation as students of social man is to discover the area or organ in which the disease resides and determine what is the nature of this disease.

II

     The thesis of phylobiology, or the thesis of man's social development as a species, begins with the beginning of language. The philologists tell us that language probably arose some two million years ago.

     It might seem, then, that we are attacking a problem that is largely archaic, theoretical, remote. It would indeed seem so but for one noteworthy circumstance -- that in each generation language arises anew in every individual. It is taught afresh to every child by every parent. Our investigation, therefore, has to do with a behavior process which, far from being historic or archaic, is in fact the immediate experience of us all. Language does not differ from other genetic variations occurring in the course of man's evolution. Like other variations within a species, language is both immediate and remote. It denotes a process that is ontogenetic as well as phylogenetic, individual as well as social.

     But too often language is regarded as a superficial part--function, as a specialization of the periphery of man, rather than as a deeply emotive function resident within his organism. It is a ready habit with us to "think" of language as a discrete, individual process, rather than as the function of the species as a continuous and solidaric organism. This discrepancy is not difficult to explain. After all, it is as talking animals that we grew up, and in our daily use of language it is natural that we should take the function of speech for granted. If we do analyze the speech function, we look on it only mentally, projectively, just as we look mentally and protectively on everything else that we examine or analyze. And so we do not experience the spoken word as our interrelational selves in action. We do not sense its physiological depth and scope as a behavioral reaction within a total behavioral frame or pattern under whose immanent sovereignty the word or symbol subsists, and to whose function as a whole it is constantly beholden.

     In our study of language as a phyloörganismic process, and in our study of the influence of this process upon human behavior, let us begin, then, at the beginning. Let us begin where the race of man begins, and where we and our children begin from generation to generation in the use of this symbolic part-function. Originally, of course, man did not possess the faculty of the spoken word -- no more than, as new-born infants, we possess this faculty today. Man's reaction to his environment, as to his fellow human beings, was a reaction of his whole organism. It was man's organism in its entirety that enlisted man's reaction to the world outside him.

     But with the beginning of the word, a new adaptation set in for man -- an adaptation that has not been appreciated in all its biological significance. From the background of our group experimentation it was seen that this adaptation did not consist only of a peripheral, socio-symbolic innovation, but that it has caused a radical modification in the organismic relation of man to man as well as of man to his physical environment. We may assume that the inception of speech, or the shift upward of the function of communication to a special zone of the head, entailed at first but a slight somatic alteration. It probably began-and this again we see recapitulated in the immediate experience of ourselves and our children --as only a single sound or surface gesture here and there; and this sound or gesture corresponded to a single object or condition. Slowly, very slowly, the sounds and the gestures multiplied; and with this multiplication there occurred an altered awareness, an altered pattern of attention in respect to the objects and conditions for which the sounds and gestures stood.

     Coincident with this local process or special modification in the cerebral area, reactions which hitherto had engaged the interest and elicited the emotive response of man's organism as a whole now also began gradually to be displaced upward, and to center in a relatively small segment, or within the forebrain of the organism. Thus it happened that with the descent of the generations of men, as with the ontogenetic development of our children and of ourselves today, a tremendous behavioral transformation slowly took place. In the sphere of man's behavior as a social animal, the importance, interrelationally, of the whole organism began little by little to recede, and in its place there was formed throughout the species a new focus of interaction between man and his fellows, as between man and his environment. Man's fellows and his environment were now newly apprehended by him.

III

     Like other species, the human species is primarily common and unitary in structure and function. Its instinctual needs and incitements are basically continuous throughout. In a word, the basic behavior of man, like that of other animal orders, represents a condition of homogeneity and solidarity. (7) Man's consciousness -- his attention and interest -- is primarily unitary and undifferentiated. As a genus, man has consciousness and motivation that is common and uniform. This solidarity of the species extends to the functions of perception, response, and activation. But now with the acquisition by each of us of the facility of speech there resulted the social mechanism of agent and receptor. As occasion demanded, individuals could now stand to each other in the surface relation of subject and object. One might order, another obey; one might ask, another provide; one direct a task, another perform it. As men stood thus opposite one another, projecting words and observing the effect produced, something radical happened to the organism of man. There was the emergence of an altered interrelational function, a socially reciprocal adaptation among individuals that became more and more accentuated; and man was launched upon a new era of human interchange.

