Customer Reviews (1) 
Old Road to Regress
That there is a fundamentalism in certain aspects of physical science and in certain revelations of social reconstruction is becoming increasingly apparent. And there seems to be no lack of appeals to the modern mind to accept a unitary plan and a single sweeping formula for salvation. Certainly the work under review, if it does nothing else, confirms these observations. Quite independent of its flaming cover, this work is a red-hot statement of a social gospel. Its author, while assuming to be scientific, confesses that he is "almost fanatically" devoted to socialism and communism. Therefore his book sounds less like a scientific treatise than like some of the old prophetic utterances or the stormy oratory of the revivalist.
The author's main ideas are not hard to find. Again and again these basic theses appear, always without any apology or any attempt to conceal. There are eleven of them, as follows:
1. Social sanity is the prerequisite of individual sanity.
2. Capitalism is the major neurosis of our age.
3. The World War was the traumatic episode which undermined and unbalanced the contemporary mind.
4. Fascism represents cultural regression, a true psychosis from a sociological point of view.
5. Marx and cultural anthropology agree that human nature is not primary, but derivative.
6. The cure for the modern problem of neurosis cannot be other than the Marxian technique of social revolution.
7. Communism is the one adequate psycho therapy.
8. Soviet educational philosophy is mature; the American system is infantile.
9. This new socio-psychological concept of "young maturity" brought to fruition by the Soviet educational system represents the most far reaching of all imaginative revolutions in human nature.
10. The maximum of humanness, rationality, consciousness and sanity is attainable only in a communistic culture.
11. This book, which presents these theses, marks a turning point in the history of modern psychology and psychotherapy.
The author calls his point of view "creative pessimism," in all probability because he rejects anything in the nature of religion, cosmic purpose, or absolute truth. From the positive standpoint, he probably would rate himself as a social psychiatrist. He constantly appeals to certain views of sociology and also criticizes severely individual psychology and psychiatry. At every turn he shows up the inadequacies of psychoanalysis, its techniques and its objectives. In one place he asks whether psychoanalysis is a science or a disease. Elsewhere he declares that the mood of the world is Marxian, not Freudian. Still again, the author repudiates a description of psychoanalysis as an artistic science, and insists that perhaps a more accurate phrase would be "a spook sonata." A considerable section of the book is labeled "What Marx Can Teach Freud," and the conclusion is that the "new emergent culture of scientific communism is a profounder study in psychotherapy than even psychoanalysis itself." The difficulty is that Schmalhausen accepts even from this individual psychiatry and psychopathology certain concepts as almost axiomatic, and applies them to society. This was one of the earlier sins of sociology, but most of us have been believing that we had outgrown these organismic theories of the nature of social life.
This fiery apostle of communism frequently accuses the philosophers and others of "flight from reality," but the reader is left wondering whether it would be possible to make a greater flight from reality than the author himself does; say, in his constant allusions to Russia or in his attitude towards religion. For example, he declares that "atheism means honesty in thought (science); sincerity in feeling (comradeship); idealism in living (communism)." Indeed, his whole attitude is almost uproariously anti-Christian, anti-religious. "Religion," he charges, "has prevented the mind from being human." Atheism he claims is only a candid way of saying that man himself must save the world or go under. The main purpose of religion he holds to be to block progress. Apparently to him religion is necessary only in those societies where the social scene is barbarous.
The technical philosopher would have no difficulty in finding abundant evidences of logical fallacies in this work, most common of which is the familiar petitio principii. The author constantly uses certain dogmatic statements as if they were proved and then proceeds almost breathlessly to build up an argument upon them. For example, instead of citing the necessary evidence he makes the dogmatic statement that "surely the greater number of psychological and psychoneurotic wounds and disquietudes that torture the mind are clearly traceable to defects and disharmonies in the social order." Again, in order to prove that the capitalistic system is insanity, he dares us to deny that millions of adult men and women in both Orient and Occident are suffering from "anxiety neurosis." The assumption is that men on the more primitive level and in the jungle are without anxiety or fear. It is for this reason that however much moral earnestness the words may convey, the reader inevitably remains unconvinced.
The author's criticisms of contemporary society are more or less cliches. They are the burden of the literature of social protest for more than a century past. The particular psychopathological form which they take in this book is traceable to the tradition of the degenerationists, such as Morel, Max Nordau, and Lombroso.
In the course of the argument, we encounter certain interesting conclusions, some of which will elicit quick assent. Few will deny that the World War has been a major source of collapse and neurosis; or that physical medicine must be supplemented by psychological medicine; or that the problem of Evil must be broken up into concrete evils in order to admit of sociological treatment; or that "the blinding gulf of man as mind and woman as body" must cease before we attain real progress. No such assent is likely to be given to the statement that religion is "a chapter in the history of insanity"; or that the choice of policies lies between social revolution and social reaction; or that the New Deal leads straight to fascism; or that revolution is the moral equivalent of war; or that Bertrand Russell is the greatest of modern educators; or that professors are the cultured courtesans of capitalism; or that family life is a study in lunacy.
From several places in this book arises a somewhat pestilential fog which would seem to imply that homosexuality is a possible alternative to the disciplined patterns of marriage. Apparently the author has suffered certain traumatisms himself. His phobias are sufficiently declared, for example, in his reaction towards current education, religion, and the home. It may be humor, and the author has it, but it sounds suspiciously like the shout of the mentally unbalanced Strindberg to declare "there is no place like home except a lunatic asylum," or that "the family obstructs the liberation of the modern mind and the humanization of modern society."
He certainly loses this sense of humor at times, for example, in paying his tribute to nudism; for nudism contravenes aesthetics rather than morals!
It is entirely possible to agree with the author's fundamental assumption that human nature does change, and, indeed, cannot escape being changed. Human nature is plastic, but the author offers no evidence except his own reiterated preachment that communism is the sole social environment in which to realize man's undiscovered potentialities. All the time that one listens to this communistic prophet portraying the glories of a neurosis-free Russia, one is forced to at least keep an ear open to persistent whispers which ask whether there were no fears in Russia. The listener cannot suppress the unholy suspicion that the G.P.U. is not an institution calculated to integrate the Russian soul. Nor does the "liquidation of kulaks" or the deliberate starving of four million Russian peasants seem exactly the way of salvation from neurosis. If, as the author insists, job security is fundamental to healthy-mindedness -- and we agree -- there has been little so far, at least, in the way of security in this sense to the Russians as a whole. It is quite possible that the ruling bureaucracy in Russia was fairly free from neurosis, but we have plenty of evidence that even within the ranks of the Communist party itself there is soul-tearing uncertainty, terrific fear, questioning, and personal and social nightmare.
Schmalhausen avoids a direct answer to the question of whether there will be no neuroses under communism; about as far as he can go under his mantle of prophecy is to assert that the neurosis call "Capitalistic civilization" will not exist under communism, which is about the equivalent of saying that X equals Q. He resorts also to such wise-cracks as this: "perhaps under Communism all neurotics will be persuaded by incredible therapy to become geniuses." Evidently the author is simply throwing God out of the window and inviting him back through the door -- God, in the happy hunting ground of this communistic utopia, being a summarizing word for sociological therapy and positive experimental science.
In short, like so many other essays in psychopathology and social criticism, this book uncovers more than it can provide with convincing treatment. It is frankly propaganda of a not very subtle or world-shaking sort. Its thundering repetitions fail to hammer out reader conviction that this is the or indeed any road at all to progress.
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