     Until now, language had entailed no conflict. There existed as yet no basic discrepancy between the personality of one individual and another. The organism of man as a species had merely acquired an accidental variation in the pattern of its function as a whole. A socially emergent modification was in process, but the common emotive incitements within all individuals still found common expression, and even heightened social articulation, through the medium of speech.

     So far, then, it would seem that all had gone well with the evolution of man as a social organism. So far it would seem that man had taken on only greater assets, and that as yet he had incurred no liabilities as a consequence of this phylodynamic innovation in his interrelational life. Then, as formerly, the organism as a whole continued to take care of the processes belonging to it as a whole. The relationship between center and surface remained intact. Just as man's reactions to heat and cold, to hunger and satiety, continued to maintain their accustomed balance, so, with the newly acquired function of language, the processes of the phyloörganism as a whole proceeded with harmony and equanimity throughout the field of man's behavior. (8) There had come about only the acquisition of a peripherally localized and discrete function for mediating, through symbols, mutual understanding and co-operation among us in our common relation to the environment and to one >another.

IV

     But at a certain point in our evolution as a social organism an extraneous element began to enter; an element that was untoward and obstructive arose within the organism that impaired the coordinated function of man as a species. It is to this obstructive element that we must address ourselves in the effort to locate the seat of man's disordered behavior. As I say, if we are to discover the cause of a disorder, we must first discover the seat of that disorder. We must acquaint ourselves with the function of the tissue or organ which has suffered the impairment or dysfunction. Only in this way shall we be in a position to indicate the needed "prescription" for man's disturbed behavior.

     If now we may venture to reconstruct man's phylogenetic situation on the basis of our ontogenetic experiment in social groups, the inadvertent development which now took place in man may be described somewhat as follows: With the increasing upward surge of the organism's emotive interests and drives, there was the centering of the individual's interrelational feeling and motivation in the anterior segment of the head and in the face. There was the development of the specially circumscribed function of the brain I later called the symbolic or part brain. For with the enormous complexity and reorganization of function that arose coincidentally with the invention of language, there took place a special systematization within the brain and organism of man. With the upsurge of the emotive behavior of man and its amalgamation with this with this highly complex code of symbol usage, there developed a partitive behavior organization. In this systematization of man's subjective feelings and interests there was formed a restricted behavioral personality or identity -- the partitive identity I have called the "I"-persona. (9)

     Our experimental group findings show that the "I"-persona has today got completely out of hand. (I0) This entity that each individual came to experience as the self or "I" is now running riot. The surface organization embodied in this "I"-persona has assumed an autocratic dictatorship over the processes of us all, and social man is in a muddle. For in the absence of an understanding of what has happened to man -- in the absence of an understanding of the neurodynamic alteration that has taken place within man's brain -- all efforts to combat and control the aberrant thoughts and actions of the social "I"-persona are now blindly undertaken only by this same aberrant identity. The consequence is that throughout our social processes today there is confusion worse confounded. The biologically shallow symbolic or part brain concomitant to the "I"-persona is not competent to handle the profound behavior problem presented by this partitive brain itself. The "I"persona cannot remedy the "I"-persona; only the basic whole brain can compass this profound behavioral problem of man's partitive dissociation. Hence the only possible approach to the "I"-persona and the autopathic part-brain is through research measures that permit a direct attack on the neurodynamic process responsible for our social pathology. What is generally considered in high circles to be thoughtful debate regarding questions of human behavior, whether interpersonal or international, amounts to mere emotive squabbling. Such surface discussions are not conducted under the auspices of the brain as a whole, but are beholden to the emotive systematization of man's inadvertent "I"-persona. Man must look into this lawless personality structure and its errant behavior reactions.

     With the segmentation of the species into the separate centers of interest and feeling that comprise each individual, there was correspondingly the separation, the opposition, and the differentiation of individual interests from one another. The separate feeling of the individual was now the separate identity of the individual. This separate, autopathic identity became the individual's authority. Hence there was not only the objectively definable difference between agent and receptor, but as a result of the subjective systematization of man's emotive incitements into a partitive segment of the brain and the formation of the separate "I"-persona, man was now composed of vicarious selves, of artificially discrete identities. In this personality transformation the emotive drives of the phylum became the wishful drives of the individual. Here is indicated the phylodynamic scope of the social "I"-persona.' For in the spurious self-systematization of us all, we now felt differently toward one another. Personal sympathy or antipathy for one another replaced man's primary empathy as a phylum, and we experienced a different feeling relation toward the environment and each other. Where formerly our common interests had been primary, now our separate interests were primary. Instead of the common consciousness that once united us, a partitive self, the common self-interest of the species was shifted to the personal self-interest of each individual, and henceforward interrelational conflict replaced the organism's unity and co-ordination as a phylum. This is the breach whose global extension we see today in the irreconcilable ideologies of East and West.

     Again, this development has its parallel I the child of today, in the child that was once ourselves. In his first acquirement of words, no artificial division of the child's personality occurs; there is no behavioral conflict. It is only later -- at the age of two or two and a half years -- that separate feeling begins to be systematized into a separate identity, and there are fashioned the divisive part brain and the "I" persona. It is at this stage that parents and educators speak of the child's "difficult age" -- quite forgetting that their own difficult age still goes merrily on without check or hindrance.

     From now on the educational conditioning of the younger by the adult generation was increasingly marked by the inculcation of this newly acquired partitive mode of interrelational adapation; until this secondary, localized pattern of behavior now supersedes, in extent or surface range, the deeper organismic pattern of behavior primarily governing the interactions of man as a unitary species. In this transposition of whole feeling into the symbolic segment there resulted its condensation into restricted affects and their projection.

     Affect projection was the beginning in man of mental and social aberration. Affect projection is social untruth and neurosis. For affect projection is the ascription to others of feelings and motives that are resident within oneself. When these feelings and motives within us are unacceptable to us, they lead to hostile projection. Such hostile projections are seen today upon a global scale, and in overwhelming degree, in the affective reactions that characterize international behavior. We readily witness these projections in the mutual insults and incriminations that are being daily bandied between Russia and the Western States. And so, in the naive interchange of these two great divisions of the world, their diplomatic relations, for all their solemn trappings, amount to nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black.

     In view of its obstruction to the wholesome development of man's mental and social life, this mechanism of affect projection has not received the objective examination it deserves. It has not received this objective study precisely for the reason that this universal defect is one that resides in the subjective behavior of us all. It resides in the affecto-symbolic part-brain and in the social constellation we have just described as the "I"-persona. As we have seen, the "I"-persona is but the systematization of man's habitual affects into a separate artifact identity, and it is this artifact identity that now dominates the processes of man as a race. We cannot expect life to scan as long as it is subordinated to the "I"-persona.

     We should try to understand the subjective mechanism and development of this false identity. We should try to attain an internal appreciation of the biological origin of this personality formation in man, and its emergence in each of us. Although the feeling and motivation of man's organism is primarily homogeneous, the upsurge in each individual of the facility of communication through speech was accompanied also by a corresponding upsurge of man's feeling or emotive activation. That is, the individual who possessed the power of projecting speech now falsely arrogated to himself the power of projecting the partitive feeling or affect associated with speech." As a separate "I"-persona, each of us could now be arbitrarily pleased or displeased with what another individual thought or failed to think, with what he felt or failed to feel, with what he did or did not do. (12)

     In this social dissociation, in this phylic feeling-aberration, each individual became the dictator, the self-appointed sponsor of the other's feeling and thinking and doing. For in his separate feeling as now systematized into a separate affective identity or "I"-persona, each constituted himself the center of motivation, and each thus became the sole and absolute authority in respect to human conduct. In this way there was fashioned the subjective division of you versus me that now completely overrules the processes of man -- a division that marks the origin of man's spurious ideologies, his affect -- dichotomies and conflicts. This is the behavioral division which in their unconscious naïveté men mistakenly call their "right." But this is not the biological right either of individual or species in their relation to the environment. It is not the right embodied in the organism's biological norm, but is a universally projected affect-right over which each of us feels himself to be the absolute arbiter. Here, according to our group investigations, was formed a socio-biologically impossible situation. Here was laid the ground for the social neurosis, the irreconcilable division and conflict in individual and community behavior, that we see on every hand today.

     In this bionomic distortion the attentive faculty in man as a species became decentered, misdirected. It became decentered and misdirected because the focus of man's feeling and interest which motivates man's attention was now decentered and misdirected. The focus of his interrelational interest or motivation was short-circuited into the affect-image of "my right." The contrast between biologically fitting and unfitting behavior was narrowed, and confined to an artificial image dichotomy of "good" and "bad." (13) Here was begotten the phyloörganismic fallacy of interpersonal "morality." Man's common interest and feeling as a species was replaced by the unilateral motivation or interest of an artifactual "I"-persona --the affect constellation that separates and renders mutually irreconcilable the feeling of all individuals as separate and opposed social entities. My feeling (the feeling of every "me") has become transmuted into my "right." This is man's false selfhood, his disingenuousness. This is his intrinsic untruth and neurosis.

     The effectively systematized "I"-persona, the authoritarianism or falsely begotten sense of the self that arrogates to itself rights in respect to others which are absolute and unimpeachable, is the meaning of prejudice. (14) This false sense of the self explains why prejudice and not reason is the universal authority over man's processes today. Because of prejudice, because of affect projection and the moral dichotomy of "right" and "wrong," man's social behavior has become political instead of organismic, ulterior rather than unitary. "My" private gain versus "your" private gain is now the motive underlying the pursuit by each of us of his separate advantage. In their "goodness" men became altruistic, but their "altruism" disintegrates utterly under the affect motivation to conflict and war, or under the reaction of conflict with the other person's or the other nation's privately arrogated right or badness -"badness," that is, from the point of view of the now separated "me," or "I"-persona. The 'I"-persona is simply not rational.

V

     It is essential that the "I"-persona be regarded as a phylic as well as an individual phenomenon, that it be regarded as concomitant to an alteration in brain function that affects the species throughout." Basically the "I"-persona is a defect in the process of attention. Man's common tension, his whole tension or cotention, has been replaced by a deviate, esoteric, partitive tension, or ditention. (15) The adjustment of this defect in attention, therefore, is our basic problem. (16)

     This neurodynamic adjustment has been the whole significance of our group analysis. People persist in thinking that, like sociological, psychiatric, or other academic groups which attempt to deal with behavior, my associates and I have sought to level affect differences by recourse to discussion. Nothing could be further from the correct description of our socio-biological group studies. This is what the Church, the school, the court, and the clinic do. This is what the United Nations does. This is what Congress does -- the 80th and the 81st! It is what all group endeavors must do which do not rest upon principles of objective science -- which do not recognize that affect disorder is due to the violation of a phylic norm in the behavior of the genus homo and that this affect disorder must be met by the application of phylic criteria. Accordingly, our attempt has been to recognize in ourselves as individuals and as a group the presence of the systematization of affects and prejudices I have described as the "I"-persona, and to trace the phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin of this universal malfunctioning." Only thus shall we come to see that it is our prejudices that control our minds today, not our minds that control our prejudices.

     In our finding, affect and prejudice are to be traced to the deviate function of man's symbolic part-brain and its effectively projected dichotomy of "right and wrong." In the reckoning of phylobiology, both communism and capitalism are expressions of affect projection. Both these politically restricted processes in feeling and thinking represent equally the shift of the phyloörganism's motivation and behavior from its function within the organism as a whole, to the retroactive part-function located in the affecto-symbolic segment of the head. This reversal of the organism's total feeling is the biological basis of prejudice and of man's conflicting ideologies. This is the bottleneck in man's emotive behavior today; the genetic basis of his neurosis. Russia is not interested in One World, but only in One Russia. Similarly, America is interested not in One World, but in one American World. With the separate "I"-persona dominating individual and nation, it could not possibly be otherwise. Each person or nation, being the whole show, must run the whole show. The problem of neurosis and conflict, individual and international, lies within us.

VI

     Let us turn, then, to ourselves. Let us turn to the ontogenetic aspect of this biological transformation as it influences the behavior of social groups today. This accident in man's development is, as we have said, a subjective accident. It is an accident that has befallen you and me. Hence unless we return to ourselves unless we appreciate this accident within our own subjective processes as we live and have our being today in a society of completely artificial personality structures-we shall not be in a position to reckon objectively, and to remedy effectively this subjective defect in our own socio-symbolic evolution. As things stand today, our habitual subjective authority reflexly defends its subjective pretensions and bitterly resents objective inquiry into them. But we can no longer blink the fact that we are all part of this subjective dissociation, and that nolens volens it calls for objective observation.

     Our group analysis, therefore, was the analysis of ourselves. It was the analysis of the social conditioning of the organism of each participant in it. It was not an analysis of the past. Our concern was not with the ruminations of fantasy or other reminiscent elements. We were engaged in the analysis of the moment as that moment had been built up of all preceding moments from infancy on. This technique required our consistent and unremitting challenge of the partitive reactions or affects existing among us as a group, here and now. Through this group process in mutual affectbaiting we came to sense the unnatural displacement of the organism's whole function by a part-function. We came to sense the artificial systematization of affects, the restricted personality formation, that is the autocratic "I"-persona. Finally, we sensed this bionomic discrepancy to the point of experiencing the physiological stress underlying this emotional congestion-an emotional congestion that had accumulated and become occluded, so to speak, within the symbolic or autopathic segment. This is the impaction and stress we have recognized as ditention in contrast to the organism's total pattern of behavior, or cotention." On the basis of our experiments with the physiological reactions induced by the emotive segmentation coincident with speech, we found it possible to reconstruct, in greater or less degree, the phylogenetic experience of man as a species by reason of the immediate behavioral data derived from the corresponding- ontogenetic or individual experience of our experimental group.

     Biologically, any human group is a cross section of human society, and human society is but another name for the species man. Our experimental setup, then, consisted of a minute section of the species man; and the aspect of the section under investigation was the functional interaction or the social behavior of the section as a whole and of the separate individuals composing the section. We ourselves-the physicians, students, and patients participating in the investigation-were the material under investigation. We were both agent and receptor. We were the investigators, but we were also the material to be investigated. Our task was to observe as a whole organism, individual and social, whatever ditention or part-function was perceptible within the individual or within the unit as a whole.

     In the effort of my associates and myself to investigate within ourselves as a unit or group the behavioral configuration that is partitive or ditentive as compared with the configuration that is common or cotentive, it became possible to distinguish the seat of the disorder that had been inculcated in our childhood as individuals and as a race. With the definition of the focus of our behavioral difficulty as a community or species-with the internal recognition of the area or organ affected by the gradual upsurge of the emotive behavior of man into the cerebral or linguistic segment and its concomitant displacement of man's feeling or emotivity as a whole-we were in a position to tease out, as it were, and sense the needed remedy for our phylopathological differentiation or separation in motivation and behavior. We were able to define the area or pattern of conflict as it affected our own interrelational processes. In this physiological localization of the stress concomitant to the sense of separation or conflict, we were at last "getting warm" in our quest for the required remedy or prescription. We began to discriminate the pattern of ditention, of separation, of private self-interest, from that of cotention or the common, undifferentiated self-interest of man's organism as a species.

     The induction of the pattern of cotention, though extremely simple in theory, is in practice extremely unwelcome. But an unwelcome task should not therefore be called difficult. In fairness one can only -emphasize the unwelcomeness of a technique of research which attempts to recover a pattern that goes counter to the personal and social pattern now become habitual to man.

VII

     Let us now go on to consider the prescription, to the technique of cotention. The student cannot achieve cotention through recourse to any moral regime of self-examination or any program of "introspection." Unlike the behavioral procedures directed at any other problem of man, the approach to cotention is not mental or moral. It does not lie within the organism's projective radius. Neither is it physical in the sense in which we ordinarily apply physical force or dexterity to our external environment. Something untoward has happened to man's organism as a species, and is now laying waste his phylic powers. Hence there must be brought into play a recourse wholly alien to his habitual experience, individual and social. We have pointed out the universal presence of affect projection, and particularly the tendency to ascribe to others unacceptable feelings resident within oneself; and we have traced this reaction to the modification in brain function that distorts the process of directive attention. The problem of man's behavior, then, is internal to him. It is physiological. It is a problem of his physiological self in action. It is a phylophysiological problem. If man is to employ the phylobiological technique for adjusting his organism's interrelational malfunction, he must resort to measures that will arrest in himself habits of ideation that are affect-laden (ditention), and thus intercept surface habits of prejudice and projection that now govern us with the force of an overpowering social reflex. In phylobiology the student must be his own guinea pig. Furthermore, he must do something about his internal behavior. Principles and methods in human behavior cannot neglect the role of doing or the function of art in maintaining healthy human adaptation.

     In the main the task of the investigator is the replacement of affect projection or the emotively colored mentation of the "I"persona (ditention), with a sense of the neuromuscular tension that is the concomitant of this habitual social behavior response. As for my associates and myself, a long apprenticeship in the mutual challenge of socially projected affects provided a substantial springboard for our attack. It was the unremitting shock to accustomed psychosocial reactions, and the persistent arrest of a reflexly established social pattern, that first forced into consciousness the presence of the physiological stress coincident to it.

     The effect of abnegating mental images, of disavowing one's habitual thinking, was to produce a sense of awareness of the eyes themselves and of the forepart of the head. With the increasing assertion of this awareness, and with its persistent cultivation, this kinesthetic sensation of the eyes and head is sensed as one of weight and stress. Concomitant to this internal perception, there occurs the automatic elimination of one's customary preoccupation with affect-laden images, and one feels the problem of his reorientation to be essentially physiological." It has become a problem that is subjective or internal to the organism itself.

     We have found that quieting the habitual movements of the eyes assists in the organism's physiological reorientation, since the process of projection is so largely interwoven with the visual function. My own procedure has been to set aside during the day (and night) experimental periods in which I have Adhered so consistently to the arrest of the eyes and the concomitant kinesthetic observation of the cephalic area of partitive tension that the background from which it is observed, namely, the organism's primary tensional pattern, or cotention, is forced into recognition and into conscious, directive efficiency. That is, the technique for bringing into operation the pattern of cotention, or the tensional pattern of the organism as a whole, consists in centering upon the part-area of discomfort and stress, with the resultant arrest of affect images.

     After all, cotention is the primary pattern that characterizes the spontaneous behavior of the infant in relation to its environment. This cotentive principle is also operative in the balanced process of integration that characterizes the disinterested mentation of the scientist in his approach to his material of observation and analysis. Indeed, what the child has by nature and the scientist by training, all mankind possesses potentially in the primary unity and integrity of his total organism's relation to its environment. Cotention is man's biological staple; as much so as food or air or soil. In recovering this basic pattern of behavior one is merely carrying the laws of evolution into the subjective domain of human feeling and motivation now distorted by the affect projection and untruth of ditention and neurosis.

     The technique of cotention, however, like any other technique, is acquired only through research, or "practice." No student will step lightly from ditention into cotention. Cotention is not a matter of intellectual acumen, but of intestinal fortitude. Its attainment demands constant repetition. The distractions are many and persistent, and the student must return again and again to his experimental task. I can give him no other formula than that of refusing to entertain his customary ideas or affect images, and thus gradually coming to perceive the segment that habitually projects the image. With increasing practice the student will perceive this segment through the characteristic sense of local tension he experiences with the abrogation of his habitual ditentive interests. But this is research. It is research on the part of man's whole organism in respect to a deviate part-function of that same organism. The student is thus approaching for the first time a wholly new field of experiment. Throughout his approach there will be a constant tendency in his own habitual and immediate behavior to discredit his task, and to harken instead to the more welcome invitations of affect and ditention.

     I do not know how it may seem to others, but I believe no one will strive to arrest an habitual reflex if the reflex offers no difficulty-no pain or impediment. If a habit presents no menace to the health of the organism, why should one wish to arrest it? As I have said, with my coworkers and myself there was much pain and embarrassment in the emotional impact brought about by the interrelational challenge and arrest of our habitual affects. And it was only under the duress of this repeated trauma that a sense of the affront to the underlying, physiological structures within the forepart of the head was brought to awareness, and finally caused the attention to shift from the affecto-symbolic object (projection) to the physiological reaction underlying it.

     I think that cotention will not attain practical realization as a phylic discipline except in the measure in which communities of men are educated to the recognition of the false affect values, the surface (wishful) thinking that now determine their interrelational behavior in all its aspects-political, religious, economic, academic, industrial. Therefore one may not speak of the cotention of the individual without of necessity presupposing the restoration of the cotentive pattern of adaptation in mankind at large-no more than he could speak of eliminating- tuberculosis in the individual and not in the phylum. It is only as cotention becomes a community expression that there will be an automatic modification of customary affective, or socially subversive, behavior. I cannot emphasize strongly enough our position that neurosis is a social aberration, and that the essential contribution of phylobiology to the sphere of behavior research is its recognition of the subjective constellation of reactions embodied in the social "I"-persona -- the field of man's partitive self in action. This, and this alone, is cotention; this is the meaning, the essence, of phylobiology.

VIII

     As far as the researches of my associates and myself have gone, this is the remedy, the "prescription," about which Professor Sorokin has inquired. But at this point Professor Sorokin or anyone else might well ask: "Assuming that your position is correct, just how is the patient-that is, the sick society of man-to be induced to accept the prescription? What is to persuade him to swallow so unpalatable a dose of behavioral medicine?"

     This is indeed a question that requires looking into. As a science of subjective man-a science that deals with processes within us-phylobiology is of its nature a discipline applicable equally to scientist and layman. But for both scientist and layman it must be emphasized that only a mature interest in improved methods of human adaptation -- only a passionate interest in the organism's fullest measure of balanced function and health in accordance with scientific method, as over against uncontrolled reaction habits and possibly incite a student to pit his organismic self against the self of automatic habit. In substance, his problem is to exercise the scientific discipline that will give precedence to the delayed reaction in contrast to the immediate response, even where the adjustment will affect his entire personality with all its age-long entail of reflex habituations. Certainly nothing could be more unacceptable to him in the entire pharmacopeia of behavior remedies than a recipe for undermining all that he now knows as his personality, and adopting instead a procedure that will insure a total (phylic) pattern of reaction of which he has as yet no conscious knowledge.

     To the student who has not participated in the technique of phylobiology, the situation may look rather hopeless. But from my own experience and that of others, it is by no means hopeless." When man must do something, he finds a way to do it. Today it is not only the biologist, the sociologist, the philosopher, the psychologist, and the economist who are concerned with the signs in man of social imbalance and disintegration; men everywhere are hard pressed to reconcile the inconsistencies in our human behavior with a sane program of individual and social adaptation. Men are daily becoming increasingly aware of serious difficulty, of pain and impediment, for which they cannot account. As a consequence, I believe that the habit mechanisms of affect, prejudice, and projection will be brought more and more under scrutiny, and that intelligent men on each side of this divided and unhappy world will demand of themselves the discipline of an inquiry that offers a radical challenge to the accepted behavior precepts prevailing throughout the processes of us all. I do not doubt that the needed social discipline; which in our experimental group work came to be exerted upon my associates and myself, will gradually come to exert itself spontaneously over the processes of men, in sufficient numbers and with sufficient strength to give the lie to the behavioral prescriptions-religious, political, ethical, legal, educational-now accepted among us as bona fide remedies for a disorder of adaptation which man will in spite of himself be forced to recognize as a physiological disturbance internal to him. With the increasing opportunities of contact between individuals and nations, with the closer interknitting physically of men and institutions the world over, there is an intimation, however vague, however inchoate, of a corresponding trend within the processes of men toward recognizing, beneath the clash of our superficial ideologies, the essentially common nature of persons and peoples throughout the family of mankind.

     Man's present-day institutions, however, do not reflect this phylobiological trend. In the false, unilateral ideology of so-called communism, there is no hint, no faint intimation, of such an inherent biological co-ordination and unity. And in the surface pieties of the systems supposedly representative of the people, in the so-called democracies, there is likewise no basic correspondence with the primary oneness of feeling and motivation intrinsic to man as a solidaric species. From the more inclusive viewpoint, the democracies are also unilateral. In their present forms both communism and democracy are but a symbol and a forecast. None of these affecto-symbolic reactions of social man bears any true relation to the organismic solidarity of the species. Hence it is useless to argue from an ideological premise. Verbal (symbolic) interchange does not touch the distorted mood that is responsible for man's ideological hostilities, his affecto-symbolic disparities.

     Man has need of a deeper, basic consciousness, a consciousness consistent with his essential continuity as a race. Reason cannot operate as long as man continues to violate so essential a principle as that of the solidarity of the species. As C. Judson Herrick says: