Harold Searles The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and Schizophrenia

THE MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA
No .
I-DEMENTIA
PRAEcox OR
THE GROUP OF SCHIZOPHRENIAS
By Eugen Bleuler
Translated by Joseph Zinkin
Foreword by Nolan D. C. Lewis
No.
2.......-5VMBOLIC REALIZATION
A New Method of Psychotherapy Applied to
Case of
Schizophrenia
By M. A. Sechehaye
No.
3-PSYOHOTHERAPY WITH SCHIZOPHRENICS
Edited by Eugene B. Brody and Frederick C. Redlich
No. 4-A
WAY TO THE SOUL 0., THE MENTALLY ILL
By Gertrud Schwing
Translated by Rudolf Ekstein and Bernard H. Hall
MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA NO.5
/n,
Nonhuman Environment,
In Normal Development
and in Schizophrenia
Harold F. Searles, M.D.

\\
INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC.

NEW YORK
Copyright 1960 by Harold F. Searles, M.D.
Library 0/ Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9579
Second Printing 1973

Third Printing 1979
Manufactured in the United States of America
To
Sylvia
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgment
ix
xii
Part One
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS
1 Man's Kinship with the Nonhuman environment .
Part Two
THE NONHUMAN ENVIRONMENT
.-\5 EXPERIENCED BY THE HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL
2 The Infant's Subjective Oneness with His

Nonhuman Environment
. . . . . . . . .
29
3 The Nonhuman Environment in Subsequent Healthy
Personality Development . . .
54
4 The Mature Person's Attitude Toward His
Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . .
100
5 The Psychological Benefits Which Derive from a
Mature Relatedness with One's Nonhuman
Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Contents
viii
Part Three
IN PSYCHOSIS AND NEUROSIS
6 Confusion Between the Self and the Nonhuman

Environment . . . . . . . . . .
7 Anxiety Lest One Become) 01 Be Revealed as,
Nonhuman . . . . . . . . . . . .
8 The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Defense
Against Various Feeling-States
. . . , .
9 The Desire to Become Nonhuman As a Function of
the Striving Toward Maturity via CtPhylogenetic
Regression"
............
10 The Reacting to Other Persons As Being Nonhuman
11 The Reacting to Elements of the Nonhuman
Environment As Being Human. . . . . . .
12 Transference Distortions, and Miscellaneous Other
Distortions, in the Indioidual's Conception of His
Environment . . . . . . . . . . .
13 Detailed Data [rom the Patient-Therapist
Relationship
..
143
178
223
250
269
289
325
348
Part Four
FROM THE CULTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE
14 Cultural Attitudes Concerning Man in His

Nonhuman Environment . . . . . . . . . 383
Part Five
TOWARD THE FUTURE
15 The Potential Value in Further Investigation of

This Subject
411
Bibliography
427
Index
441
Preface
Probably for every one who has found life to be more kindly than
cruel, the land of his youth is a golden land; youth is such a
golden time of life. Certainly for me the Catskill region of upstate
New York possesses an undying enchantment, a beauty and an
affirmation of life's goodness which will be part of me as long as
I live. For as far back as I can recall, I have felt that life's meaning resided not only in my relatedness with my mother and father
and sister and other persons, but in relatedness with the land
itself-the verdant or autumn-tapestried or stark and snow-covered hills, the uncounted lakes, the rivers. In subsequent years,
the so-different life in cities-Boston, New York, San Francisco,
\Vashington-has shown me that the "nonhuman environment"
here is equally enchanting and profoundly meaningful to one's
living. Whether in surroundings that are largely natural or largely
man-made, I have found that moments of deeply felt kinship
Preface
with one's nonhuman environment are to be counted among those

moments when one has drunk deepest of the whole of life's
meaning.
My personal psychoanalysis, which concluded seven years ago,

further deepened my appreciation of the significance of the nonhuman environment. I shall never forget, to give but one example, the grief I felt upon realizing that the very building in
which I had grown up, which had been sold some years before,
was now lost to me forever.
My work with psychiatric patients during the past twelve years,
particularly with schizophrenic patients whose therapy has been
my main occupation, has shown me many previously unsuspected
ramifications of this subject, ramifications which evidently are
not confined to those persons who are psychiatrically ill. What I
have learned about this subject, in the course of psychotherapeutic
work, has helped me to understand a little better the great mystery of what the deeply schizophrenic person experiences, and this
in tum has shed some light upon that even greater mystery: the
psychodynamic processes involved in the experience of the normal
infant, whereby he is changed, gradually, from a newborn human
animal into a person who is aware of himself as an individual
human being.
An additional source of fascination which I have found in this

subject is the fact that it constitutes a natural meeting ground, a
rare if not unique meeting ground, for data flowing from an
extraordinarily wide range of fields of inquiry-not only psychiatry and psychology and the other behavioral sciences, but
philosophy and religion, biology, physics, and so OD, throughout
literally all possible studies of either man himself or the world he
lives in. It has been a delight to me to find that the very little I
know of philosophy, or physics, or art, or anthropology, or myth..
ology J or great literature, possesses-for me, at least-illuminating
relevance to this subject of the nonhuman environment in man's
psychological experience.
Preface
Xl
This whole subject may be likened to a vast continent, as yet

largely unexplored and uncharted. Some persons have set adventurous foot here before me-rather many persons, in fact, I
have found as I have gone along; my book cannot endeavor to
chronicle the discoveries of every one of my predecessors but can
give only what I hope and believe to be a large sample or their
discoveries. I believe that this book represents the first attempt
to bring together as many as possible of these earlier discoveries;
but I am, after all, trying here mainly to record my own discoveries, at least a fair number of which are I believe genuinely
new.
In a book of this sort, designed to stimulate interest in and
provoke thought about what I regard as a predominantly ne..
glected subject, it seems to me not only permissible but desirable
to give free rein to speculation, and this I have done. I am not
trying to nail down conclusively, once and for all, this subject of
the nonhuman environment in human living but rather to open
it up, unprecedentedly widely and deeply, to the curious, seeking
eye. If my book raises more questions than it answers, then it will
have served its purpose wen.
Acknowledgment
The late Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann made it possible for me

to write this book. To her is my greatest debt of gratitude) and
this despite her never having read more than a few pages which
sketchily outlined what I had in mind here; it was through her
good offices that I was enabled to obtain, from the Foundations'
Fund for Research in Psychiatry, the grant which financed my
investigation of the subject upon which this book is based. Moreover, she allowed me a completely free hand in pursuing this
investigation, and this quite unfettered atmosphere for m.y work
meant a great deal to me.
Dr. Robert G. Kvarnes, Executive Director of The Washington
School of Psychiatry, through which the above-mentioned grant
was disbursed, has been warmly encouraging and consistently
helpful to me through all the phases of this investigation and the
Acknowledgment
xiii
writing of this book. His ever-reliable support has been a major

source of strength to me.
All the following colleagues, members, or, in a few instances,
ex-members of the staff of Chestnut Lodge, have been most
generous in permitting me to include clinical data from their own
work} data which help greatly to fill various gaps in material
from my clinical experience: Drs. Marvin L. Adland, Clay F.
Barritt} Donald L. Burnham, Cecil C. H. Cullander, Jarl E.
Dyrud, John P.. Fort, Milton G. Hendlich, Robert G. Kvarnes,
Berl D. Mendel, Cesar Meza, Norman C. Rintz, Clarence G.
Schulz} Roger L. Shapiro, Joseph H. Smith, and Naomi K.
Wenner. For the mode of presentation of their data here, as well
as for the theoretical interpretations placed upon them, I am, of
course, solely responsible.
Dr. Dexter M. Bullard, Medical Director of Chestnut Lodge,
gave me many valuable and encouraging suggestions for revision
of the first draft of the book manuscript, as did Drs. Donald L.
Burnham (Director of Research at the Lodge), Robert G.
Kvarnes, and Joseph H. Smith. Dr. Marvin L. Adland, our
Clinical Director} and Dr. Otto A. Will, our Director of Psychotherapy, have shown a friendly and encouraging interest in this
work from its inception, and in the final stages of my revising the
manuscript they helped me to find the necessary time by freeing
me from certain of my regular hospital duties. The support of
all these long-time colleagues has meant a great deal to me.
Mrs. Lottie Maury Newman, Editor of International Universities Press, has contributed to the final revision of the manuscript not only her highly professional editorial skill, but an equally
professional grasp of psychodynamics and a scholarly acquaintance with psychoanalytic literature. She has been particularly
helpful in pointing out to me, in the field of psychoanalysis with
children-a field in which I have done no clinical work and
only relatively scanty reading-writings of relevance to my topic.
Mrs. Verdelia F. Scott and Mrs. Lois E. Baker have given me
xiv
Acknowledgment
most patient and kind, as well as extraordinarily competent,

secretarial assistance with the successive drafts of the manuscript..
Mrs, Grace H. Ennis has been similarly helpful and competent in
typing the many letters which my correspondence with various
persons, concerning copyright permissions and other matters, has
entailed. Mrs. Hilma Beall, our Librarian, has provided her assistance pleasantly, patiently, and unstintingly throughout my
innumerable visits to the library.
Although the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry,

which financed this work, and The Washington School of Psychiatry which disbursed that grant to me, are organizations rather
than individuals, my gratitude to them is nonetheless genuinely
personal in nature.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers
and authors for their permission to quote from the designated
writings:
Robert Bronner, Inc.: Interpretation of Schizophrenia, by Silvana
Arieti.
Dr.. Michael Balint and The International Journal of Psycho-Anal..
'Psis: "Friendly Expanses-Horrid Empty Spaces," by Michael
Balint.
Liveright Publishing Corporation: Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique, by Michael Balint.
The Williams and Wilkins Company: "Process of Recovery in
Schizophrenia,' by H. Bertschinger; "Variations in Ego Feeling
Induced by D-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25) ,It by Charles
Savage; and "The Delay of the Machine Age," by Hanns Sachs.
International Universities Press: "The First Treasured Possession,"
by Olive Stevenson; The Image and Appearance of the Human
Body, by Paul Schilder; Dementia Praecox or the Group of
Schizophrenias, by Eugen Bleuler; Practice and Theory of Psychoanalysis, by Herman Nunberg; "Notes Upon the Emotionality
of a Schizophrenic Patient and Its Relation to Problems of Technique," by K. R. Eissler; Chronic Schizophrenia, by Thomas L.
Freeman, John L. Cameron, and Andrew McGhie; "An Ego
Disturbance in a Young Child," by Erna Furman; Ego Psychology
Acknowledgment
and the Problem of Adaptation, "Psychoanalysis and Develop..

mental Psychology," "Contribution to the Metapsychology of
Schizophrenia," "Notes on the Reality Principle," "Comments
on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego," and "Comments
on the Formation of Psychic Structure," by Heinz Hartmann,
Ernst Kris, and Rudolph M.. Loewenstein; "On Changes in
Identification from. Machine to Cripple," by Lisbeth J. Sachs;
"Hospitalism-s-An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood," by Rene A. Spitz; and Comparative
Psychology of Mental Development, by Heinz Werner.
Doubleday & Co." Inc.: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
(Copyright 1949 by Ray Bradbury).
G. P. Putnam's Sons: Alone, by Admiral Richard E. Byrd (Copyright 1938 by Richard E. Byrd) .
Oxford University Press, Inc.: The Sea Around Us, by Rachel L.
Carson.
Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc.: Wisdom~ Madness and Folly--The
Philosoph" of a Lunatic, by John Custance {Copyright 1952 by
John Custance; Two Adolescents, by Alberto Moravia (Copy..
right 1950 by Valentino Bompiani & Co., S. Art).
W. W. Norton 8t Co., Inc.: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis,
by Otto Fenichel.
The Psychoanalytic Q,uaTlerly: "Psychoanalytic Notes Relating to
Syndromes of Asthma and Hay Fever," by Flanders Dunbar; "On
the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia," by
Victor Tausk; and "Configurations in Play-Clinical Notes,"
by Erik Homburger Erikson.
Estate of Albert Einstein: Out of My Later YeaTS, by Albert Einstein.
Basic Books, Inc.: An Object-Relations Theory of the PeTsonalit",
by \. Ronald D. Fairbairn; "One of the Difficulties of Psycho.
Analysis," by Sigmund Freud; and The Construction of Realit'Y
in the Child, by Jean Piaget..
Rutgers University Press: Nature and Human Nature, by Lawrence
K. Frank,
The Hogarth Press, Ltd.. : "One of the Difficulties of Psycho-Analysis," by Sigmund Freud.
The University of Chicago Press: Psychotherapeutic Intervention in
xvi
Acknowledgment
Schizophrenia, by Lewis B. Hill; Martin Buber--The Life 01

Dialogue, by Maurice SOl Friedman.
Rinehart & Co., Ine.: The Sane Society, by Erich Fromm (Copy..
right 1955 by Erich Fromm) .
Simon and Schuster, Inc.: The Impact of Science on Societv, by
Bertrand Russell; A Treasury of Great Poems, English and American, edited by Louis Untenneyer; Journey to the FaT Amazon,
by Alain Gheerbrant; The Open Mind,. by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
University of California Press: T he Creative Process, edited by
Brewster Ghiselin.
Editions Cahiers d~Art: "Conversation with Picasso," by Christian
Zervos.
The American Federation of Arts: "Before Paris and After," by
Julian Levi, in Magazine of A,t~ December 1940.
Hany N. Abrams, Inc.: Vincent van Gogh, text by Robert Gold..
water.
Little, Brown & Company: Mythology, by Edith Hamilton (Copy...
right 1940, 1942 by Edith Hamilton).
Psychiatr~Journal for
the Stud')} of Interpersonal Processes." "The
Personal Meaning of the Human Figure in the Rorschach," by

Max Hertzman and Jane Pearce.
E" P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: Annapurna, by Maurice Herzog.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Green Mansions, by W" H. Hudson.

Longmans, Green & Co", Inc.; The Varietus of Religious Experience, by William James.
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry: "Problems of Nosology and

Psychodynamics of Early Infantile Autism/' by Leo Kanner; and
"The Space Child's Time Machine: On 'Reconstructionll in the
Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Schizophrenoid Child," by Rudolf Ekstein.
Thomas Y. Crowell Company: King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad
Z. Lorenz (Copyright 1952, by Thomas Y. Crowell Company,
New York, Publishers).
Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation: "Zuni Breadstuff," by Frank Hamilton Cushing.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: How Natives Think, by Lucien Levy.
Bruhl.
xvii
Acknowledgment
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.: Primitive M4n as Philosopher, by

Paul Radin.
The New York Times: Editorial (unsigned) on November 28, 1948.
Henry Holt and Company, Inc.: Ou; of My Life and Thought~ by
Albert Schweitzer.
Yale University Press: The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich.
Mr. A. E. van Vogt: (tVault of the Beast." by A. E. van Vogt,
The International [ournal of Psycho-Analysis: "The Schizophrenic
Defense Against Aggression," by Robert C. Bak; and "Autism and
Symbiosis, Two Extreme Disturbances of Identity," by Margaret
Schoenberger Mahler.
Warren M. Brodey, M.D.: "Narcissistic Relationship-s-A Paradox,"
and "Some Family Operations and Schizophrenia: A Study of
Five Hospitalized Families Each with A Schizophrenic Member,"
by Warren M. Brodey,
Margaret Schoenberger Mahler, M.D~: "The 'Influencing Machine'
in the Light of the Psychotic Child's Body-Image Development,"
by Paula Elkisch and Margaret Schoenberger Mahler.
Rand McNally & Co.: Ken-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl.
The Humanities Press: The Child's Conception of Physical Causalit,,~ by Jean Piaget.
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: "The Theory of Ego Autonomy:
A Generalization," by David Rapaport; and "A Sunday with
Mescaline," by Philip B. Smith.
HAROLD
RockvilleJ M atyland
F.
SEARLES)
M. D.
PART
ONE
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS
Man's Kinship
with the Nonhuman Environment
CHAPTER
Most writings concerning human personality development and

the dynamics of mental illness, whether by Freud and his followers, by lung, Rank, Adler, Sullivan, or others, limit them...
selves, for all practical purposes, to a consideration of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. What I shall refer to as
the nonhuman environment (that is, the totality of man's environment, with the exception of the other human beings in it) is,
by implication, considered as irrelevant to human personality
development, and to the development of psychiatric illness as
though human life were lived out in a vacuum-as though the
human race were alone in the universe, pursuing individual and
collective destinies in a homogeneous matrix of nothingness, a
background devoid of form, color, and substance..
Freud was aware) certainly, that this is an unduly limited
picture of man's psychological life. It may be that he simply was
The Nonhuman Environment
fully occupied with making his innumerable great discoveries

concerning the psychological processes that transpire within man
and between man and man, that he did not often find time for
detailed searching into this other dimension of man's psychological existence. Actually his whole psychology is grounded in
the concept of man as a product of the biological evolution of
species, a process which had been described by Darwin in 1859.
Freud was largely concerned with our basically animal inner
natures, and the psychoanalytic therapy which he devoloped aims
to help us come to terms with these animal impulses. In his propounding of the controversial, and now largely rejected, theory
of a death instinct (50), he was showing a keen awareness that
man's biological fate, the return to a nonhuman state, possesses
deep psychological significance in the motivation of the living
individual.
If any doubt remains as to how Freud viewed mankind's psychological position in the larger animal world, his following
words, written in 1917, should dispel that doubt:
80
In the course of his development towards culture man acquired

a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal
kingdom.. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to
place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which pennitted
him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the
animal kingdom. It is noteworthy that this piece of arrogance is
still as foreign to the child as it is to the savage or to primitive
man. It is the result of a later, more pretentious stage of development. At the level of toteinism primitive man has no repugnance
to tracing his descent from an animal ancestor. In myths, which
contain the deposit of this ancient attitude of mind, the gods take
animal shapes, and in the art of prehistoric times are portrayed
with animals' heads. A child can see no difference between his
own nature and that of animals; he is not astonished at animals
thinking and talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer to a dog or a
horse an emotion of fear which refers to his human father) with.
out thereby intending any derogation of his father. Not until he
Introductory Considerations
is grown up does he become so far estranged from the animals as

to use their names in vilification of others.
We all know that, a little more than half a century ago, the
researches of Charles Darwin, his collaborators and predecessors
put an end to this presumption on the part of man. Man is not
a being different from animals or superior to them; he himself
originates in the animal race and is related more closely to some
of its members and more distantly to others. The accretions he
has subsequently developed have not served to efface the evidences, both in his physical structure and in his mental dispositions, of his parity with them [49].
The views which I shall propound in this book will be extensions of various of the psychodynamic concepts which Freud
introduced. But it remains true, nonetheless, that in Freud's own
writings, as well as in those of other investigators, it is a rare thing
to find explicit acknowledgment paid to the significance of the
nonhuman environment in man's psychological life.
This disregard of the significance of the nonhuman environment to psychology and psychiatry has persisted despite the
accumulation of abundant data, provided by numerous and
varied scientific disciplines, which show us beyond doubt that
man is not an alien in his nonhuman environment but in kinship
with it. For many years we have had convincing evidence that
man is a member of the greater animal kingdom and, in tum,
of the still larger realm of animate Nature, and, finally, in terms
of the chemical structure of his body as well as in terms of his
fate-the inevitable return to an inorganic state when his life
span is ended-an integral part of the fabric of all created
matter, including the great inanimate environment of which our
known Universe is predominantly composed. I shall shortly bring
forward, merely by way of reminder, a number of examples of
the kind of long-known data to which I refer here.
What is apparently, however, very little recognized is the
importance of the implications which such data have for the
scientific disciplines which are concerned with human behavior
and, most particularly, for psychoanalysis. The thesis of this
volume is that the nonhuman environment, far from being of
The Nonhuman Envi.ronment
little or no account to human personality development, constitutes one of the most basically important ingredients of human
psychological existence. It is my conviction that there is within
the human individual a sense, whether at a conscious or unconscious level, of relatedness to his nonhuman environment, that
this relatedness is one of the transcendentally important facts of
human living, that-as with other very important circumstances
in human existence-it is a source of ambivalent feelings to him,
and that, finally, if he tries to ignore its importance to himself,
he does so at peril to his psychological well-being.
It is as if we live in a time when the pendulum has swung to
the opposite extreme from that represented by ancient man's
anthropomorphized conception of his nonhuman environment
when he felt, as it were, so intimately wedded to it that he had
yet to arrive at a realization of his own differentiation from it as
a unique product of creation, a human being. Myths handed
down from ancient times show us how human beings of some
thousands of years ago viewed this environment. One example,
charming as are many such myths, will suffice: Midas had been
chosen as one of the umpires in a musical contest between Apollo
and Pan. He expressed his honest preference for the music of
Pan, which reflected his poor judgment not only in musical
matters but also in politics; Apollo was the more renowned
musician of the two and was also a god, far more powerful than
Pan, a mere satyr. Midas paid for his mistake when Apollo
changed his ears into those of an ass, saying that he was only
"giving to ears so dull and dense the proper shape."
Midas hid his shame under a cap, but his servant found the
secret hard to keep, and he finally whispered it into a hole which
he dug in a field. But, Hamilton tells us) "in the spring reeds grew
up there, and when stirred by the wind they whispered those
buried words-and revealed to men not only the truth of what
had happened to the poor, stupid King, but also that when gods
are contestants the only safe course is to side with the strongest"
(66).
Anthropological data about the attitudes concerning this subject held by various so-called primitive peoples likewise provide,
Introduclor')1 Considerations
of course, a rich source of such anthropomorphic conceptions of

the nonhuman environment, To give, again, a single example
from a vastly fruitful field:
. . . I once heard a Zuni priest say:
"Five things alone are necessary to the sustenance and comfort of the 'dark ones' [Indians] among the children of the earth:
"The sun, who is the Father of all.
"The earth, who is the Mother of men.
"The water, who is the Grandfather.
"The fire, who is the Grandmother.
"Our brothers and sisters the Corn, and seeds of growing
things" [104].
For presumably hundreds of thousands of years, men felt themselves to be in mutually interchangeable kinship with the rest of
their environment; but they presumably felt, very possibly more
often than not, that this relation was not one of such gentle kinship
as the last quotation portrays but rather one in which they were at
the mercy of an animistic, and often anthropomorphized, nonhuman environment which was basically hostile, chaotic, utterly
uncontrollable. It may perhaps be counted man's proudest
achievement that he has come, largely through the medium of
scientific endeavor, to realize so many of his uniquely human

potentialities, to free himself to the extent that he has from an
ancient) overwhelming awe of the nonhuman, and to attain a
position of very considerable supremacy over it. At the same time,
the processes and products of technology tend to cause him to
lose sight of the basic kinship between human and nonhuman.
This divorcement has probably been additionally encouraged,
during the past two thousand years, by the spread of Christianity,
which so often preaches that man loses the hope of union with
the Godhead to the extent that he yields to his "animal" impulses
-the impulses which form his psychological bonds with his
closest kin, the other member-species of the animal kingdom.
The Christian religion is to be contrasted, in this regard, to the
pantheistic paganism of Ancient Greece, which preached that the
revered deities themselves often took the forms of various membent of the animal kingdom or even of the vegetable kingdom.
William. James, in his classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience (85), displays his keenest interest in the basically emotional realization that a state of unity exists between oneself and the
universe about oneself. He calls science to account for denying
the validity of such personal, subjective, emotional elements as
characterize this kind of religious experience. He asserts that
Science . . . has ended by utterly repudiating the personal
point of view. " .. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen
now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilib..
rium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling
wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time
which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have
ceased to be [85a].
He foresees that science will turn from its pursuit of a coldly

impersonal perception of the universe, toward a union with that
which is personal, emotional, basically mystical in man's religious
strivings.
Yet science itself, which along with the more ascetic components of Christian religion has tended to foster in man a convic..
tion that he is basically alien to his nonhuman environment, has
yielded abundantly convincing data, from various sources, to
show him how closely akin he is to that environment.
At the level of psychology, the science of animal psychology
has shown us that there are psychological processes in various
vertebrate species-psychological processes comparable with those
occuring in human beings. These include pathological processes
that may be compared with-although very far from being
identical with-the neurotic proc~es with which psychiatry is
familiar (103, 57, 93, 105).
At the level of physiology, we find that each of the basic
physiological processes which sustain human life-digestion, respiration, the circulation of vital fluids, excretion, the functioning
of the nervous and endocrine systems, and reproduction-has
its analogue in innumerable other species of the animal kingdom,
1ntroducto1Y Considerations
including invertebrates as well as vertebrates, and most of these

processes have analogues, as well, in many species of the vegetable
kingdom.
In terms of anatomy, both gross and microscopic, we find here,
too, startling similarities between the organ systems of the human
body and those of many other species of the living entities) animal
or vegetable, which occupy the nonhuman environment. Any
college textbook of biology brings before one the fact that the
human family is itself a part of the vastly larger, infinitely more
varied, family of all living things.
Coming to the level of chemical constitution, we find that
among the seventeen chemical elements of which the human
body is composed, all but one of these-carbon-are also distributed widely throughout the inorganic, nonliving matter which
comprises the vast bulk of our nonhuman environment, and all
seventeen of these elements are to be found widely distributed
among the organic, alive or once-alive matter which comprises
the remainder of that enviromnent. There is no chemical element
-including carbon-s-which is found in the organic realm and is
totally absent from the inorganic realm; even carbon exists in
inorganic nature, in the form of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and a few other compounds which are generally considered
to be inorganic.
Even down at the most basic levels to which science has
penetrated into the matter of the universe, the levels of atomic and
subatomic particles, we find this kinship between man and his
nonhuman environment. It appears, even, that at these levels the
kinship is so close as to be called, more properly, a state of one..
ness. Dr. Paul C. Aebersold, an atomic scientist who is head of
the Oak Ridge Isotopes Division, has stated that the ten billion
billion billion atoms that make up our body are all second-hand,
having been used before, from the beginning of time, by people,
plants, animals, trees, flowers, and everything else that makes up
biologically exchangeable matter. He says that during a man's
life he takes in and puts out a total of 1,000 billion billion billion
atoms, and that about half the atoms in one's body are replaced
every month (160).
10
Th Nonhuman Environment
When) lastly, we take the dimension of time into account and

contemplate the earliest phases of the human individual's physical
development, we find still further corroborative evidence of this
kinship with his nonhuman environment. In the science of ernbryology, it is a basic prinicple that "ontogeny repeats phylogeny"
-that the developmental phases of the human embryo recapit..
ulate the phylogenetic phases which transpired in the evolution
of the successive forms of animal life on earth, leading, finally, to
the emergence of the higher forms. The human organism begins
with the union of the sperm and the ovum as a two-ceUed entity
only somewhat more complex, in terms of its microscopically
visible appearance, than the lowest forms of present..day animal
Iifet the unicellular organisms such as the amoebae. It then goes
OD, in the developing complexity of its structure, to assume a form
anatomically very similar to the embryo of Amphioxus, a primitive form of fish, and to the early embryo of the frog. Its next
fonnative phases yield structures which are closely comparable
with those of the embryos of reptiles and primitive mammals.
Many of the structures which the human embryo transitorily
assumes in the course of its evolving are similar not only to
embryonic structures in other Iife-fonns, but also to the definitive
structures in the mature state of these life-forms, For example, by
the sixth week: of its development the human embryo possesses a
prominent tail (which gradually disappears within the ensuing
two weeks). In one phase the heart possesses only three chambers,
an arrangement similar to that found in adult fishes, before
proceeding to the differentiation of its fourth chamber. Up until
the relatively late phases of development, the formation of not
only the gross subdivisions of the embryo but even that of its
separate organs--heart, liver, lungs, eyes, ears, and so on-is so
closely comparable with the fonnation of those organs in, for
example, the pig, that the study of the embryology of the pig
constitutes one of the standard means by which the premedical
student acquaints himself with the so similar intrauterine develop..
ment of the human being (3, III ).
It is even more surprising that psychoanalytic theory has remained largely undeveloped in this important area when we
11
consider not only the relevant data from science itself, as touched
upon in the foregoing paragraphs, but in addition the overwhelming abundance of data inherent in man's daily life, in our
culture, indicating how essential to his psychological well-being
is his relatedness to the nonhuman environment. This kind of
data is so familiar to us all that I find myself somewhat apologetic
about mentioning them; but I feel that it is this kind of disparagement-through-familiarity that our science must work
against. To me it is reminiscent of the disparagement shown by
various Southern-born patients in saying anything, early in
therapy, about the Negro nursemaids who, as further therapy
reveals, were the prime sources of the love, during their early
years, which literally saved their psychological lives. We must
not disdain the familiar, for it may, if we take a second, searching
look at it, teach us most of all.
The data I have in mind here consist in our love of gardening;
our love of frequenting familiar haunts of Nature; our enjoyment
of active sports-golf, boating, hiking, and so on-which in their
pursuit bring us physically closer to Nature; the very real and
important places which pets have in the lives of many of us; the
fascination which so many persons, both children and adults,
find in going to zoos; the appeal of beautiful landscapes in motion pictures, in paintings, in literature, and, not uncommonly,
in the very dreams that well up from our innermost beings.
The language of romantic love, like the language of poetry, is
saturated with similes and metaphors which compare or identify
human qualities with aspects of the nonhuman environment. It
is rare to find a great novel which so skeletally limits itself to a
portrayal of human beings alone as does psychoanalytic theory.
Much more often, great literature embeds its studies of human
beings in a portrayal of them as being collectively an integral part
of larger, nonhuman Nature itself. Much great art, to the best
of my limited knowledge, does likewise.
The work of various popular humorists, too, reflects our interest in our relatedness with the nonhuman environment; we
chuckle at cartoons which show dogs, for instance, soberly en..
gaging in what we like to consider uniquely human activities,
12
and laugh when James Thurber solemnly tells us of his Uncle

Zenas who died of the chestnut blight (155). The anxiety which
is often, I believe, behind our laughter will be described in Chapter II.
The tremendous popular appeal of the subject is manifested
by the recent series of article; in Life magazine entitled The
W orld We Live In (94), by the series of beautiful Nature movies
produced by Walt Disney, and by books concerning this general
subject} such as The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson (23).
All these convey the message that man is not only in the Universe
but of it. The first chapter of Miss Carson's book conveys this
message more beautifully than anything else I have read, in its
portrayal of the fiery creation of the entirely inorganic earth, its
slow surface-cooling to the accompaniment of centuries-long
rains which eventually fonn the oceans, the formation in the
sea of the most primitive forms of life, and the gradual evolution
of increasingly complex forms of life, concluding with the emergence-as an integral part of the unbrokenly continuous over-all
process--of human life. Despite the readiness with which one can
tell oneself that much of this portrayal arises from theory rather
than incontrovertible fact, it makes profoundly stirring reading,
and that such literature does so deeply influence so many readers
is a fact, a psychological fact whose significance deserves more
attention in psychoanalytic literature than it has thus far received.
In philosophy and in various religions, man's relatedness to
his nonhuman environment has long been a matter of focal
interest; in the study of philosophy, that is, as well as in the
pursuits of his everyday life, man has progressed much beyond
the limit reached so far, in this area, by psychoanalytic theory.
The field of philosophy is but one among many fields of knowledge-s-physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, religion, and
others--each of which contains, I strongly surmise, rich docu..
mentation of the theme of this present volume, documentation
which could be provided by anyone interested in this theme and
expert in the particular field of study. Since my own grasp of
these fields is extremely limited I shall give only two references
1nlToducto11 Considerations
13
here, to a work by Albert Schweitzer and to one by Bertrand

Russell.
In touching upon some of the philosophical systems which
were prominent in the past, Schweitzer has this to say of the
Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome, and the ancient Chinese
philosophy of Lao-tse and his followers:
..... the fundamental thought of Stoicism is .... that man
must bring himself into a spiritual relation with the world, and
become one with it. In its essence Stoicism is a nature philosophy
which ends in mysticism.
. . . . Lao-tse .. For him, too, the important thing is that
man shall come, by simple thinking, into a spiritual relation to
the world, and thus prove his unity with it by his life [129].
In Chapter IV I shall quote some relevant material concerning
mystical experiences. Schweitzer in another passage presents us
with the core of his own contribution to philosophic thought) a
contribution directly in line with the subject at hand:
The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed
themselves to have to deal only with the relations of man to man.
In reality, however, the question is what is his attitude to the
world and all life that comes within his reach. A man is ethical
only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and
animals as [weU as] that of his fellow men [129a].
It is my conviction that we need, similarly, to extend the focus

of our psychoanalytic investigation to include more than mankind
alone. But I would not draw the limit, as Schweitzer does regarding the concern of ethics, to include only that wider sphere
of all that lives; I hope that the clinical data which will be
brought forward later here, as the solid foundation of this book,
will convince the reader that psychoanalysis needs to concern
itself with the total nonhuman environment, including the inanimate as well as the living elements in it.
Pragmatism is defined by Websters New Collegiate Dictionary
as a belief that "the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in
14
their practical bearings, that the function of thought is as a guide

to action, and that truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the
practical consequences of belief' (161). Bertrand Russell rejects
such a philosophy on the grounds that
Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind which finds on the
surface of this planet the whole of its imaginative material; which
feels confident of progress, and unaware of non-human limitations
to human power . . . But for those who feel that life on this
planet would be a life in prison if it were not for the windows
into a greater world beyond . . . to men who do not find man an
adequate object of their worship, the pragmatist's world will seem
narrow and petty) robbing life of all that gives it value, and making
man himself smaller by depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its splendor [120J.
When we tum now to a sampling of the explorations which psy..

chiatry and psychoanalysis have made into this fundamental subject, we find that the development of theory has lagged far behind
the development of widespread technical practices in this regard.
Here I refer specifically to practices which have long ago become
accepted as valuable in the institutional therapy, as conducted
by psychiatrists of either a general psychiatric or a psychoanalytic
orientation, of patients suffering from psychotic Of severe neu..
rotic illness. That is, even in strongly psychoanalytically oriented
institutions (144), where the therapeutic effort is focused primarily upon the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes of the
illness, considerable efforts are also maintained to provide occupational therapy activities (wood and metal working, weaving,
and so on), to provide beautiful landscaping about the hospital,
and to provide opportunities for gardening and for visiting
nearby places of natural beauty. Zilboorg informs us, in his A.
History of Medical Psychology, that occupational therapy was
introduced about one hundred years ago, and landscaping, at
least one hundred and fifty years ago (16B). We carry on these
efforts in hospitals without having, I think, any adequate place
provided for them in our psychoanalytic theory. This is a matter
of more than theoretical importance, moreover, for it has seemed
1ntroductoT'Y Considerations
15
to me, in my own institutional work) that one reason for the

notorious difficulty in psychoanalysts' working with and appreciating the efforts of the staff members of the occupational and
recreational therapy department is that our psychoanalytic theory
does not embrace that field; our theory has not shown us the
common ground in which the psychoanalyst and the occupational
and recreational therapist are working.
To continue with the findings which psychiatry and psychoanalysis have unearthed concerning this subject, we sometimes
find richly suggestive material in the accounts, by recovered
patients, of their own illnesses. The most valuable such account
with which I am acquainted is that in which John Custance
brilliandy describes the experiences which he underwent while in
the grip of episodes of manic-depressive psychosis (26). Regarding his manic episodes) he says,
One of the striking features . . . was a strong tendency to
anthropomorphism. The sun came to have an extraordinary effect
on me. It seemed to be charged with all power; not merely to
symbolize God but actually to be God. . . . The moon had a
similar effect, though less intense, so had birds, animals and trees
[26a].
In another passage he gives us a description which) to anyone
who has worked with manic patients) will be, I think, reminiscent.
He is speaking about his delusions of grandeur and his drive for
power, associating himself with the cat tribe:
I first noted it in the padded cell at Brixton while in a state
of acute mania. I saw a series of visions which impelled on my
consciousness a strong sense of destiny and leadership. I imagined
myself a sort of lion destined to conquer the world, and in conformity with this delusion paced interminably round and round
my cell on the balls of my feet with a sense of extraordinary
muscular looseness or suppleness [26b].
Marcel Heiman, a psychoanalyst, has written an extremely

valuable and interesting paper entitled "The Relationship Between Man and Dog" (73). He not only presents, with abundant
16
clinical documentation, an impressively original concept of his

own, but provides a rich survey of existing psychoanalytic literature concerning this broad subject. One will find in this paper
many important references which I have not attempted to duplicate in the bibliography of my own volume. I am indebted to
Dr. Heiman for his sending me a copy of his paper prior to it)
publication; this copy was more extensive than is the published
version.
The psychoanalytic literature on this subject usually stresses
the importance only of animals (the dog, most particularly) J and
the importance of animals not basically resident in their innate
biological relatedness to man, but rather in their serving as the
bearers of individual man's transference feelings, projections, and
identifications. In reading such material, one feels that it has been
lost sight of that, to use Gertrude Stein's kind of phraseology, a
dog is a dog is a dog, and that as a dog he is of real significance
to human beings. We see this same traditional slant reflected
in Heiman's own original conception, very interesting though his
contribution is. The following passage is from the conclusion of
his paper:
The domesticated animal, in particular the dog, is for civilized
man what the totem animal was for the primitive. The dog
represents a protector, a talisman against the fear of death, which
is first experienced as separation anxiety. Since separation anxiety
gives rise to an increase in the cannibalistic drives, the dog is also
in that sense a protector. By displacement, projection, and identi...
fication, a dog may serve as a factor in the maintenance of
psychological equilibrium [73].
The remarks of a number of discussants are appended to the

unpublished version of Heiman's paper. Among those by Dr.
Louis Linn are some comments which stress the kind of emphasis
which I am trying to keep foremost in this book. I gather that
Linn considers this paper, as I do, to be a valuable and creative
contribution; but I enthusiastically support his following words:
This leads us to one aspect touched upon in Dr. Heiman's
Introducto,y Considerations
17
thesis, although not, it seemed to me, sufficiently elaborated.

Clearly, the dog is no inanimate repository of symbolic meaning,
but a living being that eats and bites and destroys and urinates
and defecates and can lavish affection and has a. sex life and,
finally, is subject to illness and death. . . . In short, dogs are
capable of entering into human emotional relationships which
seem almost as complicated bilaterally [73].
In giving Heiman's paper the attention it deserves I have

digressed somewhat from the main stream with which this book
is dealing, up along a tributary current; dogs, and even animals
taken collectively, constitute but one facet of the broad subject
to which my efforts here are devoted.
The only writing heretofore published, of which I am aware,
which deals with this subject in its entirety is the volume N ature
and Human Nature (44) by Lawrence K. Frank, who may best
be termed a social philosopher. His book, with which I became
acquainted only late in the preparation of this volume, I found
not only fascinating but inspiring. The concept of human per
sonality which Frank provides us is at once spiritually enlarging
and scientifically sound, consonant with the recent findings of all
fields of science, whether concerned primarily with human or
nonhuman elements of the universe. My own volume might be
considered to offer documentation, from the particular science
of psychoanalytic psychiatry, to the broad concepts which Frank
puts forward.
In essence, Frank describes all the infinitely varied constituents
of the universe as being produced by the same basic physical,
chemical, and biological processes; he describes all as consisting
in different configurations of energy, persisting only by a ceaseless process of actively absorbing and releasing or transforming
energy; and he shows that each organism, including man himself,
is a slowly altering pattern, through which the universe is ebbing
and flowing, as it daily captures, stores, and releases parts of the
geographical environment-a pattern which, when it can no
longer maintain these vital transactions, dies and disintegrates.
Piaget (113a) states, similarly, that it is impossible even so
18
much as to think of "an environment" and "an organism" without abstraction; there exists between these two, he says, a complexus of relations, of changes and reactions which implies
complete physicochemical continuity.
Rather than giving here any further material from relevant
literature in psychiatry and allied fields, I shall bring in such
material from time to time as we go along, as it proves useful in
expanding various points which will be considered successively.
It may be well, before proceeding further, to deal with a
number of objections which, I anticipate, have by now arisen in
the reader's mind concerning my thesis; I more or less assume
their presence, for they soon emerged into my own attention,
sometimes repeatedly, in the course of my developing interest
in this subject. I shall include here a major objection raised by
a colleague after hearing an outline of this volume. Many, of
course, may be the objections which I cannot foresee.
First, one may protest that the nonhuman environment, as I
have called it, does not exist; one may assert that all of man's
surroundings, including not only his own artifacts but also the
unspoiled works of nature are} in man's perception of them, so
invested with numerous personal and cultural meanings that, in
terms of his subjective relatedness with them, they can not be
accurately called "nonhuman." To this, I would say that I realize
that such meanings are indeed there, that the whole of an individual's "nonhuman environment" may constitute, for him, the
expression of a mother's love or a father's hatred, for example;
or all of nature may present itself to him as something to be
mechanistically used or devoutly worshiped, depending upon the
cultural attitudes which have been instilled into him during his
upbringing. To my way of thinking, it has been a serious lack in
psychiatry that we have underestimated the importance of the
nonhuman environment; but to try to minimize the significance
to man of his own fellow men would be an obvious folly. I have
no illusion, for example, that a beautiful maple tree, beloved to
one's childhood, can really have made up for the lack of a childhood friend.
When I myself have felt misgivings on this particular score-
19
have thought that perhaps the nonhuman environment, if it

could be stripped of its interpersonal and cultural meanings in
our perception of it, would be found devoid of psychological
significance to man-I have repeatedly come up against a persistent conviction that it would be illogical to think that man
could feel entirely unresponsive, psychologically, to this nonhuman environment which is so akin to himself at so many levels
-biologicalJ chemical, and so on. Moreover, my own personal
life experience, as well as my clinical experience with psychiatric
patients, has convinced me that man relates to his nonhuman
environment on a dual level. That is, however important is the
level of his relating to, for instance, a cat or a tree in terms of
their constituting, in his perception of them) carriers of meanings
which have to do basically with people (by way of displacement
and projection of his own unconscious feelings onto the cat or the
tree, transference of interpersonal attitudes on his part on to
them, perceiving them through various cultural distortions, and
so on), there is also another level on which he relates to them:
to the cat as being a cat and to the tree as being a tree.
Second, one might object) "What difference does this make
in, for example, psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with patients?
If an individual's relationship to his nonhuman environment is
disturbed, it is only because of his intrapersonal and interpersonal
difficulties; once these have been resolved, he can tum to that
environment and make the most of it, psychologically, without
difficulty." To this, I would say essentially what I have said in
the paragraph immediately above, and would add that the clinical material which is to follow in subsequent chapters will
indicate, I think, that in the life of a psychiatrically ill individual
his ability or inability to relate himself constructively to the non..
human environment may be of more than a little importance,
both in terms of causing his life to be significantly less, or more,
grievous, and in constituting a real factor in the prognosis of his
illness. I have repeatedly gotten the impression in clinical work
that to the seriously ill patient the threat of impending psychosis,
for example, conveys terror not merely in that it will bring with
it bizarre and frightening and confusing experiences (hallucina-
20
tions, delusional distortions in his perception of himself and other

persons, and so on), but also in that it will mean the loss of
familiar relationships with other persons (family members at
home, co-workers, and so on) and of the familiar nonhuman
environment.
Third, it might be asserted that if the nonhuman environment
does in itself possess psychological significance to human beings,
that significance could not possibly be ascertained, because this
environment is composed of such innumerable, and such tremendously varied, elements. To this, I would reply that a science
~psychiatry and its related disciplines-which has been able to
achieve, to date, a very respectable formulation of the complex
processes of intrapersonal and interpersonal living, need not quail
at the subject now before us, however chaotically complex it may
appear at first.
The fourth) and perhaps most fonnidable, of the objections
which I anticipate may go something like this: how, one may
ask, can the nonhuman environment possibly be considered of
real significance in personality development and in psychiatric
illness, since we all know that a paranoid schizophrenic illness,
for example, in an individual reared on a Midwestern farm is not
fundamentally different from such an illness in an individual
reared in so very different a nonhuman environment as New
York City? And, as another example, two persons, one reared in
the Adirondack Mountains and the other reared in the so-verydifferent desert country of Arizona, can both develop obsessional
neuroses which are of quite similar structure. Does this not clearly
rule out the thesis of this book as possessing any validity?
I think not. We may find, for example, in two individuals
each of whom shows an obsessional neurosis, that the neuroses
are very similar in structure but differ in content. Moreover,
when we try to compare the two persons who are manifesting
those illnesses, we find ourself in two territories which are far
vaster, far more complex, and far less comparable to each other
than are the much simpler, much more stereotyped, territories of
the two illnesses. We can describe an illness in relatively few
words; we cannot describe a person adequately in any space
21
much shorter than a long novel. It is my strong impression that

the relationship which the individual has had to his nonhuman
environment has been very influential in the development of his
over...all personality. The types of psychiatric illness are relatively
few, but the "kinds of persons" who are ill are illimitably varied;
in fact each person is, as we know, unique. 1 One may say) further,
that it is the quality of this over-all personality, with the development of which I believe the nonhuman environment has had
much to do, which determines whether or not the individual
possesses the requisite strength to recover from his neurosis or
psychosis. Among normal persons, also, I conjecture that each
individual's nonhuman environment has had much to do with the
development of his particular personality. We know that among
normal persons (as among persons with psychiatric illness), the
infinite variety in terms of personalities fully equals the variety in
terms of the nonhuman environments among which various personalities have developed.
One kind of experience which has substantiated my feeling
that there is validity in the thesis I am pursuing is my repeatedly
finding that acquaintances, upon my bringing up this subject as
a topic of conversation, respond eagerly to it with affect-laden
personal reminiscences. One colleague was promptly reminded,
with much feeling, of how crucially important certain inanimate
possessions, particularly treasured books, had been to him at
various times in his life. Another person, one of our most highly
valued and experienced psychiatric aides, when this general subject came up at the lunch table said, simply and with tears in
her eyes, UWhen I was growing up I got all my affection from
animals." In her saying this she gave no impression of rancor
against people in her past, of making a wildly distorted statement
for the purpose of blaming her parents; her comment came as a
simple, and very moving, statement of subjective fact. What I
especially wish to emphasize is the impression I have gotten repeatedly from such respondents, that one has tapped here a
~ Gregory Bateson, in the book entitled Communication-s-Th Social Mo.
tri of Ps"chiatT'Y, by Jurgen Ruesch and himself, says, "It would appear that
the phenomena of pathology are actually simpler, more general, and more
recurrent than those of normality and health" (119).
22
territory of personality which has lain long hidden from interpersonal view, full of thoughts and feelings which have remained
private through the years and which eagerly respond to the
opportunity to gain expression to another human being.
I have been interested to find the same eager responsiveness
reported in an article by Olive Stevenson, "The First Treasured
Possession: A Study of the Part Played by Specially Loved Objects and Toys in the Lives of Certain Children" (146). In
Chapter lilt concerning the significance of the nonhuman environment in normal personality development, I shall refer to
this valuable article at some length. At the moment I wish merely
to give two passages from it, each of which reports the same kind
of responsiveness in respondents as that which I have seen in my
own experience. D. W. Winnicott, in his preface to Stevenson's
article, mentions that he has found, in his own history-taking
from mothers concerning the place of such first treasured possessions in the livesof their children, that
. . . By remembering these early details they get into touch

with the early stages of development of their children and usually
they are not in any way disturbed by reminding themselves of
these things. Usually parents will be found to be pleased that these
early details are given full significance. In the same way it is
surprising how many children can remember back to infancy
along this channel, since the original object, where there has been
one, is often still in use or is kept in the back of the toy cupboard
or at the bottom of the drawer; or alternatively there is a poignant
memory of the moment at which the object was lost, thrown away,
given away, or confiscated . . . [l46a]..
[And Stevenson herself reports that] It was rarely difficult to
make a quick and friendly contact with mothers on this subject
[t46b].
During the past approximately sixty years, the focus of psychiatry's attention has gradually become enlarged, from an early
preoccupation with intrapsychic processes (particularly the Indlvidual's struggles with his own conflictual id, ego, and superego
strivings), to include interpersonal and broad sociological-an-
1ntroductory Considerations
23
thropologicaJ factors.. It would seem, then} that a natural next

phase would consist in our broadening our focus still further,
to include the investigation of man's relationships with his nonhuman environment.
Harry Stack Sullivan, for example, became progressively occupied, during the last few years of his life, with a field concept
of psychiatry which was limited to 'lithe world of culture and of
people" (150). By contrast, I am emphasizing in this volume that
the significant field, the field which psychiatry needs to consider,
is a much more inclusive one, containing, in addition to the world
of culture and of people, the nonhuman environment If Sullivan
included this latter under the term "culture," he did so only
implicitly; it deserves more explicit consideration than he accorded it. Sullivan said, in effect, that the human being is an
indissoluble part of the world of culture and of people; I am saying
that he is an indissoluble part of the fabric of all created matter.
By this, I do not mean to assert, as did Sullivan, that the sense
of personal individuality, of uniqueness, is an illusion; to my way
of thinking, man both individually and collectively is unique in
the universe, and his kinship with the nonhuman environment,
on however many levels, does not erase the fact of his uniqueness.
Margaret Mead, in the recent anthropological anthology edited
by herself and Nicolas Calas (104)} describes a form of resistance
which is analogous to that which we encounter in ourselves when
we try to come to terms with the fact of our kinship with the
nonhuman environment. The resistance of which Mead is speak..
ing is that which the people of one culture must resolve before
coming to realize their basic kinship with the people of another,
alien culture. Mead points out that a new kind of objectivity, a
new dimension of historical consciousness, is born when the members of a culture refer to themselves by the names which other men
apply to them, rather than calling themselves "human beings,"
while referring to others as "eaters of snakes" or "dwellers farther
inland" (104a).
It is well known that analogies all prove to be inaccurate if
pursued far enough, and that it is therefore dangerous to accept
them uncritically. But if approached in a spirit of tentativeness,
24
of reservation of final judgment, they can prove illuminating. It

is in such a tentative spirit that I shall present one more analogy,
for the reader to make of it what he feels it to be worth. This
analogy has to do with the historical evolution of physicists'
conception of the universe, from the classical mechanics of Newton up to present-day views which hold that all physical phenomena-whether concerning hydrodynamics, heat, light) gravity, electricity, or whatever-are various manifestations of a basic..
ally unitary field, are not to be regarded as particulate phenomena,
but rather as field phenomena. Mathematiciam are, as we know~
striving to formulate an equation which would "explain" all
these phenomena taken together. It seems to me this development
in physicists' thought may constitute a useful analogy to the
development in psychiatry, a development which, although many
years behind the one in physics, also represents an increasing
broadening of focus beyond the individual particle (in psychiatry,
the human individual). Einstein has traced this development in
the science of physics in a stimulating fashion. For example,

concerning the contributions of Faraday (1791-1867), be says,
For us, who took Faraday's ideas so to speak with our mother's
milk, it is hard to appreciate their greatness and audacity. Faraday must have grasped with unerring instinct the artificial nature
of all attempts to refer electromagnetic phenomena to actionsat-a-distance between electric particles reacting on each other.
How was each single iron filing among a lot scattered on a piece
of paper to know of the single electric particles running round in
a nearby conductor? All these electric particles together seemed
to create in the surrounding space a condition which in tum produced a certain order in the filings. These spatial states, to-day
called fields, if their geometrical structure and interdependent
action were once rightly grasped, would, he was convinced, furnish
the clue to the mysterious electromagnetic interactions. He conceived these fields as states of mechanical stress in a space-filling
medium, similar to the states of stress in an elastically distended
body . [30a].
[Einstein expresses his own opinion on this subject in the following words:] What appears certain to me . . . is that, in the
25
foundations of any consistent field theory, there shall not be, in

addition to the concept of field, any concept concerning particles.
The whole theory must be based solely on partial differential
equations and their singularity-free solutions [SOb].
The question may now be raised, "Why has there not been
formulated, before this, a more comprehensive psychoanalytic
theory than we have at present, a theory which takes into account
not merely man in his human environment, but man in his total
environment (including, that is, the nonhuman environment)?"
Part of the answer to this presumably consists in the simple
fact that psychoanalysts have had their hands full with the task
of investigating, and developing valid theories about, Intrapersonal and interpersonal phenomena. This task has been so complex, of such pressing importance, and so inexhaustibly productive of new mysteries beneath the recendy solved mysteries,
that we had, as it were, no time to raise our eyes to the larger
environment around us, feel a sense of appreciation of how
important must this nonhuman environment be to the psychological life of man, and to be drawn to the pursuit of the mysteries
that beckon over here. It may well be that we have first had to
develop at least a moderate degree of reliable understanding
concerning the intrahuman and interhuman processes, before we
could then, with this clearing in which to work, start cutting
paths into the greater forest surrounding WI"
But, primarily through the genius of Sigmund Freud, we have
had such a solid foundation for some time now. The circumstance of this time lag, plus a number of other evidences to which
I shall refer in subsequent chapters, suggests that we have been
hampered not only by ignorance concerning these possibly more
pressing, "exclusively human" processes, but also by another fac..
tor: anxiety which we psychoanalysts possess, along with other
human beings generally, concerning our relatedness with the nonhuman environment. In the next chapter I shall attempt, partly
with the aid of clinical material, to elucidate something of the
extent, and the sources, of that anxiety.
PART
TWO
AS EXPERIENCED BY
THE HEALTHY INDIVIDUAL
The Infant's Subjective Oneness

with His Nonhuman Environment
CHAPTER
In psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature a great deal of

attention has been paid, in recent years, to the early development of the ego and of object relations. Many writers have
described normal infancy as including a very early phase in which
the infant, in his subjective experience) has not yet become dif..
ferentiated from other human beings--in particular, from the
mother. And the infant's achievement of a sense of separateness
from the mother is depicted as being of crucial significance in
the development of human personality. Hartmann, Kris, and
Loewenstein (72), Hofler (79) J Fenichel (40), Sullivan (149),
and Hill (78) are a few among the many writers whose publications have emphasized this point.
But there is, I believe, an additional dimension involved here
which all these writers, to the best of my knowledge, either whoUy
neglect or, at most, touch upon only fleetingly: this crucial phase
30
of differentiation involves the infant's becoming aware of himself

as differentiated not only from his human environment but also
[rom. his nonhuman environment. Prior to his reaching this degree of psychic structure, he experiences himself as being at one
not only with his mother, but also with the nonhuman environment which faUs within his ken.
This is a dimension of early development which warrants more
than merely passing mention, for, as I hope to show in the course
of this book, the postulated subjective oneness with the nonhuman
environment (as well as with the human environment), which
holds sway in the early postnatal life, has repercussions which
flow throughout the subsequent development of the personality,
even in the years of adulthood, in "normal' as well as psychiatrically ill human beings. The whole theme of this book, in fact,
is that the human being is engaged, throughout his life span, in an
unceasing struggle to differentiate himself increasingly fully, nat
only from his human, but also from this nonhuman environment, while developing, in proportion as he succeeds in these
differentiations, an increasingly meaningful relatedness with the
latter environment as well as with his fellow human beings.
While there are differences of opinion in regard to the theoretical explanations of the early postnatal period, perhaps many
analysts would, if asked, agree with the concepts of the developmental psychologists, Werner and Piaget, to the effect that the
infant experiences himself as one with the environment: he does
not distinguish himself from his surroundings, whether human
or nonhuman; he does not distinguish between inner and outer
sensations; in the brief periods of wakefulness he and the world
around him are one.
The long periods of sleep are punctuated by stimuli impinging
upon the infant from outside-coldness, abrupt shifts in position,
loud noises, and so on- and from sensations originating within
his own organism-the most insistent and regularly persistent
being hunger. The infant's utter helplessness, his complete dependence on the environment, is also the factor which "teaches"
the infant gradually to appreciate reality-for he depends on
human beings to alleviate the unpleasure caused by sensations
The Healthy Individual
31
of hunger, Of, as I would prefer to say, to alleviate the tension

caused by internal physiological processes. The mother's ministrations lead to the dawning awareness that unpleasure, tension,
discomfort are relieved by the appearance of mother. In this way
the image of the mother gradually becomes cathected and differentiated from the rest of the world. But this process takes many
months. Moreover, what we have called the image of the mother
is by no means a clear perceptual or ideational representation of
mother as a human being, with distinct personal characteristics.
At this stage, mother is, in Anna Freud's (45c) term, a "need..
satisfying object" that may be comprised of the breast, a bottle)
the flow of milk inside the infant's mouth.
Such descriptions of the infant's subjective experience are of
course predicated on what little we know about the functioning of
the primitive psychic apparatus, particularly the perceptual one.
Unless we attribute complex psychic functions to the newborn infant-and the majority of authors do not-we realize that even on
the perceptual level there is initially so little differentiation that we
have lumped animate and inanimate "objects" together.
There is no conclusive evidence, to my knowledge, whether the
infant can perceptually distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. That he does not do so visually was demonstrated
by Spitz's ( 143a) experiments on the smiling response. This
response does not appear until the child is three months old, and
even then it is elicited by the perception of a configuration (resembling the human face) in motion. But the infants responded
with a smile regardless of whether a person nodded or whether
they were confronted by a nodding mask.
Mahler (102), on the other hand, assumes that the newborn
infant can distinguish tactually between animate and inanimate
objects. Referring to Stirnimann and von Monakow, she indicates
that as early as the first day of extrauterine life the infant has the
ability to discriminate "in a sensorimotor way between the living
part-object and lifeless matter."
Stircke in 1921, in his paper entitled, "The Castration Complex" (145), describes the infant's experiencing the mother's
lactating breast as an integral part of himself (as integral a part
32
as is his own penis) ; in instances where bottle feeding takes the

place of breast feeding, this inanimate object, the nursing bottle,
is experienced as an equally integral part of the infant's self;
finally Starcke emphasizes how very important a part of the infant's self is constituted by the breast, so that "the nipple . . . is
perceived as the centre of one's own personality . . ."
From Stiircke's reasoning, which seems thoroughly sound to
me, flows the rather odd and startling implication that in an
infant who has had only bottle feeding, an inanimate object (the
nursing bottle) is perceived as the very center of his own per..
sonality. One wonders whether, if all this is so-as I for one am
quite ready to believe-it does not have an important, if subtle,
influence upon the course of later personality development.
Stircke, as will be seen, expresses his conviction that there is such
an influence. I know of no research results which have demonstrated that bottle feeding as contrasted to breast feeding, yields
any differences later in the adult's personality. But at least I find
this idea thought provoking; one sees so very many patients) both
psychotic and neurotic patients, who are troubled by deep-seated
doubts about their own humanness, and even about their own
aliveness. Such doubts can be found, to be sure) to have numerous
determinants; but one wonders whether in some cases a history
of exclusive bottle feeding may be one of the determinants, especially if the child is not held and cuddled by its mother but
left alone with a propped bottle.
And to extend this to a consideration of the infant's over-all
experience, beyond simply the matter of bottle or breast feeding,
one would wonder, by the same token, whether the individual's
lifelong personality development may not be profoundly in..
fluenced in one or another direction by the clrcumstance of his
having spent his infancy in) on the one hand, an environment
rich in human contact, or, on the other hand, an environment
made up almost exclusively, the greater part of time, of inanimate
objects. Some three or four years ago I saw a picture in Life
magazine which I think caused many readers, like myself, to
shudder: pictured was a glass case, scientifically so skillfully
designed as to provide the infant in it with satisfaction for pre-
The Healthtj Individual
33
sumably all his physiological needs, so as to require an unprecedented minimum of care by any human mothering peISOO.
Certainly, were any infant actually subjected to spending its
infancy in such a contraption, we would not hesitate to expect
such an experience to leave an important scar in the subsequently
developing personality-that is, assuming the infant survived.
What I have been saying here ties in with material reported by
Margaret Ribble (118) in 1944, showing that in hospitalized
infants, an abundance of human contact, in the fonn of motherly
responses from the nurses, is in some instances of literally life..
saving importance; without such care the infants grow apathetic
to the point of death, particularly those who have previously
known mothering. We could formulate such findings, as I believe
they have generally been fonnulated in the literature, in terms
of the infant's having a need for cuddling, stroking, and other
aspects of being mothered, a need which is to be regarded as at
least semiphysiological, and fully as real and important as the
need for air and food. We might also formulate such findingK
from this other point of view which I have been utilizing, simply
to throw some possible light upon a different aspect of the situation: we might think that an unfortunate infant who, upon being
hospitalized, receives a minimum of such mothering, is left most
of the time in a world almost exclusively made up of inanimate
objects, and may consequently experience himself as being an
Inanimate, and therefore naturally inert, object.
In line with this reasoning, I find it of interest that Spitz (140
143), in his findings reported in 194546 concerning hospitalism
and anaclitic depression in the infants and children in a foundling
home, findings similar to those of Ribble, describes an "anxious
avoidance of inanimate objects" (141) in these children, and at
another point mentions, again, that "a curious reluctance to
touch [inanimate] objects was manifested" (143),
These findings suggest that the earliest modality of experience
is mediated via tactual-kinesthetic sensations. Hence, even on the
primitive perceptual level-s-and certainly on the symbolic and
ideational ones-there is little discrimination of objects, and no
distinction between the infant and the rest of the world.
34
While there is substantial agreement among analysts in regard

to descriptions of the infant's subjective experience, different conceptualizations have been advanced. These theories have changed
with the development of psychoanalysis and reflect its growth
from the early almost exclusive preoccupation with libido theory
to the introduction of the structural point of view.
In 1911 in the Schreber case (46) and in 1914 in his paper
"On Narcissism" (47) Freud developed his theory. of object relations-and the relation to the nonhuman environment, in which
I am interested here, is of course also a function of object relations, since in psychoanalytic terminology "object" refers to the
"object of the drives," regardless of whether human or nonhuman. 1 Freud postulated an early stage of primary narcissism
as the universal original libidinal condition, with true object love
developing later. Melanie Klein (88) and W. R. D. Fairbairn
(38), on the other hand, assume that the infant's libidinal
strivings are from the very beginning directed outward. Michael
Balint (6, 7J 8), taking issue with the concept of primary narcissism, as did Edith Jacobson later ( 84a) assumes an early
mode of relatedness between infant and mother, which he calls
"primary love." ~ Mahler (101, 102) describes this early period
as a symbiotic one.
From the structural. point of view, these problems have been
formulated by Hartmann (67), who postulates an early undifferentiated phase of development, in which "Strictly speaking,
there is no ego before the differentiation of ego and id, but there
is no id either, since both are products of differentiation . . ."
(67a).
These analytic concepts have their counterpart in the developmental psychology of Heinz Werner (162). His Comparative
Psychology of Mental Development provides rich documentation,
1 In actual practice, however. "human" has almost become equated with
"object.." This is no doubt due to the paramount importance human beings
have in the development of penonality-an importance I do not wish to deny.
S In this mode of relatedness, Balint says, the mother is so very important
to the infant-his dependence upon her is so absolute-that he can scarcely
afford to make any allowance in her respect, to show her any consideration;
'Qr the infant she il~ indeed. only an Obj6Ct, to be taken for granted.
35
from a wide variety of fields of study, for the phase of oneness

with-nondifferentiation from-the surrounding nonhuman environment. Much of that volume is devoted to the nondifferendation, or, in Werner's term, "syncretism," which permeates the
psychological functions of (a) animals of many different species,
(b) children, (c) members of "primitive" cultures, (d) schizophrenic patients, and (e) patients with organic brain damage.
Werner presents voluminous material, from his own researches
and from those of a multitude of other investigators, showing the
great extent to which the individuals in each of these five categories are psychologically at one with their total environment.
These three passages will, I hope, give some hint of the richness,
and relevance to my topic, of his book:
. .. . it is characteristic of primitive mental life that it reveals

a relatively limited differentiation of object and subject, of perception and pure feeling, of idea and action) etc. The biologist
Buytendijk says: "It appears that in the whole animal world the
correlation of the animal and environment is almost as intimate
as the unity of the body.." The perceptions of the animal exist,
therefore, only in so far as they are part of a wider totality of
action in which object and inner experience exist as a syncretic,
indivisible unity [t62a].
. . . Radin and others are certainly justified in stressing the
admirable ad justment of the aborigine to his surroundings; but
this all too perfect adjustment is the sign of a lower form of
behavior, rather than of an advanced. A primitive, highly balanced, "one-track" culture Jacks that friction between individual
and environment, that flexibility and freedom in unceasing attempt to readjust, which is the very life and essence of higher,
advanced cultures [162b].
One of the most fundamental preliminary conditions for any
magic fonn of behavior is a highly integrated (syncretic) unity
of world and ego. The world is separated only slightly from the ego;
it is predominantly configurated in terms of the emotional needs
of the self (egomorphism). But, conversely, the ego, seen from
the opposite angle, is highly susceptible to the emotional stimulation from the milieu. The egomorphic view of the milieu means
a "personalization" of things, of such a kind that things cease
36
The Nonhuman Environmen'
to be rigid, inanimate objects and become living, vitally effective

entities. . . . [162c].
In connection with the passage just quoted, Werner describes
magic practices which are known as the "magic of continuity":
the Papuans rub their backs and legs against rocks in order to
partake of the rocks' strength and durability, and they embrace
strong trees with their arms and legs in order to draw power and
resistance from the trees; the African Galla wanior stands on
turtles and the Cherokee Indian brave binds turtles to his legs,
so that the soles of the feet and the leg muscles, respectively, may
become as tough and hard as the shell of the reptile. I find that
these, and similarly exotic data} provide colorful documentation
for the concepts which one finds in psychoanalytic literature} by
Hartmann and others, concerning the evolution of psychic structure.
AIl these writings imply that there is a primitive stage of development, in which the child has not yet become aware of the distinction between himself and his environment. That is, if the infant is
for a time unable to distinguish himself from his human environment, and unable (as a few investigators-c-to be mentioned in
Chapter III-have reported) to distinguish animate from inanimate in the outer world, then he presumably is similarly unable,
for at least some time postnatally, to distinguish himself from his
surrounding nonhuman (inanimate, plant) animal) environment
-unable to be aware of the fact that he is living rather than
inanimate, and a human creature rather than plant or animal.
The time span, after birth, normally covered by such a phase
of nondifferentiation is, of course, a matter of great relevance. I
know of no literature which explicitly endeavors to define the
limits of 'such a phase. But the age levels at which the other,
presumably later, differentiations are achieved have been described by various investigators. Ackerman and Behrens (1) state
that it is somewhere in the second to the fifth month that the
infant becomes subjectively differentiated from the mother; in
other words, the normal infant-mother symbiosis extends over
the first two to five months of life. Hoffer (79) says that whereas
37
to a hungry infant of four weeks it will not make much difference

whether it is the infant's own hand or fingers, or a bottle or
comforter, which comes into his mouth, the infant of sixteen
weeks has achieved an ability to distinguish among these various
things.
Inhelder and Piaget (82a ) describe the state of nondifferentiation between self and outer world as occurring with relative
prominence in three phases of normal maturation: (a) in infancy
and early childhood, on a sensorimotor or perceptual level; (b)
in later childhood, on a "representational," or verbal language)
level; and (c) in adolescence, on the level of formal thought
Ol cognition. Concerning adolescence, for example, they point
out that when the adolescent first becomes able to formulate
long-range plans for his life, and theories about the world, he is
at first unable, again here on this new plane (as previously on the
planes of, respectively, sensorimotor experience and verbal-communication experience), to distinguish between self and outer
world. Thus, he feels himself to be at the center of a world which
he is called on to reform.
One is reminded, here, of the clinical experience that although
a chronologically adult member of a symbiotic relationship has
long been able to differentiate at a conscious, perceptual level
between himself and his symbiotic partner, it will be only by dint
of much psychotherapeutic work-if ever- that he becomes able
to develop a conceptual image, at an unconscious as well as
conscious level) of himself and of the partner as being distinct
entities. Thus it is, presumably, with our position vis-a-vis the
nonhuman environment in nonnal development: at unconscious
levels of concept formation, subjective oneness with that sector
of the environment persists long after differentiation on a purely
perceptual and conscious level has been effected.
Were the nonnal-neurotic psychotherapist completely and
irrevocably differentiated from the nonhuman environment, at
unconscious as well as conscious levels) he would be unable, as
a matter of fact) empathically to sense the anxiety which the so
greatly dedifferentiated schizophrenic patient experiences in this
book will repeatedly describe the anxious, weird,
regard.
nus
38
eerie sensations which I, and various of my colleagues, have

found in ourselves upon coming face to face with the anxiety of
a patient who is subjectively undifferentiated from his nonhuman
environment. Were the therapist, in each of these instances,
entirely free from any remnant of such nondifferentiation, he
would be blind to the meaning of the clinical phenomenon before
him. Werner makes this point when he emphasizes that
. . . man possesses more than one level of behavior; and . . .
at different moments one and the same man may belong to
different genetic levels. In this demonstrable fact that there is a
plurality of mental levels lies the solution of the mystery of how
the European mind can understand primitive types of mentality
[162d].
With such thoughts in mind we can read the following passage

from Fenichel and gain from it a realization which the author is,
apparently, not intending to convey--a realization of the anxiety
which may be experienced by the infant in the face of an as-yet ...
unrnasterable environment which is totally,

inantly, comprised of nonhuman elements:
or
at least predom-
The ego becomes differentiated under the influence of the

external world. Correspondingly, it can be said that the newborn
infant has no ego. The human infant is born more helpless than
other mammals. He cannot live if he is not cared for Innumerable stimuli pour out upon him which he cannot master. He is
not in a position to move voluntarily and is not able to differentiate the encroaching stimuli. He knows no object world and has no
ability yet to "bind" tension. One can guess that he has no clear
consciousness but has at most an undifferentiated sensitivity to pain
and pleasure, to increase and decrease of tension [40a].
Here we are beginning to get some hint of the anxiety which,

I believe, is aroused in one who attempts to investigate the subject
at hand. To my mind, much of the delay in our coming, in the
psychoanalytic profession, to a realization of the importance of
the nonhuman environment, is attributable to the circumstance
39
that any determined effort to penetrate this area brings up in us

the kind of anxiety which, I surmise, we knew all too much of
as infants, when the world around us seemed, oftentimes, comprised largely or even wholly of chaotically uncontrollable nonhuman elements. Such anxiety is, surely, no total stranger to our
everyday experience; each of us has known the anxiety occasioned by OUf feeling overcome by the unmanipulability of a
mechanical device, or the seemingly impossible complexity of a
home.. carpentry job, or the seemingly unorganizable chaos of
figures and Government regulations which flood us when we
start to cope with an income-tax return. I believe that beyond
the sheer intellectual difficulty of organizing a great deal of
unstructured material, one experiences anxiety lest one--eut off
from the world of people to a considerable extent, as one must
necessarily be in such work-be overwhelmed by this nonhuman
materiaL
There is a second great source, I think, for the anxiety which
impedes our exploration of this whole subject. Not only do we
have unconscious memory traces of infantile experiences in which
we were surrounded by a chaotically uncontrollable nonhuman
environment that was sensed as being a part of US; in addition,
we presumably have unconscious memory traces of our experi..
ence with losing a nonhuman environment which had been
sensed, heretofore, as a harmonious extension of our world-ernbracing seH. Starcke, in his previously mentioned paper, has
pointed out that "It is this separation in the primitive ego} the
formation of the external world, which, properly speaking, is the
primitive castration" (145). Thus the exploration of this whole
subject, no matter upon how scientific a plane we attempt to
pursue it, impinges upon a deeply rooted anxiety of a doubleedged sort: the anxiety of subjective oneness with a chaotic
world, and the anxiety over the loss of a cherished, omnipotent
world-self,
This hypothesis is an extension of that which I have just been
discussing, and I regard it as being considerably less firmly
grounded in evidence than is the former one. But I find some
reason to think that there is validity in this second hypothesis:
40
the development of the ego in the healthy human individual

recapitulates the phylogenesis of the human race-it recapitulates, that is, the evolutionary history of the human race, from
the beginnings of that history in an entirely inorganic world.
proceeding through the phase of the appearance of the first
elementary forms of living matter, and on through successively
higher forms of life to the final triumphant emergence of the
human fonn of animal life on this planet. I do not mean, of
course, that the individual ego, in the course of its development,
experiences its existence as being that of, for example, each and
every successive form of life in the trunk of the evolutionary tree.
But I do believe that in its broad outlines such a recapitulation
does actually take place, namely. that the earliest rudiments of the
human ego may experience existence as being totally inorganic, totally inanimate, including itself, followed by later phases of experiencing itself as something living but not yet human, and only later
.still experiencing an awareness of oneself as a living, individual
human being. Let me recommend, once again, the first chapter of
Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (23) for its beautiful, deeply
moving portrayal of this history of the human race, this history
which, I believe} we can find repeated in at least broad outline
in individual ego development.
It is primarily because of two factors that I believe this second
hypothesis may hold true. (a) Accounts of the evolution of
human life on earth, such as the account given by Carson, have
the capacity to stir and thrill one with a profound fascination,
a sense of exhilaration; this fact at least suggests to me that such
accounts may strike a deep chord in us, a chord tracing back to
experiences early in our own individual lives, preverbal experi...
ences unformulable directly in our memories, when we were
struggling up along an analogous path, a path toward the
achievement, and subjective realization of, our status as truly
human personalities. (b) Very deeply regressed psychotic patients show evidence-evidence which, again, I shall reserve
largely for the later chapters of this book--of having "phylogenetically regressed" to a stage} a stage presumably comparable in
various respects to early infancy, in which they experience them-
The Health'Y Individual
41
selves as being something subhuman: animallike, or even inani...
mate. I do not mean, by this, to say that objectively they quite

lose their humanness; but subjectively they seem. to have regressed
to an earlier phylogenetic stage. It is of interest, here, that the
previously mentioned John Custance subscribes, as a result of his
own personal experience of severe manic-depressive psychosis, to
a view such as I have proposed in this second hypothesis:
Just as in the physical sphere the human embryo compasses
untold centuries of development into a few months, starting as
a speck of protoplasm and climbing the ladder from invertebrate
to vertebrate, doubtful at one moment whether to become a bird
or a fish, before finally emerging as a mammal, so in the mental
sphere the soul of the child seems to follow the path traced by his
ancestors. He starts as a purely instinctive creature of a few urgent
impulses and needs, with their corresponding sensations, and
gradually puts on, partly as a result of environment and partly
of development, the complicated psychological apparatus of
modern civilized man [26c].
Mythology provides a rich source of material about this whole
subject, material which constitutes at least highly suggestive

evidence in support of the hypothesis which I have presented,
It seems to me that the prevalence in ancient Greece, for example,
of myths-which at that time were popularly regarded as factportraying man as being interchangeable with his nonhuman
environment, long before science had become able to demon-
strate the evidence that man is indeed integrally related to his

nonhuman environment through the tree of evolution, bears
witness to the probability that individual ego development has, as
its initial phase, such a subjective interchangeability with the
nonhuman environment.
In utilizing this occasion to touch again upon the treasure
which mythology offers us, I shall arbitrarily limit myself to a
few examples of myths concerning the origin of mankind. These
myths, portraying mankind as having emerged from a primordial
animal state, or even an inorganic state, seem to me to reinforce
the hypothesis which I have just advanced as regards the ego
42
development of the individual.. Edith Hamilton (66) tells us that

in Greek mythology heaven and earth were the first parents. The
Titans were their children, and the gods their grandchildren;
finally the gods created mankind. As to the specific methods by
which the gods created the human race, various Greek myths
differ. According to one account, Hamilton tells us, the gods
experimented with various metals. They made their first race of
men from gold, then one of silver, and after this race also passed
away, they tried using brass. The human race which now inhabits
the earth, according to this myth, was made from iron.
A second account claims that the gods created mankind from
stones, This took place when Pyrrha and Deucalion came down
from Pamassus, the sole survivors of a great flood which had
finally receded. Finding a temple, they gave thanks to the gods
for having escaped the flood and prayed for help in their awful
loneliness. Suddenly they heard a voice commanding them to
veil their heads and to cast behind them the bones of their
mother. At first the command struck them with horror, and they
were perplexed as to its meaning. But then Deucalion realized
the implication:
"Earth is the mother of all," he told his wife. "Her bones are
the stones. These we may cast behind us without doing wrong."
So they did, and as the stones fell they took human shape. They
were called the Stone People, and they were a hard, enduring
race, as was to be expected and, indeed, as they had need to be,
to rescue the earth from the desolation left by the flood [66g].
Robert Graves (64) presents a similar account of this myth
involving Pyrrha and Deucalion, as well as a number of other
Greek creation myths which seem comparably reflective of man's
sense of having emerged, primordially, from the nonhuman
world about him.
In a subsequent chapter I shall report upon a schizophrenic
patient who evidenced anxiety lest she be "turned into a rock.' 1
Schilder (128e) says that some melancholic patients complain
that they have been turned to stone.
In Norse mythology concerning the creation of the world and
The
Health~
Individual
43
of mankind, we find, similarly, that "the first man and woman

were created from trees, the man from an ash, the woman from
an elm. They were the parents of all mankind" (66h).
Erich Fromm in The Sane Society (55) briefly refers to similar myths among various other peoples.. He says that, according
to the belief of the Winnebago Indians, creatures in the begin..
ning did not have any permanent form.. All were neutral beings
which could transfonn themselves into either man or animals.
At a certain period, they made a decision to become definitely
that which they remained thereafter. The Aztecs, Fromm tells
us, believed that the earth at one time had only animals and
that the era of human beings arrived with Quetzalcoatl. Some
Mexican Indians still believe that a certain animal corresponds
to a particular person; and the Maoris believe that a certain
tree, planted at an individual's birth, is thereafter identified with
him.
I fi~d that Trevett (157), in a recent paper entitled, "Origin
of the Creation Myth: A Hypothesis," has come to a conclusion
very similar to mine, as to the likelihood that myths of creation are expressive of very early experiences in the course of
ego development, and development of awareness of the surrounding world. He presents a number of interesting passages from
relevant literature, including a work by George Field, published
in 1869, in which Field put forward an identical hypothesis as
to the significance of myths of creation. My above-described
hypothesis constitutes a further elaboratlon, when compared
with those by these writers, to include the nonhuman environ..
ment, That is, Trevett's hypothesis, for example, limits itself to
hypothetical infantile sensations having to do with the infant's
dawning awareness of the mother (or parts of her) especially the
breast), and with the infant's dawning awareness of himself,
experienced presumably as a human being. My hypothesis extends this, by suggesting that the infant's awareness of himself
progresses through the stages of (a) experiencing oneself as being
alive, and therefore distinct from the inanimate things in the
environment; (b) awareness of oneself as not only alive but
human, and therefore distinct from the animate sector of the
44
nonhuman environment (I.e., animals and plants); and (c)

awareness of oneself as a living human individual, distinct from
other human beings including one's mother."
For further evidence of man's buried susceptibility to feeling
a sense of interchangeability between himself and his nonhuman
environment, I shall tum now to a second field-the field of
anthropology. In the anthology of Margaret Mead and Nicolas
Calas (104), primitives are said to regard artificial likenessespainted, carved, or sculptured-as the real thing, as real as the
individuals represented.
In the same anthology we read:
In North America, the Mandans believe that the portraits
taken by Catlin are alive like their subjects, and that they rob
these of part of their vitality. . . . "I know)" says one man, "that
this man put many 0/ OUT buffaloes in his book, for I was with
him, and we have had no buffaloes since to eat, it is true,'
"They pronounced me the greatest medicine-man in the
world," writes Catlin) "for they said I had made living beingsthey said they could see their chiefs alive in two places-those
that I had made were a little alive-they could see their eyes
move----could see them smile and laugh, and that if they could
laugh} they could certainly speak, if they should try, and they
must therefore have some life in them." Therefore, most Indians
refused him permission to take their likenesses. It would be parting with a portion of their own substance, and placing them at
the mercy of anyone who might wish to possess the picture. They
are afraid, too, of finding themselves faced by a portrait which, as
a living thing, may exercise a harmful influence [104b].
This anthology also contains an interesting description of a belief held by the Jukun, a Sudanese tribe. They believed their king
to be identified with the annual com crop. When a king died,
his death was kept secret and his body preserved until after the
I Lewin's (92) paper in 1953 entitled, "Reconaideration of the Dream
Screen." is of inteI"elt in connection with Trevett's hypothesis. Lewin finds
that the dreams of lome patients are experienced by them as if projected
upon a blank 'Idream. screen," like the screen upon which motion pictures
are projected, and he find. evidence that this dream screen is traceable to
the dreamer. earliest infantile perception of the motherl breast.
The Health" Individual
45
harvest lest the crops wither; especial care was taken to avoid
burying him in the dry season lest the com die forever. We also
learn that the Ogallala Indians consider the clothing of a deceased person as retaining the individuality of their late owner.
Since they believe that the dead person's spirit will linger about
these articles, they will never wear any clothing which has been
wom by one now dead"
One of the many relevant pieces of anthropological data from
Wemer's book is this passage:
A great many primitive people seeno contradiction in believing

that various forms of life, continuously changing, represent one
identity. A Congo native says to a European: "During the day
you drank palm-wine with a man, unaware that in him there was
an evil spirit. In the evening you heard a crocodile devouring
some poor fellow. A wildcat, during the night, ate up all your
chickens. Now, the man with whom you drank, the crocodile who
ate the man, and the wildcat are all one and the same creature
[162d]6
Coming now to our own culture and our own time, we find
our third and fourth sources of evidence to reside in, respectively,
the fairy tales which children read, and the humorous cartoons
and literature which adults enjoy. Among fairy tales there is, for
example, the story of Pinocchio (25), a story which has fascinated
generations of children, about a wooden puppet which, after
many tribulations, finally emerges triumphant, metamorphosed
into a real boy. In a subsequent chapter, I shall have occasion
to mention a few more among the many popular fairy tales
which are expressive of the same general theme: the interchangeability between the human being and his nonhuman environment; or, to put it in another way, the basic lack of qualitative
distinction between the human being and his nonhuman environment.
One of the richest sources of such data, in contemporary life,
is comprised by humorous literature, and humorous cartoons.
James Thurber is an outstanding humorist who deals much with
this kind of material, in both his writings and his drawings (155).
46
Another writer who. works to some extent in this same general

area is William Saroyan. In his semiautobiographical book, illy
Name Is Aram (125), Saroyan as a boy accompanies his uncle
during the latter's first visit to a piece of desert property which
the uncle has acquired. In the description of this visit we find a
rare and delicate humor, a humor based upon the childlike won..
der, the mingled feelings of kinship and alienness and an undercurrent of anxiety, which a human being-here, the author's
uncle--experiences upon meeting something new in the non..
human enviromnent (in this instance, the world of desert nature)
for the first time, face to face. The childlike freshness of the
uncle's experience givesus a rare insight into the meaning which,
I think, the nonhuman environment has had for each of us in
our early childhood. At once humorous and touching is the
uncle's evident uncertainty and uneasiness as to whether he is
innately superior to the desert creatures, or vice versa. For in..
stance:
My uncle looked the homed toad straight in the eye. The
homed toad looked my uncle straight in the eye. For fully half
a minute they looked one another straight in the eye and then
the homed toad turned its head aside and looked down at the
ground. My uncle sighed with relief [125].
As far as humorous cartoons are concerned, it appears to me

that, as an example, in the very popular The New Yorker 19501955 Album (108), something like one out of every ten cartoons
depends, for its laugh-provoking capacity, upon its portrayal of
some situation in which we suddenly find that certain longaccustomed distinctions are suddenly absent, or are at most only
very fuzzily present-s-distinctions between man and animal, man
and plant, man and inanimate object. We see animals behaving
like human beings, human beings looking like animals or plants
or inanimate objects, inanimate objects seeming to be endowed
with a disconcertingly humanlike life, and human beings revealing a semianimal or a semi-inanimate constitution. We have so
largely mastered our confusion about all these different elements
in the world of our experience--a confusion which once pre..
47
vailed over each of us as an infant, a confusion by which many

adult schizophrenic persons are once again overwhehned-that
now we sense a bit of anxiety, easily mastered, and we chuckle,"
A fifth source of evidence is comprised by dreams, no matter
whether these are produced by "normal," neurotic) or psychotic
individuals; here, too, is reflected the integral part which the
nonhuman enviromnent plays in the constitution of human personality. We all know how relatively infrequently the substance
of a dream is limited to purely human material; much more
often, dreams abound in nonhuman elements, such as animals,
inanimate objects, landscapes) and so forth. I well realize that
one can object, "But if human beings are to be portrayed in
their carrying out of human activities, they must be shown in
the process of using nonhuman materials, or moving in a nonhuman setting, as human beings do." This is an obvious troth;
but if we reflect that all dream material has long been held to
consist entirely in projections on the part of the dreamer, it
would seem to me to be going too far if we regard only the dream
portrayals of human beings as representing integral parts of the
dreamer's psyche. The nonhuman elements must also, by the
same token, be looked upon as projections-as) likewise, integral
parts of the dreamer's unconscious. Furthermore, one occasionally encounters dreams in which a patient's self is represented
by some subhuman life form, or even by an inanimate object; he
himself puts it that, "I had a dream last night in which I was a
(such-and-such)." There have been patients, some of them in
therapy with me and some of them in therapy with my colleagues
at Chestnut Lodge, who have had repeated dreams in which the
patients' selves were portrayed as various domestic or jungle-type
'Of interest in this connection is Kris'. (89a) explanation of the curious
fact that ctlrictlture appeared so relatively Iate-i-namely, the end of the sixteenth century-in the development of art. He notes that caricature, when it
did finally appear, transformed inanimate objects and animals into human
beings, and vice versa, and he says that one of the major reasons why this
art form had not previously appeared is that people had only now matured to
the point where they no longer believed that magic could be worked in this
way-that such transformations could actually be effected, in reality, through
the drawing of such pictures. To me, this implies that people had Dot become) theretofore, lufticiently lUre of their own humanness viJ.~vis the nonhuman environment to accept) with humorous appreciation, such an art form.
animals, or protozoa; and one chronically schizophrenic woman

reported a dream in which she was "a bombed-out building."!
Sixth] with hallucinations, likewise, a very considerable portion of the content seems usually to be made up of nonhuman
material. For instance, I have seen a patient to be comforted by
the hallucination of a machine which, he felt, constantly watched
protectively over him; a woman who was in terror at the experiencing of there being a line of "exploding teeth" which filed
up the side of her room, across the ceiling, and down the other
side; and another woman who, utterly bewildered, indicated that
she experienced the (actually unpeopled) landscape outside her
window as being filled with an indescribable confusion of clanging trains and roaring trucks.. The following quotations from a
paper by Savage (126) J which contains valuably detailed de In the course of the final revision of my book manuscript, I have encountered dream material reported by Boss (15a) in 1958 which strikingly
documents my hypothesis that ego development recapitulates the phylogenetic
development of the human race. BoIS presents the salient features of more
than 800 dreams which were reported by a schizoid, overly intellectual engineer who had never dreamed, to his knowledge, until some time after the
analysis had begun.
The patienis dreams were limited in their content, for the fint sUe and a
half mon tha, to inanimate objects such as turbines, cyclotrons, automobilel t
and airplanes. Then) at the end of this phase. for the first time he dreamed
of a living thing: a potted plant.
He went on" then, to dream of pine trees and of rosee, though the latter
were diseased and withered. During the ensuing few months he began dreaming of such creatures as worms and insects; over a half-year period) beret he
dreamed 105 times of insects. Then followed a half yeat in which he
dreamed of toads, frogs, and anakea; then mammals were included: first a
mouse, then a rabbit, and pigs.
Two yean after the beginning of the psychoanalyaist there occurred hi,
tint dream about a human being: an unconscious woman under the surface
of an ice-covered pond. The dreams went on) subsequently" to include conacioul, very much alive human beings.
Concomitantly with this evolution of his dreams) he had come to realize,
during the first of the above-mentioned phases, that although married and
able to carry on his profession, he had not really been aware t heretofore, of
the full reality of the outer world~f the inanimate things a plants, animals,
and people about him. He realized that he felt himself to be only a cog in
an industrial machine. and that the people in hi. world were nothing more
than marionettes and ghosts. In essence, Boss describes an evolution, in the
patient. experience of reality in waking life, which occurred hand in hand
with the remarkable sequences of his dreaming. The author credits Jung
with being "the first to draw attention to such a -Phylogenetic developmentof dream phenomena: to serial dreams which take place during especially
intenae periods of maturing in the life of the dreamer,"
49
scriptions of the hallucinatory experiences of subjects in whom

transitory psychotic processes have been induced by the admin..
istration of LSD25 (D-Iysergic acid diethylamide}, help to show
something of the multitude of inanimate objects lying, so to
speak. in our unconscious:
If the individual closes his eyes or sits in a subdued light, he
is overwhelmed by a kaleidoscope of fantastic images. There is a
progression from the change in appearance of external objects, "a
blue flame shooting out from the tip of the pencil" through bright
lights flashing in the periphery, neon lights which organize to
form geometric designs, lattice works and arabesques; then
formed objects appear, such as tapestries, animated wire-like
drawings of people, such as airplanes with pilots and finally very
realistic representations of human beings. "Everything is dark now
except for that naked woman. She is certainly voluptuous." . . .
uA landscape with peasants in the field hoeing com" . . .
"Donald Duck with eyes puffed out; they are emerald litfeet with glistening bunions;" "Groucho Mane-his wig turned
into a rat and ran off the piano" [126a].
One subject who saw a picture of a golden flower of unequalled
beauty, wished he could sketch it, then thought why not photo.
graph it. Expressing this idea aloud reminded him that this was
an hallucination [126b].
Seventh, recent reports by W. W. Heron et al. at McGill University (74) and by John Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health (95) of the effects upon human beings who are kept
in experimental isolation, . .in so far as practicable, from all enviromnental stimuli, seem to me strongly to reinforce my views
as to the essential importance of the nonhuman environment in
human personality functioning. In these experiments) the personality functioning of most of the subjects deteriorated with
surprising rapidity-far more rapidly, evidently, than is known
to be the case with personswho have suffered, for whatever reasons
(polar exploration, shipwreck, imprisonment) and so on) isola..
tion from the human environment only. Although the findings
from these two fascinating research studies have been discussed
50
much in both lay and professional circles) I have not found this
particular interpretation applied to them heretofore..
I find it of interest in connection with these isolation experiments that Biran is quoted by Piaget (115e) as saying, in about
1800, that "consciousness arises through contact with things."
Rapaport (11 7), in an interesting discussion of the above-mentioned experiments, reviews the evidence that the ego structures
with which psychoanalysis deals require "stimulus nutriment"
for their development, and cites the work of Piaget (114) and
Erikson (35, 36) in this connection. Among the situations characterized by stimulus deprivation he includes also (a) the circumstances of induced hypnosis, (b) the concentration camp,
and (c) the technical setting of psychoanalysis (the couch, the
analyst as a blank screen, and so on) ; and he points out that the
modifications in the psychoanalytic approach which are found
useful for the therapy of borderline cases (i.. e., such modifications
as the face..to-face situation, and more active participation by
the therapist) are such as to provide the patient with greater
stimulus nutriment, Also of relevance) here, is Spitz's (141) report of the living conditions at the foundling home, where the
children developed hospitalism, as contrasted to conditions at
the nursery, where the children were free from this syndrome.
Although Spitz attaches abnost exclusive significance to the disparity in mothering," what he describes concerning the disparity
in nonhuman environmental stimuli is to me very suggestive, He
found that whereas in the nursery nearly every child had one or
several toys, hardly a single child in the foundling home had a
toy. And whereas in the nursery the children had a ready view
of trees, landscape and sky, 'as well as of mothers busy with their.
e-It U true that the children in Foundling Home are condemned to
lolitary confinement in their cots. But we do not think that it is the lack
of perceptual stimulation in g,n"al that counts in their deprivation. We
believe that they suffer because their perceptual world is emptied of human
partners, that their isolation cuta them off from any stimulation by any per.ons who could signify mother-representatives for the child at this age. The
result . . is a complete restriction of psychic capacity by the end of the
first year...... By the end of the second year the Developmental Quotient
sinks to 45, which corresponds to a mental age of approximately 10 months,
and would qualify these children as Imbecllea" (141).
51
babies, Spitz discovered that in the foundling home "the corridor

into which the cubicles open is bleak and deserted, except at
feeding time . . Most of the time nothing goes on to attract the
babies' attention . . probably owing to the lack of stimulation,
the babies lie supine in their cots for many months and a hollow
is worn into their mattresses" (141)
But by far the richest source of evidence for the hypothesis in
question-a source already touched upon in the above comments
concerning hallucinations-is found in intensive, long-range
psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients; in the most deeply
ill of these individuals, one finds a conscious (not only unconscious, as in "normal" and neurotic persons) inability to distinguish clear boundaries between the self and the nonhuman
environment.
For example, a young man, hospitalized for several years because of an unusually severe schizophrenic illness, is often noted by
his therapist (one of my colleagues) to be feeling the outlines of his
face, especially of his mouth and chin, in a confused way. Occasionally he expresses his belief that one side of his face has
"slipped"; this is said as though he were referring to an inanimate object rather than a portion of his living body. During
one therapeutic hour, when a maintenance man starts hammering on a water pipe several rooms down the corridor, he draws
back, pats his chin and says in a tone of distress, "1 don't like
the way they hammer on my chin that way." On a later occasion, during one of the prolonged silences which characterize
his therapeutic hours, he suddenly demands of his therapist,
"How would you like to have square eyes?') The therapist feels
taken aback at this question} coming as it did out of the blue,
and for a moment is immersed in feeling how it would be literally
to have square eyes. Then a flash of insight comes to him and he
asks, "Is it that you've been in psychiatric hospitals for so long,
looking outside through the windows, that you feel as though
your eyes are square?" In response to this the patient gives one
of the corroborative responses which have come rarely from him.
It is work with such patients as this young man, patients who
are not only schizophrenic but who are unusually ill--unusually
52
deeply regressed-even among schizophrenics, which tells one

much about the presumable state of affairs in the very early development in the human ego. Such work substantiates a prediction made in 1945 by Feniche!:
. . . it may be expected that the study of schizophrenia will
elucidate the processes of the earliest period in the infant's life,
in the same way that the study of compulsion neurosis provided
insight into anal sadism [40].
It is my hope that, by the same token, the data from my work,

and the work of various of my colleagues, with these very deeply
regressed schizophrenic patients will contribute toward filling the
gap which, as Hartmann (69i.) comments, exists by reason of
our lack of verifiable clinical findings concerning the undifferen...
tiated phase of development. Hartmann, like Fenichel, emphasizes how important to our knowledge of early development is
the method of reconstruction based upon our clinical findings in
adult patients:
It is a memorable fact that Freud, using reconstructive methods,
could ascertain not only experiences of early childhood, typical
or atypical, but also typical maturational sequences that had
escaped the methods of direct observation, as in the case of the
stages of libidinous development . . .
A great number of childhood situations of incisive significance
for the formation of adult personality have a low "probability of
direct manifestation" . . .; but in such cases analytic insight,
the bulk of which is based on reconstruction, enables us to gain
an understanding of the continuity of development . . . Theories
about early developmental stages have to be built on data of
both reconstruction and direct observation [68b].
While I unfortunately cannot offer observational data, reconstructions based on psychotherapeutic work with schizophrenics suggest an early phase of oneness with the total environment and a subsequent pha8e~the animistic period-in which
all objects are personified. These probably precede the infant's
recognition of his own aliveness.
53
I feel that these hypotheses furnish us with a far broader,

richer, truer frame of reference from which to understand early
ego development, than is provided by the usual preoccupation
solely with the infant's differentiation of its self from the mother.
And I believe, further, that these hypotheses provide a likewise
enhanced basis for considering the subsequent maturation,
throughout life, of the individual personality; this maturation
needs to be seen, thus, as inextricably a part of the total matrix,
a matrix comprised not only of other human beings but, as I
have earlier emphasized, of predominantly nonhuman elements
-trees, clouds, stars, landscapes, buildings, and SO on ad infini-
tum.
The Nonhuman
Environment in Subsequent
Healthy Personality Development
CHAPTER
The whole of the Part Two, dealing with the role of the nonhuman environment in the life of the healthy human individual,
will be relatively brief in comparison with Part Three, for a number of reasons. First) this is too vast a subject for me to hope to
deal with it in any comprehensive way; I cannot do more than
bring out a few points about this subject, points which seem to
me significant and some of which, so far as I have been able to
determine, have not previously been expressed in our professional
literature. Secondly, since I have had no formal, detailed experience with the investigation of normal human personality comparable with my experience in the investigation of neurotic and
psychotic human personality, my data about the subject now at
hand are, inevitably, relatively scanty, Thirdly, I wish to avoid
in so far as possible observations which are banal; for example, it
seems to me unnecessary to elaborate upon the obvious point that
55
the personality of the healthy human adult in our culture cannot

be considered entirely apart from the individual's car, his home,
his clothing and all his manifold other material possessions, nor
apart from the particular skills which he possesses in dealing with
his nonhuman environment (whether in his daily work or in his
hobbies), nor apart from his animal pets, and so on. It is clear
enough to every one, I think, that all these are, in a very real
sense) ingredients of the human individual's personality in our
culture.
My fourth, and last, reason for keeping Part Two brief is that
I wish to avoid undue repetition. In keeping with my experience
that there are no qualitative, but only quantitative, differences
between the neurotic or psychotic individual on the one hand and
the healthy individual on the other hand) I believe that everything which will be said in Part Three about the role of the nonhuman environment in psychosis and neurosis applies here, too)
in spite of differences in degree. That is, I believe that every
human being, however emotionally healthy, has known, at one
time or another in his life, the following feelings which) as will
be shown in Part Three, hold sway in psychotic, and to some
degree in neurotic, patients: feelings of regard for certain elements in his nonhuman environment as being integral parts of
himself-and, upon the loss of such objects, feelings of having
lost a part of himself; a resentful conviction that some animal
or inanimate object is being accorded more consideration and
more love than he himself is receiving; anxiety lest he himself
become, or be revealed as, nonhuman; desires to become nonhuman; and experiences of his own reacting to another human
being as if the latter were an animal or an inanimate object.
Further, I think it could readily be shown that normal, adult
human beings frequently undergo temporary "phylogenetic re..
gression," in waking life as well as in dreams, as a means of
gaining release from the demands of interpersonal living and a
means of gaining a restoration of emotional energy so that, refreshed now, they can participate in more strictly human interpersonal relatedness with new freshness and vigor.
And I believe that in a second respect the data from psychotic
56
and neurotic individuals, in Part Three, will help to provide us,

by implication, with a richer picture of the role of the nonhuman
environment in normal personality development and in normal
adult living. Here I refer to the implications as to what is normal
with regard to the nonhuman environment, which we find in
constructing a hypothetical contrast to the abnormal relatedness
to the nonhuman environment which will be detailed in Part
Three. Such hypothetical implications cannot be, of course, a
substitute for actual detailed investigation of normal personality
in this respect.. But from these data about the abnormal we can
draw hypotheses which would seem, at least, to be worth utilizing
as guides to the investigation of normal personality as regards
this subject of the nonhuman environment.
As examples, from the data derived from investigation of the
personalities of psychotic and neurotic individuals, one can set
up, with some confidence} hypotheses that the parents of a nor...
mal child relate to him predominantly (though surely not unvaryingly) as being of greater innate worth than are any animal
pets, plants, or inanimate objects in the household; that the nor...
mal infant and young child has been aided, in the maintenance
of feelings of personal security and in the development of a sense
of personal identity, by having about him a relatively stable non..
human environment as contrasted with the kaleidoscopically
changing homes of many infants and children who 'later become
schizophrenic j that the healthy human adult has sufficient sense
of personal identity as a human being so that he is not more than
occasionally tormented by anxiety lest the beast in him will reign
supreme} nor so integrally attached to myriad nonhuman possessions that he cannot retain a sense of personal identity when
separate from many, or even all, of them; and so on.
Now, in presenting the material concerning the nonhuman
environment in normal personality development} I shall review
( 1) some of the literature bearing on the differentiation between
animate and inanimate; ( 2 ) some analytic hypotheses which
might help to explain how the nonhuman environment achieves
an importance in its own right; (3) the contributions which this
The HelJlthy Individual
57
nonhuman environment makes to the normally developing child

and adolescent.
In this review I shall be neither systematic (in terms of chronological sequence) nor comprehensive (I shall not present in
detail the entire analytic theory of object relations), but will
merely emphasize those concepts which seem to me to be particularly relevant.
The Differentiation Between Animate and Inanimate

In Chapter II the matter of the timing of such a differentiation, in normal development) was briefly touched upon. There is
a range of opinions about this, varying from Mahler's (102)
statement that the infant is aware by the first postnatal day of

the distinction between animate and inanimate in the environment, to Piaget's (113) findings which indicate that this is not
fully achieved until eleven or twelve years of age. Hartmann
(67e) quotes BUhler as saying that the first signs of intentionality

appear around the third month of life, Spitz (143) emphasizes
that after the sixth month the infant, because he now possesses
locomotion, can express actively his demand for social relations,
whereas he previously was limited to a passive responding to the
adult's initiative. These observations are perhaps relevant to the
timing of the infant's becoming aware of his own aliveness; but
we" must always keep in mind that his awareness of this- his
subjective experience-may lag considerably behind our (i.e.,
objective) awareness of him as being, now, a very-much-alive
creature..
There is an additional point which must be kept in mind. The
differentiation of animate and inanimate itself proceeds through
several stages and must be achieved on each level of integration
-from the perceptual to the most complex one of conceptual
integration. The question of timing this discrimination is therefore related to the different levels of integration.
Hoffer (79), as I mentioned in Chapter II, indicates that by
sixteen weeks the infant can distinguish between his own (alive)
58
fingers and the ( inanimate) bottle. Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (72d) report that between the third and fifth month, the
infant recognizes his mother as she prepares his food, which suggests that by this time he has achieved a quite appreciable differentiation between animate and inanimate in his surroundings.
Mahler (102) states, similarly, that at three or four months the
infant can perceive, at least temporarily, the mother's breast,
face, and hands. The work of Spitz (140) on hospitalism and
anaclitic depression would imply, in my interpretation of his
results, that within the first two years of life a relatively solid
differentiation of oneself as alive, vis-a-vis the inanimate elements
in one's surroundings, has been achieved. That is, Spitz found
that after the age of two years children are not susceptible to the
development of these syndromes (i.e., in terms of my hypothesis,
susceptible to dedifferentiation to the level of oneness with the
inanimate elements in their surroundings) despite such depri..
vations as give rise to these pathological states in younger children
and infants.
But always there are the meticulously reported observations
by Piaget to remind us that these very early degrees of differentiation between animate and inanimate are only partial and relatively superficial, and that a significant degree of nondifferentiation in this regard may persist, subtly, for very much longer. He
says (lt5!), for example, that not until the age of nine or ten
months does the infant search for vanished objects (for example,
objects which are hidden by a screen) so actively as to remove
solid objects which are screening or covering them, and he points
out the significance of these} and other comparable, observations
in highlighting the infant's inability, heretofore, to distinguish
between his own activity and the object (whether inanimate or
animate) toward which the activity was being directed. He says,
Childish animism . . . shows that the child endows nearly all
bodies with a certain spontaneity of movement [I.e., responds to
them as if they all, inanimate and animate alike, were animate].
It shows, above all, that the distinction between a body's own
The Hl!a1th'Y Individual
59
movement and that which is determined from outside lit] is reached

only after much groping and many difficulties [113b].
[For example, in the explanations which children give concerning the movement of clouds,] Five stages may be distin..
guished. . . . The first stage is magical: we make the clouds
move by walking. The clouds obey us at a distance [i.e., here we
see the child unable to differentiate between himself and the inani..
mate cloud]. The average age of this stage is 5. The second stage
is both artificialist and animistic. Clouds move because God or
men make them move. The average age of this stage is 6. During
a third stage, of which the average age is 7, clouds are supposed
to move by themselves . . . [which shows something of the difficulty which the child encounters in trying to differentiate between
animate and inanimate in his environment] [l I Sc].
As regards the movement of the heavenly bodies (SUD, moon,

stars), Piaget (113d ) finds, similarly, that the six-year-old still
regards these as being alive and conscious, and as following him
when he walks because they "want" to.
He says (113e) that during the early stages, every movement
is regarded as the manifestation of a living activity--i..e., a manifestation of aliveness. So reminiscent of the boy described by
Elkisch and Mahler (33) who felt himself to be a machine and
who reacted to the inanimate machines about him as if they
were fascinatingly and frighteningly alive, Piaget says that, for
the normal young child,
. . . while the external world is perceived by means of schemas
of internal origin, internal phenomena (thought, speech, dreams,
memory, etc.) are in their turn conceived only through schemas
due to external experience. The child vivifies the external world
and materializes the internal universe [113].
Werner provides this summary of one of Piaget's (112) earlier

works, a summary in which the development of differentiation
between animate and inanimate in the surrounding world is
explicitly traced:
Piaget concluded from his studies that four developmental
stages of animism can be distinguished: at the first stage, life is
60
The Nonhuman Enuironment
characterized by activity in general j at the second (6-8 years) ~

life is indicated by movement; at the third (8-10 years), life is
denoted by spontaneous movement; at the fourth (10.. 12 years),
life is restricted to animals and plants [162e].
Werner (162f) gives a succinct resume, too, of the concomitant,
but as it were opposite, process of "de-personalization" of the
inanimate things in the world of the child; he bases this partly
on his own work, but largely on the work of Piaget concerning
causality. In the first stage, lasting until about five years of age,
physical events receive egomorphic, anthropomorphic explanations; in the second stage, things and events are the product of
man's activity;' and in the third stage, namely at about seven
or eight years of age, inanimate things are now "de-personalized"
-i.e., perceived as indeed inanimate (although, as I have mentioned, Piaget does not consider that the adult conception of
causality is fully achieved until eleven or twelve years of age) .
Before leaving Piaget for the time, let us note that he implies
(and this is reminiscent of Spitz's comment [141] that the child
learns to distinguish animate objects from inanimate ones by the
spectacle provided by the play of emotions on the mother's face)
that people playa leading role in the child's differentiation between animate and inanimate in the environment: he says
(115g) that people doubtless constitute the first permanent objects, and very probably are also the first objectified sources of
causality.
Hanns Sachs (122), in a paper in 1933 entitled, "The Delay
in the Machine Age/' presents a theoretical concept which bears
upon our discussion of the differentiation between animate and
inanimate, and which is reminiscent of Piaget's observational
data concerning the subtle persistence, until relatively late in
development, of nondifferentiation in this area of experience.
Sachs raises the question of why the ancient Greeks and Romans,
despite the requisite technical skills, failed to invent machines;
lOne of my schizophrenic patients is currently in a comparable phase in
the evolution of her view of the world around her: she regards all the nonhuman environment as having been made by people-and, in fact" as having
been mtJd. Old of people.
61
by "machines" he means sufficiently complex machines (as examples, the mechanical loom, the steam hammer, the locomotive) to do the work predominantly alone, so that man need
only be the master mind in control. In answer to this, Sachs
suggests that these ancient peoples possessed so great a degree
of narcissism, and a narcissism so bound up with the body image,
that for them any ego simulacrum in the form of a machine,
inanimate but functioning in a manlike way, would have aroused
an intolerable degree of uncanny feeling" Sachs reminds us that
" . . In some vague way, which we ourselves often disavow, we
all know this feeling as a reaction to the sudden appearance of
animation in the inanimate when without warning an object
begins to move or to speak in a human manner" The use of
automatons in literature, the theatre, and the cinema, in order to
produce an effect of uncanniness, is so general that it seems
superfluous to cite examples and proofs" . "
He cites comparable data from schizophrenic patients' delusions of influencing machines, and agrees with Tausk's statement
that "The machines produced by the wit of man are fashioned
after the likeness of the human body, an unconscious projection
of his own bodily construction."
Whether or not one finds the psychoanalytic concept of primary narcissism to be usefully applicable here (and I do not),
it does seem plausible that even though these ancient peoples
must have considered themselves to be fully aware of the distinction between animate and inanimate in their environment, and
of the distinction between their own animate selves and inanimate
ingredients of their surroundings, at an unconscious level this
distinction was insufficiently clear so that whenever anything approaching manlike machinery began to be developed, it was, as
Sachs points out, used merely as a form of entertainment rather
than being developed seriously further" Mankind's becoming able
to break through this collective resistance, many centuries later,
into the era of invention and utilization of such machines, would
seem to have much the same psychodynamic meaning-s-i.e., a
deepened awareness of the distinction between animate and inan-
62
The Nonhuman Enoironment
imate, between human and nonhuman-as did the similarly

belated development of the art of caricature, which Kris (89a)
has discussed .
Werner's volume contains many passages which bear upon the
differentiation between animate and inanimate, and between
human and nonhuman" Concerning} for example, the concreteness of primitive thinking, he says,
Among primitive peoples, and also children, there is found a
kind of thinking which, with great justification, may be termed
"concrete" thinking. Its distinctive characteristic lies in the fact
that the conceptual activity operates in indivisible unity with
motor-perceptual and imaginative processes. It is only gradually
that a non-sensori-motor-that is, abstract-mode of thinking
separates itself from this unity [162g].
The language of primitive man is concrete because it must be
so in order to designate a world marked by an inunensely rich
variety of concrete things and events. It is quite possible that the
primitive man does not use a general term for "knife" because
he is primarily concerned with the specialized functions of the
knife in cutting different objects, or with the functions of many
specific knives used in performing varied operations [162h].
We obtain, here, some glimpse of the degree to which the

"primitive" man is at one with, or wedded to, the concrete world
around him, and it seems to me that the concreteness of his language gives us some suggestion of how much a part of him are
the nonhuman objects which abound in the outer world of any
human being. In a recent paper (136) I have discussed the
differentiation between concrete and figurative thinking in the
recovering schizophrenic patient, a subject to which I shall return, here, on pages 174-177. The concreteness of the child's
thinking suggests that for him, as for the member of the so-called
primitive culture and for the schizophrenic adult} the wealth of
nonhuman objects about him are constituents of his psychological
being in a more intimate sense than they are for the adult in our
culture, the adult whose ego is, as Hartmann and Werner emphasize, relatively clearly differentiated from the surrounding
63
world, and whose development of the capacity for abstract think...

ing helps to free him, as my paper on this subject pointed out,
from his original oneness with the nonhuman world.
Werner describes the role of "things-of-action" or "signalthings"-i.e., things which have a special affective meaning, or
a special significance in the sensorimotor functioning of the
individual-in early phases of differentiation:
. . . the perceived things of the primitive world are constructed
differently from the things of advanced, civilized man. Things do
not stand out there, discrete and fixed in meaning with respect to
the cognitive subject. They are intrinsically formed by the
psycho-physical organization of which they constitute an integral
part, by the whole vital motor-affective situation. Hence we may
speak of "things-of-action,' or of "signal-things" in such a primitive world [162i].
. . . a relatively undifferentiated functioning leading to a predominance of things-of-action is characteristic of the earlier stages
of childhood4 .. [162j].
The relevance of this to the differentiation, for example, between animate and inanimate is indicated in this passage:
. . . the fact that the objects are predominantly understood

through the motor and affective attitude of the subject may lead
to a particular type of perception [namely, "physiognomonic"
perception]. Things perceived in this way may appear "animate"
and, even though actually lifeless, seem to express some inner
form of life [162k].
For instance [the child] wants something from [an] inanimate
object, and as a result of this desire it inevitably comes to personal
life [162 I]
4
Of interest as regards the sequences involved in differentiation is Werner's concept that the whole world is perceived
"physiognomonically" before persons emerge as such:
It may be that the child apprehends persons physiognomonically
more readily than other objects in his surrounding world. This
64
fact might give rise to the erroneous impression that the child
first discovers physiognomonic characteristics in human individuals and then transfers them to nonhuman objects. The more
direct assumption, however, and one which is in greater accordance with the facts, is that the child, grasping the world as he
does through his motor-affective activity, will understand the
world in terms of physiognomonics before personifying. The
relatively easy understanding of human expressions and gestures
is possible because of the early development of physiognomonic
perception [162m].
Wemer notes that primitive languages reveal the extent to

which categorizations of the ingredients of the surrounding world
-namely, the human beings, animals and plants, and inanimate
things in the world-are dependent not upon what we would
consider the "real" characteristics of these, but rather upon the
affective evaluations of them in the mind of the primitive person.
Thus we see how greatly the differentiation of the surrounding
world into animate and inanimate, human and animal and plant,
is distorted by affective factors:
In the Ban tu language there is a class of persons and also a
class of things. But aU persons who are in any way contemptible
or unworthy are relegated to the class of things. The blind, the
deaf, the crippled) and the idiot all belong to this thing-like class.
The language of the Algonquin Indians often puts small animals
into the class of inanimate objects, whereas large plants are often
placed in the class of animate things. In the Gola language of
Liberia the prefix 0 denoting the human or animal class is substituted for the customary classificatory prefix when the object is
to be emphasized as one that is especially large, valuable, or
important [162n].
Werner (1620) mentionsthat for the Zuiii, everything madewhether building, utensil, or weapon-is conceived as living a
still sort of life. He mentions (162p) that it is a universally
dominant idea among children (of our culture) that they can
65
become, or at some time have become, animals. And of the beliefs

of the primitive Brazilian Indians, he quotes Karl von den
Steinen" as reporting that
We must quite disregard the boundaries between man and
beast. Any animal can be cleverer or more stupid, stronger or
weaker, than the Indian himself. . . . as yet there is no humanity in the ethical sense so far as the primitive Indian is concerned
[162q].
The Development of Object Relations
As stated earlier, the way in which an individual comes to

appreciate the nonhuman environment is a function of the de..
veloprnent of object relations. However, it seems to me that
psychoanalytic writings have almost exclusively been limited to
the theory of interpersonal relations. When psychoanalysts have
been confronted with phenomena in which a nonhuman object
has played an important role in the life of an individual, they
have generally assumed that this nonhuman object derived its
significance from its symbolic or defensive value." That is, the
significance of such a nonhuman object was attributed to a
displacement of cathexis, either from an important person, or
from the child's own body. The object, whatever it may be,
"stood for)' or "represented" either mother or a part of the body.
Spitz, for instance, goes so far as to say that
. . . perception is a function of libidinal cathexis and therefore
the result of the intervention of an emotion of one kind or another. Emotions are provided for the child through the intervention of a human partner, i.e., by the mother or her substitute. A
progressive development of emotional interchange with the
mother provides the child with perceptive experiences of its
environment [141].
3 I have not attempted, in the instance of each of the quoted passages
from Werner) to mention the reference sources which he has wed; the
interested reader should consult his voluminous bibliography.
See, for instance) the theories of childhood phobias or of fetishi!m.
66
Spitz, and many others like him, thus would say that a person's
interest in nonhuman objects derives directly from the human
object.
Another point of view has been expressed much earlier by
Ferenczi, who relates the gradual appreciation of reality to the
child's interest in his own body. Ferenczi (41) believes that the
child, during the animistic period, views every object as endowed
with life and tries to find in the object his own organs and their
activities. Having been concerned exclusively with his own body
and its satisfactions through sucking, eating, defecating and so
on, he is now especially attentive to those objects and processes
in the outer world which bear even a distant resemblance to his
dearest experiences. Thus, Ferenczi says, there arise those intimate
connections between the human body and the objective world,
connections which remain throughout life and that we call
symbolic. On the one hand, the child in this animistic stage sees
in the world nothing but images of his physical self; on the other,
he learns to represent by means of his body the whole infinite
variety of the outside world.
An intermediate view is found in the work of Winnicott (164)
and Stevenson (146) concerning the role of "transitional objects"
in the life of the infant and young child. In a preface to the
article by Stevenson, Winnicott states:
In a paper read for the British Psycho-Analytical Society
(1953) [164] I drew attention to the importance of the first
object used by the infant. . . . It is important to note that this
object is not part of the infant, like the fist or the thumb or the
two middle fingers. Its use is related to thumb-sucking. Some infants when sucking the thumb fiddle with the face with the
fingers, or else while sucking one hand they twiddle their hair
or a piece of cloth with the other hand. . . .
The transitional object is also not the same as the next soft
toy. It can be said that the next one must be acknowledged as
coming from the world . . . . but [the transitional one] from the
infant's point of view was created by the infant. . . .
. . . this transitional area of existence between inner reality
67
and external reality is a very important third aspect of life which

is surprisingly neglected in psychoanalytic writings [l46c].
Stevenson herself writes,

Transitional objects are in fact an entirely healthy and normal
manifestation of the beginnings of the reconciliation between
reality and fantasy: in normal children they finally lose importance with growing interests and awareness of the outside world.
But, Winnicott points out, they may and frequently do become
a defense against anxiety and reveal the tension which the growth
toward unity of personality-the fusion of fantasy and realitymust involve [146d].
Wishing to concentrate mainly upon the functions of these
first treasured possessions in the lives of normal children, Stevenson obtained her material mainly from mothers' clubs in different
parts of London, and from a request for information published

in a magazine, The Nurse~I'Y World. From these sources she
obtained between fifty and sixty examples. As she puts it, her
main interest here is in the healthy, comparatively normal manifestations, occurring in children who seem to be making a fairly
successful adaptation.
One may question whether, by this method of going about her
data collecting) Stevenson was making contact with the most
outstandingly normal of mothers; but these latter are surely not
easy to contact in any organized research, and I, at least) am not
inclined to quibble on this basis about the applicability of Stevenson's findings to any "more normal" homes which, very possibly,
may exist.
As an example of the kind of communication which she received from the mothers about this subject, she quotes a mother's
comments about what her small son called his "own pillow":
UWhen will he give it up? I don't know but I do know that
I shall never insist. I feel when he no longer needs it he will do
so of his own accord. It is too deeply loved and has helped him
through too many trials to be too easily discarded."
68
The view expressed here [Stevenson comments] is one which

was implicit in the remarks of nearly all the mothers to whom
I spoke. Moreover, mothers seemed to sense that they themselves
were in some way connected with these objects and many linked
them with anxiety in the children. In one or two instances where
children clung with exceptional fervor to their '(teddies," etc.,
at an age when they should perhaps have been relinquishing them,
it was obviously felt by the mother to be in part a failure in
herself. Thus the mother of Mary wrote concerning "Golly-bear" :
"I am convinced that the Golly filled the gap between my daughter and myself because at times I did not fill my role successfully"
[l46c].
She mentions that sometimes the existence of such a transitional object in the child's life may pass unnoticed by the mother.
But there are cases where one feels that a conspicuous lack
of any transitional object may be an indication of a deviation
away from the normal, whether it be toward an extreme of dependence on or independence from the mother [146f].
Even though there were, evidently, at least a few such atypical

cases among the relatively normal group of children, Stevenson's
findings in a comparative study of twenty children in residential
nurseries show, indeed, strikingly different data:
. . . the fact that the children whom I observed did not even
try to retain constant possession [of "cuddlies"] may be an indication that the basic relationships, from which the child can move
into transitional satisfaction, are not being established...... The
nursery children whom I observed treasured little or nothingand destroyed much. Among twenty children (aged one to five)
with whom I worked, not one could be said to cherish a toy or
an object for more than a passing hour or two-and then possession was usually maintained to thwart another child I146g]..
She gives the following example of later behavior of those she

terms "objectless" children:
69
Caroline (now thirty) was the third child of the family) having
two elder brothers, both of whom were moderately devoted in
their infancy to teddies, Caroline never evinced the slightest need
for any such object. Her mother greatly desired a daughter) and
her identification with her own mother (Caroline's grandmother)
was exceptionally strong, She was a mother whose adaptation to
the needs of her daughter was excessive, with a tendency toward
emotional and erotic overstimulation. There was ample evidence
of an inverted oedipal situation, Caroline playing a somewhat
masculine role in her relationship with her mother, the mother
compensating for her own unsatisfactory marital relationship.
Caroline's homosexual tendencies became evident in other relationships.
Here we have an example of a bond so close in infancy as to
prohibit an object relationship . . Caroline from babyhood had
no "woolly" of any kind whatever [146h].4
Such "objectless" children constitute an example of one among

several points which I shall make in a later chapter-points
concerning the failure of some children to develop a normal
degree of relatedness with their nonhuman environment, because
of their having to be excessively absorbed with interpersonal
relationships in the home.
I believe, incidentally, that this work by Winnicott and Stevenson provides a valuable frame of reference for the further
investigation of various manifestations of schizophrenia. In my
own experience I have seen, for instance, that some schizophrenic
patients show "objectless" behavior; some are strikingly destructive of all inanimate objects which come within their reach; and
others cherish certain inanimate objects for long periods of time.
Each of two of my patients who manifested at first a particularly
conspicuous noncherishing of inanimate possessions came to show
an intense cherishing of such objects as therapy progressed. These
'This child may be compared with certain of the children Spitz (143)
describes as suffering from anaclitic depression as a result of the loss of the
mother: "In the case of Aethelberta, for instance, as well as in that of another child, the games consisted in rolling fecal pellets, which seemed to be
the only toy these children enjoyed . . . .t. Caroline, described above by
Stevenson, evidently was also without a mother, in the seDse of a mother
experienced as a separate object.
70
are broad and rudimentary observations from a field which is,

I feel sure, rich and deserving of detailed investigation.
It is evident that the above-described "transitional objects"
are transitional in two respects. First, although the teddie bear
(for example) is not objectively a part of the Infant's body, it is
not experienced by him as coming, either, from the outside world
-as are the later toys. In the same way, it still stands in a close
affective relationship to mother. Thus this security-engendering
object helps the infant through the transition period leading up
to the recognition that there is an outside world. Secondly, and
by the same token, the teddie bear represents a transition step
in the child's becoming aware of his own aliveness, for here we
see that an inanimate object is experienced as being a part of the
infant's body, to a degree at least approximating that of his own
thumb, before the next phase is reached when inanimate objects
(toys, blankets, and so on) are experienced as coming from, or
"belonging to" the outside world rather than being a part of his
own alive self.

In an attempt to describe the further steps, by which nonhuman objects can gain significance, I shall now tum to Hart-
mann's contributions. Hartmann introduced two highly useful

concepts: namely, primary and secondary autonomy of the ego.
As regards primary autonomy of the ego, he makes the point,
in essence, that there is already at birth something present in the
form of ego apparatuses which from the beginning possess a
degree of autonomy, of independence, vis-a-vis the id, and which
are preadapted to outer reality. This implies that the infantile
state of nondifferentiation is, even in earliest postnatal Jife t not
total-a concept which is of obvious relevance to a work, such as
my present one, which endeavors to assess the role of the nonhuman environment in human living. In a paper in 1950 (69c),
Hartmann refers to the inborn ego anlagen as "ego nuclei" and
"autonomous preparatory stages of the ego," and in a paper in
1956 he states that
. . . We should also consider what is, I think, a necessary
assumption, that the child is born with a certain degree of pre..
71
adaptiveness ; that is to say, the apparatus of perception, memory,

mobility, etc., which help us to deal with reality are, in a primitive
form, already present at birth . . . [7lb].
Further, he makes the point that not only is the existence of

such elements already established at birth, but that their future
development tends innately to proceed along certain already established lines. Of this latter point, namely, the autonomous factor
in ego development, he says in that same paper) u we may
speak of an autonomous factor in ego development in the same
way as we consider the instinctual drives autonomous agents of
development" (69d).
Hartmann (6ge) points out that Freud (53) in 1937) modifying his previous stand as to the ego's developing out of the id,
had come to find it credible that, even before the ego exists, its
subsequent lines of development, tendencies and reactions are
already determined. Parenthetically, it is of interest, here, that
Rapaport (117) credits Erikson ( 34 ..36 ) with being the first
person to trace the course of autonomous ego development, and to
propose a scheme encompassing its phases, in various writings
between 1937 and 1953.

In a paper in 1950, Hartmann speaks not only of the abovedescribed "primary autonomy" in ego development, but touches
upon his concept of "secondary autonomy" in ego development:
Ego development, like libidinous development, is partly based
on processes of maturation. And of the ego aspect, too, some of
us are agreed that we have to consider it as a partly primaryJ
independent variable, not entirely traceable to the interaction of
drives and environment; also that it partly can become independent from the drives in a secondary way_ That is what I mean by
the terms primary and secondary autonomy in ego development
. . . [68a].
In his 1939 monograph he explains this "secondary auton..
omy," and describes it as arising from a "change of function":
. . . the phenomenon of "change of function," the role of
which in mental life and particularly in the development of the
72
ego seems to be very great. . . .: a behavior-form which origi..

nated in a certain realm of life may, in the course of development) appear in an entirely different realm and role. An attitude
which arose originally in the service of defense against an
instinctual drive ma,,~ in the course of time, become an independent structure [My italics], in which case the instinctual drive
merely triggers this automatized apparatus. . . . Such an apparatus may, as a relatively independent structure, come to serve
other functions (adaptation, synthesis, etc.}; it may also-and
this is genetically of even broader significance-- through a change
of function tum from a means into a goal in its own right. . . .
[67b].
In another paper in 1950, he restates his definition of "change
of function," and gives an example of the secondary ego-autonomy which results from it:
. . . What developed as an outcome of defense against an
instinctual drive may grow into a more or less independent and
more or less structured function. It may come to serve different
functions, like adjustment, organization and so on. To give you
one example: every reactive character formation, originating in
defense against the drives, will gradually take over a wealth of other
functions in the framework of the ego. Because we know that
the results of this development may be rather stable, or even
irreversible in most normal conditions, we may call such functions
autonomous, though in a secondary way {in contradistinction
to the primary autonomy of the ego I discussed before [69f].
It is apparent that Hartmann's formulations provide the theoretical tool by means of which we can explain how the nonhuman environment attains importance "in its own right" ( as
I think of it). The concept of primary antonomy implies that the
perceptual apparatus functions from the very beginning; thus
the infant has the tools with which to relate to his environment.
The concept of secondary autonomy implies that regardless of
its origin in conflict-whether as a defense against the affects
aroused in mother-infant relationship, or as a direct derivative
from the positive elements of this symbiosis-through a change of
73
function an activity or an object may, as it frees itself from the

original conflict, gain importance in its own right.
Chapters IV and V are devoted to the individual's mature
(Le., "conflict-free") relatedness to his environment, Here I wish
to include some brief material relating to more primitive forms
of relatedness. For example, there are a series of papers-including those by Tausk (153), Banns Sachs (122), Lisbeth Sachs
( 123 ), Ekstein (32), Bornstein (14), and Rank and Macnaughton (116 ) -which describe patients who (a) either delusionally
experience fantasied machines by which they are influenced, or
which the patients themselves can wield in a subjectively grandiose way; (b) or who identify with various actual machines in
their environment. In each instance, the machine in question,
whether real or fantasied, is described by the writer as serving-sby reason of the symbolic meaning with which it is invested-a
defensive function in the patient's ego functioning. I would not
argue against such an interpretation of these phenomena, given
the partial adequacy of ego organization, the fairly considerable
degree of establishment of ego boundaries, which each of these
particular patients exhibited.
But I believe that there are patients--such as some of those
whom I shall describe in later chapters of this book-whose ego
organization has deteriorated to a level comparable with so very
primitive an infantile ego state that such inanimate ingredients
of the surrounding environment (e.g., machines) cannot yet be
experienced as sufficiently delineated from the self so that they
can be employed in this kind of symbolic-defensive fashion. I
find it significant that a number of other investigators, including
Ferenczi (41), Sharpe (138)} Langer (91), Kubie (90)} Little
(97 J 98), and Freeman et al, (45), have emphasized that, in
order for the individual to become capable of symbolic thinking
and experiencing, there must first be established finn ego boundaries which demarcate him, subjectively, from the external world .
In short, I postulate that, in the instances of many of the patients
whom I shall subsequently describe, the nonhuman environment
is subjectively part of the ego, and to that degree is infringing
upon the functioning of the ego; regression has occurred to such
74
a level that there are insufficient ego boundaries to allow for the
nonhuman environment to be experienced as outside the ego,
and selectively utilized by the ego, on the basis of symbolic
meanings to which various of these nonhuman environmental
ingredients lend themselves, in the service of defense against
various instinctual drives. Concerning these more deeply regressed
patients, I find it of interest that Rapaport (117) terms catatonic conditions "the prototypes of surrender of the autonomy
from the environment." Another phrase which Rapaport employs
I find similarly apt: "stimulus slavery," Such phrases help to
convey the great degree to which very deeply regressed-whether
catatonic, hebephrenic, or paranoid-patients are psychologically
welded to, undifferentiated from) the environment.
A number of writers have described ego development as a
process of increasing differentiation, over the years, between ego
and environment-s-of, in other words, increasing ego autonomy
vis-a-vis the environment. I quote a number of relevant passages
here because, as one reads them and thinks of the process operating in reverse-"dedifferentiation," in Hartmann's valuable
phrase-we can receive, again, some impression of the great
degree to which the deeply regressed schizophrenic patient is
subjectively at one with the world about him. Hartmann says,
Freud states that the ego, by the interpolation of thought processes, achieves a delay of motor discharge. This process is part
of .... [a] general evolution, namely, that the more differentiated
an organism is, the more independent from the immediate environmental stimulation it becomes" " . . [67c].
And he shows that this differentiation proceeds apace with,

or results from, the differentiation between ego and id:
It is possible, and even probable, that it is just this sharper
differentiation of the ego and the id-the more precise division
of labor between them--in human adults which on the one hand
makes for a superior, more flexible, relation to the external world,
and on the other increases the alienation of the id from reality.
75
In the animal neither of these two institutions is so flexibly close

to or so alienated from reality.. " . [67d].
. . . probably as a result of the differentiation of the human
mind into systems of functioning, the id is here much farther
removed from reality than are the instincts of animals [7Ie]"
" . " many aspects of the ego can be described as detour ace.
tivities; they promote a more specific and safer form of adjustment by introducing a factor of growing independence from the
immediate impact of present stimuli. In this trend toward what
we call internalization .
[69g].
4
Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein phrase it that

" . " To the degree to which differentiation [between ego and
id] takes place man is equipped with a specialized organ of
adaptation, i.e., with the ego. . . . The instincts of the animal
mediate its adjustment to the reality in which it lives and their
properties determine the extent of possible adaptation. With man,
adjustment is entrusted to an independent organization.. " .
[72b] "
Rapaport (117) not only presents with welcome lucidity the

essence of Hartmann's views about primary and secondary ego
autonomy and related concepts, but gives us an over-all, balanced picture of ego development in which we see new dimensions of meaning:
Summing up, the organism is endowed by evolution with
apparatuses which prepare it for contact with its environment,
but its behavior is not the slave of this environment since it is
also endowed with drives which rise from its organization, and
are the ultimate guarantees against stimulus slavery" In tum, the
organism's behavior is not simply the expression of these internal
forces, since the very apparatuses through which the organism is
in contact with its environment are the ultimate guarantees
against drive slavery. These autonomies have proximal guarantees
also, in intrapsychic structures. The balance of these mutually
controlling factors does not depend on the outcome of their
76
chance interactions, but is controlled by the laws of the epigenetic sequence, termed autonomous ego-development.
Much of my case material will highlight the degree to which

the above-described delicate balance is upset, in severe and
chronic schizophrenia, and the degree to which some of these
individuals become enslaved to stimuli from the environmentincluding the nonhuman sector of that environment. This case
material is such as to suggest that, even though in earliest infancy
ego apparatuses may already exist (as has been postulated by
Freud, Hartmann, Erikson, and Rapaport) and the infant may
thereby be shielded from the subjective experience of total oneness with nonhuman environment, he may be, in that undifferentiated phase of early infancy, appreciably less well differentiated
from that great sector of his surroundings than we have been
prepared to believe heretofore.
Hartmann points out that
The autonomous factors of ego development . . . may secondarily get under the influence of the drives, as is the case in sexualization or aggressivization. To give you only one example: in
analysis we observe how the function of perception, which has
certainly an autonomous aspect, may be influenced-and frequently handicapped-by becoming the expression of oral-libidinal
or oral-aggressive strivings. . . . the reality ego gradually evolves
precisely by freeing itself from the encroaclunent of such instinctual
tendencies. . . .
The autonomous factors may also come to be involved in the
ego's defense against instinctual tendencies, against reality, and
against the superogo.. . [69h].
In line with this point made by Hartmann, I have found

repeated and clearcut evidence that dedifferentiation, involving
relinquishment of ego boundaries, is one of the ego defenses
which are prominent in schizophrenia. Thus it is conceivably
possible that in those adult schizophrenics whom we find to
possess extremely little ego autonomy from the environment, there
77
had been in earliest infancy more of such autonomy than we now

find, but this had been largely overwhelmed by the sexual or
aggressive drives, or sacrificed in the defensive service of the
ego. I
An example of such. events in childhood is described by Elkisch
and Mahler (33), in a paper entitled "The 'Influencing Machine' in the Light of the Psychotic Child's Body-Image.') They
describe a psychotic boy who equated himself with a mechanical
man, constantly in motion, which was riding a bicycle on a large
advertising sign in the vicinity; and with fire engines, blowers in
the school gymnasium) the wall telephone) light switches, and
elevators. He reacted to these mechanical devices with emotions
varying from fascination to terror, depending upon the aspects
of himself which he projected upon them. It was evident, they
state, that
. . . a complete confusion between inside drives and outside

powers . . . results in equating the outside fascinating machineries with the inside visceral sensations. This in tum results . . .
in the equation of these bodily sensations with the machine, so
that the child would talk about his physiological processes 41 if
his body tuere a machine.
The previously mentioned papers by Tausk (153) and Mahler

( 102) (see also Furman [56]) provide additional examples of the
identification with machines serving defensive functions, Le.,
attempts to cope with the concretized and projected inner im-
pulses.
Since my main emphasis in this chapter, however, is on the
normally developing child, I shall now tum to the contributions
which accrue to the normal child from the nonhuman environment.
II for one cannot believe) however, that the d,=differentiation we see now
ia 10 severe as to have had no precedent in the Individual's life history, even
in earliest infancy.
78
The Contribution
Development
0/
the Nonhuman Environment to Normal
( 1) The first point I wish to make is that this nonhuman

environment apparently provides, in the life of the normal infant
and child, a significant contribution to his emotional security, his
sense of stability and continuity of experience, and his developing
sense of personal identity.
The child's relatedness to his nonhuman environment-to
animal pets, to plants, to inanimate objects-provides a context
in which his own getting to know himself, his becoming aware
of his own feeling-capacities and personality traits, is facilitated.
A number of my patients first became aware of their own sadism
and selfishness, for example, in their childhood relationships with
their pet dogs; these undesired personality traits tended not to be
noticed in the child's relationships with the parents, siblings, and
other human beings. There, it was relatively easy for the child to
project onto these other persons the possession of these "bad"
personality traits---relativeJy easy for the child to blame the other
penon and not notice his own hostility, or what not.. But when
the child related himself to his innocent, trusting dog and found
himself treating his pet in a cruel, teasing manner, the child's own
cruelty came to his attention in a relatively unobscured way. One
such patient, who showed an abundance of sadism in the transference relationship and who had spent many months in blaming
his parents, when he finally came to grips, now, with his own
sadism, recalled how he used to love to torment his dog when he
was a child.
Similarly with positive feelings, also, the child can find recognition of his own similarly unobscured capacities for tenderness,
for example, in the loving care which he bestows upon pets and
other nonhuman ingredients of his surrounding world. In terms
of both positive as well as negative personality traits, the nonhuman environment provides a relatively pure-culture medium
in which the child is both helped, and required, to see himself as
he really is, to a greater extent than is true in the much more
79
complex medium of the interpersonal world, wherein it is so

relatively easy for the child to convince himself that whatever is
transpiring is a process in which he has no really responsible
participation. Dr. Norman C. Rintz, in a personal communication, points out the additional factor that in the child's relatedness to the nonhuman, as contrasted to the human, environment
there is a freedom from words-words which the child so often
finds confusing in his relationships with other human beings.
By the same token, the child is aided in getting a clearer
picture of the personalities of each of his parents, his siblings,
and other significant persons, by observing the fashion in which
they relate themselves to the nonhuman environment. One obsessive-compulsive man, for example, finally began to realize,
after many months of analysis, that his mother really had treated
him in an unwann, rejecting fashion, when during a visit by her
to his marital home, he noticed how she kept shrinking away
from contact with a kitten which he and his wife had. The
mother was sitting on a sofa, and the kitten kept trying to snuggle
against her, while the mother kept moving away in evident
aversion. A great deal of data concerning this aspect of the
patient's relationship with his mother had already emerged in
his analysis, but it was this simple observation of his mother's
response to the kitten which finally drove the realization home.
In other instances, patients have observed a parent's being able
to reveal capacities for affection, in relating to an animal pet
or a household plant, which the parent was relatively shy about
revealing directly in interpersonal relations.
I have mentioned the papers by Mahler (102), Elkisch and
Mahler (33), Ekstein (32), Lisbeth Sachs (123), and others
who describe the schizophrenic child's disordered, inaccurately
differentiated experience of the human beings and nonhuman
ingredients in his environment; his projection of various unendurable emotions onto nonhuman things about him; and his
regression to identification with nonhuman things (such as rna..
chines) at times of increased anxiety. These findings are such as
to suggest that, in normal ego development also, the nonhuman
80
functions as a kind of shock absorber, upon which the child can

project various part aspects of himself, until such time as his
ego is sufficiently strong to integrate them into his developing
sense of self.
Erikson (34), for example, presents vivid evidence that children use their toys to symbolize their own internal conflicts. He
tells, among other interesting cases, of a two-and-a-half-year-old
boy who, struggling against enuresis, took to bed with him each
night a home-made closed cylinder, made of the center of a roll
of toilet paper, with a milk bottle cap over each end. All night
the little boy would try to hold the cylinder closed. When he
eventually did achieve control of his bladder, his still-persisting
urges to expel were expressed, still, via the nonhuman environment: before going to sleep, he would throw all available objects
out the window and, when this was prevented, he stole into other
rooms and spilled the contents of boxes and bottles onto the floor.
Erikson describes, also, an interesting series of experiments he
conducted with college students as well as children, in which the
subject was asked to construct a dramatic scene with the use of
toy building-materials and toy people, animals, and vehicles. The
results were such as to suggest that both normal children and
adults tend, to a surprising degree, unwittingly to arrange their
nonhuman surroundings in accordance with their inner conflicts
and attitudes.
Mahler (102) describes the symbolic meaning which certain
elements of a prepsychotic boy's environment represented to him,
in his struggle against ego dissolution at the time of his mother's
pregnancy:
During the last months of his mother's pregnancy he developed
an absorbing, exclusive interest in examining his inanimate en..
viromnent by touching objects.. ' .. George became conspicuous
by his strange compulsive interest in barrels, beer barrels in
particular ( they lived near a brewery). . . . Following this
preoccupation with barrels he became fascinated by pipes of all
sorts. Mter a few months he developed a similar preoccupation with electrical appliances; he would endlessly pretend to be
plugging a flex into a socket. Still later George developed an
81
intense interest in fires, and this was predominant at the time of

his hospitalization at six and a half years of age.
[In her interpretation of George's behavior, Mahler says that]
George seemed to have tried frantically to adopt countercath.ectic
devices against fragmentation of his brittle ego. He tried to
counteract the threatening loss of the libidinal object world by
attempting to recapture it in a concrete sense ... he obviously
tried to distinguish between, to compare, beer barrels and his
pregnant mother's body. After his baby sister's birth, George
compared, in this tactile way, concrete symbols of male and
female anatomy . . .
This whole book endeavors to demonstrate that the nonhuman

surroundings possess psychological significances for us which are
not confined to their serving as such a shock-absorbing background; but this function, which is implicit in such psychoanalytic writings as those mentioned above, should not be omitted
here. I wish to re-emphasize a point I made earlier: to the
degree that some differentiation between ego and surrounding
nonhuman environment has been achieved, various specific elements of the nonhuman realm (such as machines) can be reacted
to, by the developing ego which is engaged in a defensive struggle)
as symbols of the warded-off drives and affects.
It will be seen, incidentally, that the various contributions of
this nonhuman realm to normal personality development which
I am enumerating here and in the remainder of this chapter,
imply in most instances an already achieved differentiation of
the ego from the nonhuman creatures or things under discussion.
The next few paragraphs, which focus upon the earlier era
preceding such differentiation-the era prior to the achievement
of true object reIations---are an exception to this.
Susanne K. Langer, in her stimulating book entitled, Philosophy
in a New Key-A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and
Art (91) points out how significant a role the nonhuman enviromnent plays in the human being's developing conception of
his seH. She suggests that, by reason of its relative simplicity and
stability-e-as contrasted to the confusing complexity and changea..
bility of the human beings in one's environment-it provides a kind
82
of backdrop vis-a-vis which the immature human individual can

arrive, via a process of projection, at an increasingly rich, and
increasingly strong, sense of personal identity:
. . . One of my earliest recollections is that chairs and tables
kept the same look, in a way that people did not, and that
I was awed by the sameness of that appearance.
To project feelings into outer objects is the first way of symbolizing) and thus conceiving those feelings . . . The conception of "self,' which is usually thought to mark the beginning of
actual memory, may possibly depend on this process of symbolically epitomizing our feelings [91a].
lJlw4j's
Similarly in her discussion of the symbolism extant among

primitive peoples, Langer points out how logical it is that many
of their gods appear in animal form; it is so much easier to see
this or that animal as the symbol of this or that moral quality,
whereas human personalities are confusingly complex, varied)
hard to generalize. Thus, she says, animal worship seems to have
preceded, almost everywhere, the evolution of higher religions.
"Before men can find these traits clearly in themselves they can
see them typified in animals" (91b) .
I believe that the normal infant and child is enabled to derive
such use from his nonhuman environment through finding his
particular nonhuman. environment to be relatively simple and
relatively stable, rather than overwhehningly complex and ever
shifting; and to be genuinely available to him, rather than walled
off from him by too many parental injunctions against his relating
to it, and parental distortions, conveyed to him by the parents,
concerning the nature of this environment.
Work with schizophrenic patients strongly suggests, for example, that the considerable percentage of these persons who as
children have had the experience of numerous changes in residence have been deprived thereby of what is, in normal living,
an important source of security for the child-the security of
dwelling, year after year, in familiar surroundings. I have repeatedly seen these patients struggling to remember where they
lived, at what age, struggling in a way which indicated that it
The Healthy lndiuidual
83
was very important for their own sense of personal identity, of

personal integration, to be able to establish such a continuity of
experience in their memory.
I believe that such feeling experiences of the adult schizophrenic patient have much similarity to the feelings which a
normal, very young child experiences upon finding himself in a
strange nonhuman environment. I am reminded here of a train trip
which my wife and I took with our son, then almost two years
old. The joy and relief which he evidenced when, upon our
taking him to the bathroom, my wife pulled out of a paper bag
his own familiar "potty-chair" and placed it on the unfamiliar
toilet seat, gave one to realize how much of a strain he had been
finding all this unfamiliarity, not only all the unfamiliar people
but the new and quite strange nonhuman environment of the
train.
Szalita-Pemow's article, "Further Remarks on the Pathogenesis
and Treatment of Schizophrenia" (152), contains the following
valuable comments which indicate how important it is, for the
normal development of a child, that his approach to his non..
human environment is not complicated by excessively great mis..
conceptions conveyed to him by his parents, concerning that
environment =
... the animal world and inanimate nature are often introduced to the child as a distorted animistic and fantastic world,
The literature read so delightedly by adults to children provides
amply for this distortion and indicates that the animistic beliefs
are still strong even among OUf adult contemporaries [152a].
A great proportion of schizophrenic patients, in my experience,
seem to view the world as being one of overwhelming complexity
and, often, vagueness, without any fundamental meaning which
emerges and which can be grasped. I do not mean to imply that
"normal" persons are entirely strangers to such a view of the
world; but, from what I have seen, the schizophrenic person has
much greater difficulty in this regard than does the nonnal
person. The kind of thing I am speaking of is seen most vividly
84
in paranoid schizophrenic patients who have not yet managed

to arrive at a pseudo meaning through the crystallization of a
relatively fixed delusional system, and in catatonic patients who,
usually interspersed through long periods of mutism, are able to
verbalize the very abstract and complicated thoughts about moralityand about the meaning of life in which they are, apparently,
often immersed. The thinking of hebephrenic patients, which is
characteristically highly fragmented, likewise shows these patients'
inability to grasp the basic realities of their life situation. This
general phenomenon may be illustrated by a quote from William
james's The Varieties of Religious Experience (85). Schizophrenic patients usually are not capable of so much articulateness
and objectivity as this; but this is, nonetheless, one among the
infinite varieties of "unreal" views of the world to which I am
referring:
"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance
by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the
sport of the catastrophes of the heavens," says Madame Ackermann; "when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and
incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure
chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It
seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I
shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dream-
ing''' [85d].
The conjecture I wish now to raise-without getting into

matters of psychiatric diagnosis such as hysteria and schizophrenia, and matters of psychiatric symptoms such as depersonalization and derealization-s-is this: a chronic inability, during
infancy and early childhood, to relate oneself to a relatively stable,
relatively realistically (rather than animistically) perceived, relativelysimple rather than overwhelmingly complex, world of inanimate objects may have much to do with one's inability now, in adult
life, to find fundamental, graspable realities in one's life-to find,
as it were, a tangible meaning in life. This is only a hypothesis;
for it to become a conclusive observation would require vastly
more data than I have accumulated, including data which are
The Health, Individual
85
quite beyond my position to obtain, from very long-range studies

of persons in their infancy and childhood, and in their adulthood.
But I do think it highly significant that many schizophrenic
patients who are bewildered as to the meaning of their lives have
had a bewildering early experience with not only the human
beings about them, but also with the nonhuman environment.
It strongly suggests to me that the relatedness of the infant
and the young child with, for example] his toys, his clothing, the
furniture of the home, the house itself, and so on, has much
greater repercussions, for good or ill, in adult life than has been
noted so far in psychoanalytic theory.
(2) The second main point I wish to present is that the nonhuman environment of the infant and the young child, through
its being in general more simple and stable and manipulable than
the human environment, provides him with a kind of practiceground in which he can develop capacities which will be useful
to him in his interpersonal relationships.
The child's toys, for example, being without the capacity for
inner-directed physical movement and being without any capacity for thoughts and feelings so that the child need not concern
himself about the toys' "own responses" to him, are much more
manageable than are the human beings about him. In his play
with the toys he can develop his capacities for physical dexterity,
for imagination, for sequential thought, for discrimination, and
so on-abilities which he will need in the more preponderantly
interpersonal years of his life which lie ahead. The little girlleams
various things about baby care from her taking care of her doll,
so much more manageable than the real human baby which she
will some day be caring for. The little boy, through his play with
his miniature and therefore relatively manageable airplanes and
boats and automobiles and tools of various sorts, learns some of
the rudiments of knowledge and skill which will be useful to him
later on in the world of men.
One finds instances in adult life, also, where elements of the
nonhuman environment constitute a kind of practice-ground for
the development of a relatedness which ean be eanied over, Iater,
into relatedness with other human beings. In my work with
86
neurotic patients, for example, I have seen upon a number of

occasions something which probably occurs not infrequently in
"normal" living: a childless couple, through learning to care fOT
plants and animal pets in the home, help to prepare themselves
for the later rearing of children. Some excerpts from one of my
analytic hours with a thirty-three-year-old obsessive-compulsive
man will serve as an illustration of this. He had had a very lonely
boyhood, during which he had experienced little of any warm
and active closeness with his aloof and rather unmasculine father..
The patient had been married about three years prior to this
particular analytic hour. The marriage had contained, from the
first, much of conflict and grim unhappiness; but during the
most recent several months the addition of a pet dog to the home
had helped appreciably to bring more life and joy into the situation. At this present time, the wife was very early in her first
pregnancy, and the patient had been voicing doubt about his
capacity to measure up, as a father. The following excerpt from
his verbalized ruminations shows something of the very considerable value which the dog was having, in this regard, for himself
and his wife. I have italicized certain passages:
Things are going along pretty smoothly [he began, in a tone
of confidence which was unusual for him; he then said, of his
wife:] She made the remark this morning that if the Boy Wizard
[their name for me] made me more cocky than I am, something
would have to be done--which was very pleasing to me, particularly in the light of so much in the past that was uncertain
And the more I think about the child . . . , the more I think
it'd be sort of fun [slowly and thoughtfully}--uh--and I think
I'd sort of be proud of being father to a cherub-I think it'd be
sort of exciting--certainly a rather new experience-uh-and,
uh--I certainly feel that if we're going to have children we
certainly oughta have them now and not wait, because I think
the older ya get, the less adaptable ya are, and the more trouble
children are. I think the chiId-I know it'll be a good thing for
my wife, who doesn't have enough to occupy herself. . . . I think
she'll be a good mother [tone of conviction]. And I keep thinking
The Health)' Individual
87
about it's being a boy-and I keep wondering, "What the hell

would you teach a boy about life and what life is about?H-I
think I could probably do that-I suppose ltd have a tendency to
overstress those things that were lacking in my OYl1l early lifeuh-and I suppose I should be on guard not to overstress themI feel that the setup we have out there [in a remodeled farmhouse]
would be very conducive and very efficient for having a child,
having childrenCertainly if the pleasure uie'ue gotten out of this animal is an~
faint indication-it has been a pleasure" much less of course {than
that of having children], but Q, mutual responsibilit,y [said in a
tone of solid satisfaction]-even when we'd gotten pretty far
apart in terms of our feelings toward each other" the dog always
had tJ kind of bridging eDect--uh-I find that some of the things
that used to irritate me about my wife, they don't seem to irritate me so much- ... the same things [i.e., things which they
used to say to one another in contempt] are said, but they're said
in a very different way-it's almost as if they're said on a basis
of esteem rather than scorn- . . .
I have italicized, for special emphasis, that portion of his

remarks which has to do with the dog, specifically. But it should
be noted how integrally woven are these remarks, about the
animal pet, with all his other remarks which show a developing
attitude of pleasure and confidence about his marriage in general
and about the prospect of the arrival of the baby.
( 3 ) In manifold wa ys, the nonhuman environment of the
infant and child offers relief from the tensions, and satisfaction
for the hungers, which arise in his life among other human beings.
He is often able to find in it peace, stability, and companionship at
times when his interpersonal relationships are filled with anxiety
and loneliness; and he can often vent upon it various feelings
which he cannot release toward the human beings in his environ-
ment.
Many a child has been able to find, in his relationship with
an animal pet which his parents have obtained-t-or at least have
allowed him to obtain-a kind of reliable friendliness and companionship which helps him through the times when the parents
88
themselves are not able to give him the love and understanding
he needs.
Since this general point has been touched upon before, particularly in the references to the articles by Stevenson (146) and by
Heiman (73) J I shall not elaborate upon it here. But I refer the interested reader to Margaret Mead's (104c,d) description of child
rearing among the Arapesh, a primitive Australian tribe, for an extreme example of suppression of interpersonally expressed aggression, coupled with almost unlimited freedom on the child's part to
vent his interpersonally engendered rage upon the nonhuman
objects about him. The house in which the child lives is no
tabooed world of adults' treasures which he is forbidden to touch,
and when angry he is allowed to destroy nonhuman objects with
a freedom which goes far beyond the mere door slamming and
other relatively mild outlets which are time-honored modes of
venting frustration in our own culture. Mead's description of the
Arapesh culture gives one to realize vividly how important to
child rearing in our culture is the question of whether or not the
child is relatively free to release "interpersonally tabooed" feelings
toward his nonhuman environment.
(4 ) Closely related to the foregoing point, the nonhuman
environment can be seen to provide a milieu, again of what
might be called a pure-culture variety as contrasted to the interpersonal milieu, in which the child can become aware of his own
capabilities (referring here to physical strength and dexterity, ingenuity, and various intellectual abilities) and of the limitations
upon those capabilities. In his relatedness to this environment he
has opportunities to see, in a particularly clear-cut, realistic fashion,
that he is in various ways powerful, but not omnipotent .
Patients' memories of such childhood experiences may be most
refreshing to hear. One neurotic man, after almost four years
of difficult analytic work during which he had been dealing with
chronic and intense anxiety, despair, cynicism, and neurotic
competitiveness, finally made contact, so to speak, with healthy
areas of his late childhood. In one particular analytic session}
he began expressing pleased recollections of how he used to love
to climb on the cliffs along a river near his home. He said with
89
pleasure and self-confidence in his tone, "It was a testing of myself. . . . It was not so much a competing with anybody else as
a seeing what I could do myself, and it was fun." About such
childhood experiences there seems to be a certain unspoiled
quality, a quality of the child's coming to know his abilities
simply and undisguisedly and most intimately.
(5) N ow I come to a point which has to do with adolescence;
I shall discuss this point in some detail because it is not only
important but also, as far as I have been able to ascertain, entirely neglected so far in psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature.
I believe that one of the major phenomena of adolescence, one
of its deepest meanings, one of the greatest achievements of this
phase of human living, is the maturing person's becoming committed to his status as a human being. Not only does the boy
become a man and the girl become a woman, but each becomes
more deeply human, and aware and accepting of his or her
human status vis-a-vis the nonhuman environment, than had
been true before. In this transitional period, he tums his greatest
interest from the world of Nature, and of other nonhuman things,
to the world of his fellow human beings.
This change in orientation is required of the adolescent by
reason of his developing sexual needs, which can find really
adequate gratification only in a relatedness to a fellow human
being, and by his socially fostered yearning and ambition to
establish himself as a husband and father in the case of the
adolescent boy, or as a wife and mother in the case of the
adolescent girl. The turning is made possible at this time by
reason of sufficient development, by now, of various powers-sexual, muscular, intellectual, educational--so that he or she is
enabled to carve out a place for himself or herself in the world
of other human beings, which could not be made earlier.
In working with patients in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, we
have an opportunity to see at first hand the patient going through
this process, belatedly-this process which normally takes place
during adolescence. I shall describe briefly my experience with
a twenty-eight-year-old man, in analysis for a severe obsessivecompulsive neurosis. as an example of what I mean here.
90
This man had had a lonely childhood, throughout which he

suffered from severe feelings of unacceptability and inferiority.
Until the age of six he spent a great deal of time playing with
his toys in the attic of his home. He vividly recalled, during his
analysis, the fear which he had felt upon "leaving the attic,"
then, upon being required to start grammar school. Although he
did extremely well academically throughout grammar school,
high school, and college, he failed to establish normally secure
and satisfying relations with other boys and girls.. For example,
throughout grammar school he spent each recess by himself in
a comer of the school library, feeling afraid of and depised by
his classmates who were playing together on the playground
outside; in college, although he went through the motions of
doing a good deal of conventional helling around, he continued
to feel inwardly as apart from others as ever. He had sought
analysis because of the fact that certain compulsive rituals were
interfering seriously with his work as a Government lawyer.
As the analysis progressed, it became evident that this man
had never really, as yet, left the attic, in terms of his actual
feeling-orientation toward other persons. For a long time, he
persisted in dealing with other human beings much as if they
were inanimate objects; either he felt, at infrequent times of
moderate euphoria, that he had the ability to manipulate them
to his own greater glory, as he had taken pleasure in childhood
with marshaling large numbers of toy animals, or he felt-as he
did most of the time-that people were discouragingly and in..
furiatingly large mechanical obstacles in his path. He was quite
oblivious to the sensitivities, the feeling-capacities, of other human
beings. It was only after several months of analysis that he was
able to allow me to participate at all, at a verbal level, in the
analytic work; prior to that time, if I were at all persistent about
saying anything, it seemed to threaten him with anxiety of nearpanic proportions.
Over the course of four years of analysis, this man eventually
came to marry; became a father; moved into a closer, more
warm and alive relatedness with men and women with whom he
worked; and became concomitantly much more relaxed, spon-
91
taneous, and participative with me in the analytic relationship.

His obsessive rituals, which at the beginning of analysis had been
threatening to isolate him most profoundly from other people,
had nearly disappeared.
He left the analysis at a time when, despite the gains which I
have mentioned, there was much reason for me to feel that he
was at the threshold of not only consolidating these gains, but of
obtaining still deeper ones. He was still a person who was
troubled with much self-doubt, neurotic competitiveness, and
guardedness toward other people. But there was one most funda..
mental achievement which we had accomplished together: he
had left the attic. I felt sure that whatever interpersonal difficulties lay ahead for him, he was safely committed to really living
in the world, as a human being among other human beings.
A most beautiful expression of this general shift in orientation,
this shift from the nonhuman environment toward one's fellow
human beings, is to be found in Wordsworth's poem, Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintem Abbey, On Revisiting the
Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798 (167). The
poet, recalling the hours he had spent, in bygone years, among
the cliffs and hills and streams his eye once again surveys, recalls
that
. . . Nature then
To me was all in all. . . .
and he phrases incomparably the shift in orientation which he
has undergone in the interim:
. . . That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity" . . .
92
The Nonhuman Envi,onment
As Fountain (43) phrases it in a recent paper entitled, "Adolescent into Adult: An Inquiry," the adolescent
.. becomes to some degree "responsible" for his fellowman...
This shift in predominant orientation, in the course of adolescence, from non-human to human, seems to me to be at the
heart of the "idealistic crisis" of adolescence which Inhelder and
Piaget (82b) describe, a crisis during which the adolescent feels
himself called upon to reform a world of which he is himself the
center; following this crisis there is
. . the return to reality which is the path from adolescence
to the true beginnings of adulthood.
It may well be that the adolescent's urge to reform mankind,

to whom he feels a newly deepened sense of belonging, springs in
part from his projecting, upon his fellow human beings, the residua of his erstwhile identification with the nonhuman world:
he feels called on to save them from the nonhuman status (rom
which he himself, in actuality, has only now fully emerged. I find
that this shift in orientation is applicable, too, to Erikson's (37a)
concept of the "identity crisis') which occurs in adolescence. In
Chapter VIII I shall present a number of clinical examples which
indicate that such identity crises, such conflicts as to whether to
be this or that or the other kind of human being are founded
upon a deeper-lying ambivalence as to whether to be human or
nonhuman.
W. H. Hudson's classic novel, Green Mansions (81), the
story of a love affair between a young man and the bird-girl
Rima, whom he finds in the tropical forest of South America,
is an entrancingly lovely portrayal of the transition state in which,
I think, an adolescent youth exists. The love of the protagonist,
Abel, toward the bird-girl is still largely love for Nature; Rima
never emerges as a fiesh-and-blood human being distinct from
the Nature which surrounds her. I shall mention later something
of the psychodynamics which I believe to be at work in the
typical adolescent love affair of which Hudson's story is a most
extraordinarily beautiful example. But first I shall present some
The Health'j Individual
93
passages from this story, passages which must be somewhat

lengthy in order to convey the flavor of poetic beauty, of ethereal
love activated by a new-found and wondrous suspense and excitement, which Hudson captures in an incomparable fashion.
John Galsworthy, who in 1915 wrote a preface to this novel,
termed Hudson the most distinguished naturalist living, and the
most valuable writer of the age. And of this novel, Galsworthy
wrote that it "immortalizes) I think, as passionate a love of
beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man" (81 a ) .
The popularity of this story over the past forty years, among
a host of readers, is a fact which constitutes in itself some evi..
dence that Hudson has struck a chord that lies within many persons of our culture. I think this story can be truly said to give
eloquent voice to the adolescent in each of us.
The first passage which I shall quote is a description of Abel's
first contact with Rima, in which he only hears her; he does not
yet see her:
an
After that tempest of motion and confused noises the silence of

the forest seemed very profound; but before I had been resting
many moments it was broken by a low strain of exquisite birdmelody, wonderfully pure and expressive, unlike any musical
sound I had ever heard before. It seemed to issue from a thick
cluster of broad leaves of a creeper only a few yards from where
I sat. With my eyes fixed on this green hiding-place I waited with
suspended breath for its repetition, wondering whether any civilized
being had ever listened to such a strain before. Surely not, I
thought, else the fame of so divine a melody would long ago have
been noised abroad.. I thought of the rialejo, the celebrated organbird, or flute-bird, and of the various ways in which hearers are
affected by it. To some its warbling is like the sound of a beau...
tiful mysterious instrnment, while to others it seems like the singing of a blithe-hearted child with a highly melodious voice. I had
often heard and listened with delight to the singing of the rialejo
in the Guayana forests, but this song, or musical phrase, was
utterly unlike it in character. It was pure, more expressive, softer
--so low that at a distance of forty yards I could hardly have
heard it. But its greatest charm was its resemblance to the human
94
voiee--a voice purified and brightened to something almost

angelic. Imagine, then, my impatience as I sat there straining
my sense, my deep disappointment when it was not repeated! I
rose at length very reluctantly and slowly began making my way
back; but when I had progressed about thirty yards, again the
sweet voice sounded just behind me, and turning quickly I stood
still and waited. The same voice, but not the same song-not the
same phrase; the notes were different, more varied and rapidly
enunciated, as if the singer had been more excited. The blood
rushed to my heart as I listened; my nerves tingled with a strange
new delight, the rapture produced by such music heightened by a
sense of mystery. Before many moments I heard it again, not
rapid now, but a soft warbling, lower than at first, infinitely sweet
and tender, sinking to lisping sounds that soon ceased to be
audible; the whole having lasted as long as it would take me to
repeat a sentence of a dozen words. This seemed the singer's
farewell to me, for I waited and listened in vain to hear it repeated .. [8Ib].
4
It seems to me significant that, as these foregoing and subsequent passages show, Rima emerges from-although never
wholly---the surrounding Nature of which she is part; and Abel's
love for her emerges from his basic love of Nature. I think that
here may be a somewhat more specific portrayal of what takes
place in the transition which adolescence involves; that is, it
may be not so much that the adolescent's predominant emotional
orientation shifts from the nonhuman environment toward the
world of human beings, but rather that from his loving relatedness to Nature and to other elements of his nonhuman environment there emerges a loving relatedness, now the primary focus
of his emotional life, to other human beings. The intensity of
Abel's love for Nature, inseparably commingled with his love for
the still-unseen possessor of the birdlike voice, is explicitly shown
in various passages which need not be reproduced here. It is clear
that even Nature became more poignantly lovely and meaningful
to Abel as his love for Rima grew; thus we find the implication
that one needs to mature at least to adolescence in order to ex-
95
perience the depths of loving relatedness with either Nature 01

human natu"e.
In the following description of Abel's first view of Rima, we
find that she is still--though now visible-as much a part of
Nature as before. Note here that her disappearance, after her
being briefly in view, is "as if she had melted away into the
verdure."
I had not been watching her more than three seconds before
the bird [with which Rima was playing], with a sharp, creaking
little chirp, flew up and away in sudden alarm; at the same
moment she turned and saw me through the light leafy screen.
But although catching sight of me thus suddenly, she did not
exhibit alarm like the bird; only her eyes) wide open, with a surprised look in them, remained immovably fixed on my face. And
then slowly, imperceptibly-for I did not notice the actual movement, so gradual and smooth it was, like the motion of a cloud of
mist which changes its form and place) yet to the eye seems not to
have moved-she rose to her knees, to her feet, retired, and with
face still towards me, and eyes fixed on mine, finally disappeared,
going as if she had melted away into the verdure. The leafage
was there occupying the precise spot where she had been a moment before-the feathery foliage of an acacia shrub, and stems
and broad, arrow-shaped leaves of an aquatic plant, and slim,
drooping fern fronds, and they were motionless, and seemed not
to have been touched by something passing through them. She
had gone, yet I continued still, bent almost double, gazing fixedly
at the spot where I had last seen her, my mind in a strange
condition, possessed by sensations which were keenly felt and yet
contradictory. So vivid was the image left on my brain that she
still seemed to be actually before my eyes; and she was not there,
nor had been, for it was a dream, an illusion, and no such being
existed, or could exist, in their gross world: and at the same time
I knew that she had been there-that imagination was powerless
to conjure up a form so exquisite [Blc],
When, later on in the story, Abel is expressing his love to Rima,

his language is basically like that which every adolescent employs,
96
in speech or thought, to express the beauty of his beloved: he

compares her with, and often likens her to, the elements of
Nature.
Concerning the psychodynamic processes involved in Abel's
love for Rima, which as I say may be looked upon as the prototype of adolescent love in general) one finds in the story various
evidences-too long and too numerous to include here in their
entirety-that the following salient factors are at work here.
First, as the following brief passage suggests, it appears that
Abel's love of Nature is akin to the child's love for his mother:
Ah that return to the forest where Rima dwelt, after so anxious

a day, when the declining sun shone hotly still, and the green
woodland shadows were so grateful! . . . I likened myself to a
child that, startled at something it had seen while out playing in
the sun, flies to its mother to feel her caressing hand on its cheek
and forget its tremors. And describing what I felt in that way, I
was a little ashamed and laughed at myself; nevertheless the
feeling was very sweet. At that moment Mother and Nature
seemed one and the same thing .. [Old].
Secondly, Abel's conception of Rima as being so much a part

of Nature, Nature which itself is conceived by him in an idealized form, entirely beautiful and innocent and unspoiled, appears
to be a function of his struggling-and here, still, I have primarily in mind the typical adolescent whom Abel personifiesto preserve his love for Rima as an ideal love, without any
"taint" of lust, hostility, cannibalistic impulses, and so forth.
There are many hints, in the story, that such a process is at work.
For example, the relationship between Abel and Rima never
involves sexual passion, frankly felt as such. Also, Rima, who is
adamantly opposed to the killing of any of the forest creatures,
reacts to Abel with repugnance for a time after he has yielded
to his hunger for meat and eaten some of the cooked flesh of a
coati-mundi.
Rima is finally killed by savages, who set fire to a gigantic tree
in which they have trapped her. Following this, Abel, revealing
a capacity for murderous hostility which he had managed to keep
The HeGlthy Individutd
91
quite apart from his love for Rima while she was living, vengefully kill~ the leader of these savages and incites a tribe of their
enemies to murder many of them, Galsworthy, in his foreword
to the book (8Ie), is, I believe, quite correct when he says that
the story "symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the
attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life-that impossible
perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree
and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl."
From this point of view, then, it appears that the adolescent's
particular way of regarding his loved one, as being a part of an
idealized Nature, is a function of his unconscious effort to keep
his love for her "pure," free from a variety of emotions-e-some of
which were mentioned above-which are not in keeping with his
ideals. The child struggles to maintain much the same conception of the mother, I think, as the adolescent struggles to preserve concerning his loved one. The successful resolution of the
conflicts of adolescence constitutes the youth's becoming a man,
then, in terms of his integrating such idealism with his other
emotional capacities which he comes to accept now, at Jastcapacities for lust, murderous feeling, and so on. His erstwhile
perception of his loved one) as a being who is very much part of
an idealized Nature, surely involved projection-projection of
an unconscious view of himself as fonning such an integral part
of Nature. It would seem, then, that the successful dealing with
the adolescent phase of maturation involves one's relinquishment
of such a view of one's self or of any other human being.
Before leaving Hudson's novel I shall quote one final passage
from it, and briefly discuss the psychological significance which
I find in this passage. This, now, is after Rima's death, and after
also Abel's killing of the leader of the savage tribe and the murder of many members of that tribe by a tribe of their enemies,
whom Abel had incited against them. It is evidently in a state
of repressed grief and repressed remorse that Abel now experiences his existence as
dwelling alone on a vast stony plain in everlasting twilight,
where there was no motion, nor any sound; but all things, even
t
98
trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone. And in that place I had sat
for many a thousand years) drawn up and motionless, with stony
fingers clasped round my legs, and forehead resting on my knees;
and there would I sit, unmoving, immovable, for many a thousand years to come-I, no longer, I~ in a universe where she was
not, and God was not [81].
Here it is as if Abel has lost not only his sense of identity as a

human being but, beyond that, his sense of identity as being a
manifestation of animate Nature-this latter sense of identity
which, I believe, the child attains before it manages to attain,
particularly through the successful transition of the adolescent
phase of maturation, his sense of identity as a full-fledged human
being. Here in the case of Abel, it is as if the adolescent love
experience has met with such disaster that Abel's sense of per
sonal identity regresses, and with it his perception of the world
about him, until he experiences himself as an inanimate thing
in an inanimate world.
Incidentally, we know that some psychotic patients will sit or
lie, for days on end, as much like stone statues as Abel is depicted
here. I have worked with one schizophrenic patient who expressed to me the unmistakable conviction that she had been "a
statue myself, over and over." She said this in the course of
asserting her definite belief that certain well-known statues which
she had visited in nearby Washington were really people, "put
into concrete," and she protested to me that if only the doctors
here "would go around stripping statues," freeing the persons entombed within them, we would then be doing good, in place of
our present evil work. A less deeply ill person can experience
this figuratively, as did the patient of one of my colleagues who
spoke of his own "crust of hatred," for example; but I do not
doubt that the most profoundly regressed persons experience
this literally, as did Abel in the story.
The perception of the nonhuman environment as being
blended with the interpersonal, which is so prominent a theine
in Green Mansions (here I refer to the portrayal of Rima as a
person who merges with Nature) J has, I think, a special appeal
99
for us. The following passage from Walden (154) provides us

with a variation upon this same theme. Here, instead of another
individual person's being perceived as blended with the non...
human environment, it is mankind collectively-as represented
by church beIls-whom Thoreau so perceives:
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,
Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint,
sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the
wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the
horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound
heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the
same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to
our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in
this case a melody which the air had. strained, and which had
conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of
the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and
echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original
sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely
a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly
the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by
a wood-nymph [154d].
As I have already indicated, it appears that a new source of

energy, and with it a new and intense need, which both enable
and require the adolescent to grow on beyond such a perception,
is constituted by his new-found genital powers and needs. That
is, these both help and require him to perceive himself and other
persons as truly differentiated from, despite however many similarities with, the rest of Nature. But in Green Mansions Abel, I
believe, fails to carry through to this final differentiation of himself as a full-fledged human being" Those persons who, like Abel,
fail to make this final achievement of normal adolescence apparently continue throughout their lives to identify themselves
more with Nature than with mankind. Toward Nature they experience a passionately close kinship, toward mankind they have
a misanthropic attitude; their fellow men seem alien to them.
The Mature Person's

Attitude Toward His
Nonhuman Environment
CHAPTER
Not until I had been working upon, and thinking about, this overall subject of the nonhuman environment for many months did I
come to believe that there is perhaps one attitude toward that
environment which can be said to be characteristic of the emotionally mature human being. For a number of reasons one is
hesitant to postulate any such single attitude. First} such a postulation tends to smack of undue rigidity, on the very face of it.
Secondly, the nonhuman environment is so very complex as to
give one great reason for pause here; one thinks, for example,
of how varied may be the psychological meanings of a forest to}
in tum, a Iumbennan, a reaI-estate dealer, a naturalist, an artist,
and a casual stroller. Thirdly, we know that emotional maturation in general involves from childhood onward not a progressive
simplifying of emotions, not a progressive loss of capacity to ex-
101
perience varying emotions, but rather a growing ability to experience ever more rich and complex ones.
My colleague Joseph H. Smith has made to me the following
valuable suggestion: the very fact that it proves so difficult to
define the mature person's attitude toward the nonhuman environment is itself of deep significance; it may well be, then, that
maturity involves a readiness to face the question of what is one's
position about this great portion-by far the greatest portion-s-of
one's total environment, rather than fleeing to some pat explananon (such as primitive peoples' regarding this environment in an
animistic light, or modem-day psychiatry's predominantly assuming it to be only a frame for psychologically meaningful human
living, rather than an-in many respects-integral part of such
living). True maturity probably involves a large, lifelong measure
of open interest in, of seeking and questioning, the meanings
which this facet of one's life holds.
But I believe that there is indeed one basic attitude which is of
general validity here) one central emotional orientation to which
the mature human being returns, vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, however widely and richly his feelings in this regard
may fluctuate, over however wide a range, in the varying circumstances' of his everyday life. One can think of this basic attitude as a finn island upon which man grounds himself while
directing his gaze into the encircling sea of meanings, more or
less difficult of discernment and some no doubt inscrutable,
which reside in this area of human existence.
This basic emotional orientation can be expressed in one
word: relatedness.
By "relatedness' I mean, on the one hand, a sense of intimate
kinship, a psychological concomitant to the structural kinship
which, as I have described in Chapter I, exists between man and
the various ingredients of his nonhuman environment-structural
kinship in terms of physiology, anatomy, atomic structure, and
so on, as well as kinship with respect to the evolutional history of
mankind and the biological fate of the individual human being
(the inescapable destiny of our physical body to become a part
of the nonhuman environment after our death).
102
This experience of relatedness involves on the other hand, and

simultaneously, a maintenance of our own sense of individuality
as a human being, a knowing that, however close our kinship, on
however multiple levels, to the nonhuman environment, we are
not at one with it. That is, although the mature person does not
shield himself from experiencing a sense of real and immediate
kinship to, for example, a dog or a tree or an inanimate object,
he does not shield himself either from the awareness that he is
inescapably human. He does not relinquish his ego boundaries;
he is not deluded into the conviction that he can be in union with
nonhuman elements of Nature or with any other ingredients of
the nonhuman environment. He knows that he is irrevocably,
irreversibly a member of the human species, and can rejoice as
wen as despair in this knowledge of his unique humanness. In
this regard then, the sense of relatedness which the mature person
experiences toward the nonhuman environment is qualitatively
different from mystical experience; the latter involves a loss of
ego boundaries which, if it occurs at all in mature human experience, is, I believe, atypical and in itself a mark of immaturity
rather than of maturity. Martin Buber (20) has pointed out that
"entering into relationship" presupposes a "primal setting at a
distance," and when one applies this valuable concept to man's
relatedness with the nonhuman environment, we see that in order
for him to enjoy the mature relatedness with it which I am discussing here} he must first have become able to "put it at a distance"-he must have achieved a recognition of his separateness
from it.
It can be seen, then} that the relatedness to which I refer is
different from the adolescent's orientation toward the nonhuman
environment, which was discussed in the immediately preceding
chapter. The adolescent has not yet fully accepted his human
status, his unbridgeable apartness from the nonhuman environment. He has emerged partially from his environment; in con...
trast, the infant is totally unaware of any distinction between
himself and this environment. The mature human being has
achieved a full emergence, a full realization and acceptance of
103
his status as a human being; in fact this is, I am convinced, one

of the significant earmarks of emotional maturity.
As I have stressed repeatedly, however, adult living involves
an unceasing struggle to maintain, and ever more deeply realize
and develop, one's humanity vis-a-vis the surrounding nonhuman
world. We are reminded of the subtle persistence of nondifferentiation between ego and outer world when we read, for example, the following passage by Erikson (34):
. . . men easily identify women with the wishes which they
stimulate. If they learn to have contempt for "lower" drives
(and their pregenital componen ts), they may also have contempt
for women so far as they are the objects of their wishes.
This failure to differentiate between the drive and the object
of the drive calls to mind Piaget's finding that there is a persistent tendency for the child to confuse his own response to an
object-whether the object be human or nonhuman-with the

object itself. Moreover, since the phenomenon which Erikson
describes is certainly not uncommon in our culture, the subtle
persistence of subjective oneness with nonhuman as well as
human objects, in so-called adult living, would seem highly likely.
Later on, in this chapter) I shall describe this relatedness in
greater detail and shall give some examples of it. But before
doing so I shall deal, en bloc, with all the variations upon, or
subsidiary components of, this emotional theme, to the extent
that I have become aware of these. These are, that is, various
other kinds of feelings which the mature human being may experience vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, feelings which are
concomitant to this basic relatedness-orientation; perhaps one
may best think of these as feeling-components which contribute
to the rich complexity of the basic sense of relatedness.
I have already expressed (on page 55) my conviction that all
those phenomena which are to be described in the section concerning the nonhuman environment as experienced by the psy..
chotic or neurotic individual can be found, with only quantitative
differences, in the experience of the healthy individual. Not
104
to repeat the phraseology I used there, I presume that there is no

human being so mature, so secure in his own sense of his hu..
manness and, at the same time, so secure in his sense of kinship
with the nonhuman environment, that he does not at times
struggle with the "beast" in himself, alarmed at its unhuman
ferocity; or yearn to relinquish his human status and be able to
be an untroubled dog or a tree; or become so involved in the
problems of human living that he feels quite out of -touch t
really, with the nourishing ground of Nature; or enjoy his moments of animal grace with much the same pleasurable sensation
of being, indeed, an animal, as is experienced with full conviction
by the manic patient; and so on.
These feeling-variations, or feeling-components, which I
shall discuss in the next several pages will include: man's sense
of inner conflict concerning his awareness that he is a part of
Nature and yet apart from all the rest of nonhuman Nature; and
the two great ingredients of this inner conflict-man's "earning
to become wholly at one with his nonhuman environment, and
his contrasting anxiety lest he become so and thus lose his own
unique humanness.
It seems inevitable that the human being-even the mature
human being-will experience varied and conflictual feelings
about his nonhuman environment, for mankind's position in regard to this environment is existentially-innateIy-a conflietual
position. He is grounded in Nature, and yet is unbridgeably apart
from it. The history of mankind's arrival into such a state is
portrayed in the following words by L. L. Whyte. In his book,
The Next Development in Man, Whyte says that the following
change transpired in man's psychological orientation during the
period between 3000 B.C. and the opening of the Christian era:
The outward-looking pagan became introspective; man became
aware of moral conflict, aware of himself, and aware of his own
separation from nature. Knowledge of conflict led to self-consciousness and to the sense of guilt. Man fell from innocence. . . .
universalism was achieved at the cost of inner dissociation. The
struggle of the spirit against nature had begun [163a].
105
This conftictual position of mankind vis-a-vis Nature has been

most eloquently expressed by Erich Fromm. In The Sane Society
(55 ), he develops the basic concepts of what he calls "humanistic psychoanalysis," of which the main thesis is that
. . . the basic passions of man are not rooted in his instinctive
needs, but in the specific conditions of human existence, in the
need to find a new relatedness to man and nature after having
lost the primary relatedness of the pre-human stage [55b].
Fromm describes this innately conflictual situation in forceful terms:

Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the "harmony"
which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made

man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part
of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them,
yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a
part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all
creatures [55c].
The necessity to find euer- new solutions [or the contradictions
in his existence, to find ever-higher f01.m6 of unit" with nature}

his fellowmen and himself, is the source of 411 prychic forces
which motivate man, of all his passions, affects and a nxieties.
[55d; Fromm's italics].

Birth . . . , in the conventional meaning of the word, is only
the beginning of birth in the broader sense. The whole life of
the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we mould be fully born, when we die-although it
is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to
emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into
a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to
return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security. In the
history of the individual, and of the race, the progressive tendency
has proven to be stronger, yet the phenomena of mental illness
106
and the regression of the human race to positions apparently relinquished generations ago, show the intense struggle which accompanies each new act of birth [55e].
I believe that the various subsidiary reactions which the

mature human being experiences vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment, the variations from his basic emotional orientation of
relatedness to this environment) derive from mankind's conftictual situation, which is so well described by Fromm. Thus it
is not surprising that one can find innumerable evidences of a
widespread yearning, on the part of man, for full union with
Nature, and on the other hand, likewise innumerable evidences of
man's continuing anxiety lest he lose altogether his human status
through just such a union.
The appeal which the experience of a subjective union with
Nature holds for man-even for the emotionally mature human
being, although I very much doubt, as I have said, that this is
more than an atypical ingredient of his over-all orientation
toward the nonhuman environment-is well conveyed by descriptions of mystical experiences. William James's The Varieties
of Religious Experience (85) contains many accounts by persons
who have undergone religious conversions of a basically mystical
sort. The following is an example of these accounts:
UI remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top,
where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there
was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
I t was deep calIing unto deep-the deep that my own struggle
had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep
without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who
had made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and
sorrow, and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the
perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things
around me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy
and exultation remained . . ." [8Se].
Deeply pleasurable though such experiences are, and however

essential they may be to normal personality development dur-
107
ing childhood and adolescence, I believe that they are not the
characteristic mature orientation toward the nonhuman en..
vironment. Portrayed in the above account is an experience of
dissolution of ego boundaries, a loss of identity as an individual
human being and a perception of oneself, in an infantile..
omnipotent fashion, as being at one with the totality of one's
environment. Such experiences, which as I say hold great appeal
even for mature human beings, are very different from the
experience of relatedness to the nonhuman environment which I
have described. In this latter experience, by contrast, the person
feels a sense of real and close kinship, but does not lose his
awareness of his own individuality; that awareness is, instead,
deepened.
It would be a major error to assert, however, that experiences
of subjective unity with the nonhuman environment have no
place, ever, in the mature person's living. Such experiences may
mark turning points of the most essential importance following
crises in our lives, crises into which we have been cast by
tragically great losses or major frustrations, crises in which we
feel utterly cut off from the outside world by our grief, despair,
anxiety. We may find restitution following such crises by undergoing transitory regression to very early ego states in which we
re-establish contact with the world about us through feeling,
initially, wholly at one with it, as we once felt in infancy. This
process is qualitatively identical, I believe, with the process of
recovery-through-phylogenetic-regl'ession, which I shall describe,
in a later chapter, as taking place with some schizophrenic
patients. Such experiences of oneness with the totality of our
environment may also form a vital phase of creativity, as I
shall shortly describe.
But I believe that one's orientation toward the nonhuman
environment is nearly as far removed from mature reality
relatedness when one is in an infantile-omnipotent state of feeling
at one with the universe, a universe saturated with God, as is that
of the melancholiac who perceives his nonhuman environment
as being saturated with evil. The former experience, however
joyous, is, I believe, basically an infantile experience of sensing
108
oneself to be in union with the Good Mother, an experience no

more mature than that of the melancholiac who feels himself
to be in union with the Bad Mother. One can see the similarity
here in passages from James's book:
When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or
religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration
of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine
upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usual1y a similar
change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks
remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath
is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with ..
[S5g].
The distortion in psychotically depressed patients' perceptions

of their nonhuman environment is, I think, not greater in
degree than, however different in quality from, that of individuals
who have undergone religious conversions such as are portrayed
in the following accounts:
God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person.
I feel his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer
harmony with his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel
him in the sunshine or rain , .. [85h].
God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer
to me than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and
have my being [85i].
I have devoted considerable space here to a discussion of the

psychological significance of mystical experiences, as expressive
of man's-s-even, at times, mature man's-s-yeaming for oneness
with the nonhuman environment. One may protest that, however
well the above descriptions of such experiences depict such a
yeaming, mystical experiences-whether religious or otherwise
-are, after all, not a prominent aspect of present-day Western
culture, But a second fashion in which this yearning is manifested is considerably closer to home: the fascination which
109
literature of a oneness-with-nature variety, or a close.. relatednesswith-nature variety, holds for vast numbers of people in our
culture.
Green Mansions (8t) is such a work of literature. Another
prime example is Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us (23).
Certainly a significant portion of the appeal of this beautiful
account, whose popularity is attested by the fact that it remained
at or near the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists for something
like two years, resides in this theme which permeates the book:
man's intimate kinship with Nature-with the inorganic as well
as the organic elements of the Nature which surrounds him. The
following passages, even when taken from the contextual pattern
of the book of which they are an integral part, vividly show
this -theme:
When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life
carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage
which they passed on to their children and which even today
links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish,
amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammaI---each
of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements
sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same
proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day,
untold millions of years ago" when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the
water of the sea. . . . And as life itself began in the sea, so each
of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his
mother's womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development
repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing
inhabitants of a water world to creatures able to live on land . . .
Eventually man . . . found his way back to the sea . . He
could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales
had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity
and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and
investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter
it mentally and imaginatively . .
And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own
terms. He cannot control or change the ocean . . . The sense
110
of all these things comes to him most clearly in the course

of a long ocean voyage, when he watches day after day the receding rim of the horizon, ridged and furrowed by waves; when
at night he becomes aware of the earth's rotation as the stars pass
overhead; or when, alone in this world of water and sky, he
feels the loneliness of his earth in space. And then, as never on
land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet
dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of
the all-encircling sea [23a].
Another recent book whose fascination emanates, to a significant extent, from the prominence of this same theme--the
kinship of man with his nonhuman environment-is Journey to
the Far Amazon, by Alain Gheerbrant(59). This is an account
of a journey made by the author and his three friends from
Venezuela to Brazil, from the Orinoco river system. over into the
Amazon river system through previously unexplored, and
reportedly impassable, jungle. These men, who endured almost
incredible hardships in the course of their fourteen-months expedition, were sustained by a deep conviction that they could
relate themselves, on friendly terms, to the members of the
various native tribes of the region, no matter how far removed
from civilized mankind, and how warlike, these tribes were reputed to be. The book beautifully describes the four men's
setting out from civilization (at Bogota) and moving slowly into
areas of less and less civilized peoples, until finally they reached
the area of the Ouaharibos, the least civilized of all these tribes
they encountered and, in many respects, living much like
animals among other animals. A spirit of fellowship was reached
even between the Guaharibos and the four explorers; I feel
that this marks the capstone of the book's portraying, however
implicitly, the continuous thread joining civilized man with the
animal world. Shortly after leaving the area of the Guaharibos,
in the deepest heart of the previously unexplored jungle, the
men reached the Amazon river system and, progressing down
ever-larger branches of the Amazon, reached progressively more
civilized peoples again.
The Health, Individual
111
In Gheerbrant's book is a photograph of a Guaharibo woman

nursing a dog; the author found that these women nurse dogs
and their own children indiscriminately) and more than once
saw a baby sharing its mother's breasts with a puppy. Once he
and his comrades saw two small monkeys being nursed at a
woman's breasts like twin babies; he tells us that the Guaharibos
believe themselves to be the descendants of monkeys, and worship them. These people eat insects, marsh flowers, and even
earth if it seems rich enough. Gheerbrant says that they do no
work, but merely exist as plants and animals exist, being distinguished from the animal world by little but their upright stance
and their ability to make fire.
Of the Piaroas, another primitive tribe with whom the
travelers stayed, the author mentions that these natives consider
the lamentins, whalelike creatures of the Amazonian rivers, to be
their grandmothers, and therefore never kill these creatures.
Concerning the Maquiritare tribe, a somewhat more civilized
tribe with whom Gheerbrant and his comrades stayed, the
author says that one of the members "told me that the first
Maquiritares were wild boars" (59a).1
The book contains one passage memorably reflecting the
spirit of relatedness which the four men felt even toward the
inanimate possessions which they carried with them; that is, the
spirit of relatedness in which the men regarded the human
beings of the various native tribes, however little civilized, extended even to this level. We find this passage in Gheerbrant's
account of how he and his friends felt when, near the end of
their journey, it developed that in order to save their lives, with
only two dugout canoes remaining to the party, they would
have to abandon a large part of their equipment and of the
scientific material they had collected during the expedition:
k-
We began to sort out our things. Having got them so far we

J
Werner tells us that "In the opinion of the Brazilian Bakairi the canni-
balism of a neighboring tribe may be accounted for by the fact that these
people are supposedly descended from jaguars. As a result of this ancestry,
to a certain degree they stiU remain jaguars... Similarly, the Bakairi also
believe that the Trumai are a certain kind of aquatic animal" (162r).
112
had become sentimentally attached to them all and it was terribly

difficult for us to divide them into the saved and the damned,
into a group whose fate was still to be linked with our own, and
another group which was to be left behind. It seemed almost as
though each item, having shared our troubles and our labors,
had thereby acquired an individuality of its own and a right to
live, almost as though it were a human being [59b].
In turning now (rom the subject of adult man's yearning for

oneness with his nonhuman environment to the subject of his
contrasting anxiety lest he become at one with that environment
and thus lose his status as a human being, again I shall not
endeavor to describe comprehensively the ways in which this
particular feeling-reaction shows itself. I shall mention only two
aspects, as examples, in which this reaction is manifested. The
first is the great proclivity on the part of human beings, even
adult human beings, for the development of prejudicial attitudes
toward groups of other human beings, prejudicial attitudes which
include the conviction that these groups of their fellow men are
really subhuman, really more animal than human. Such prejudicial attitudes, to which I believe we all are in some degree drawn,
betray our own unconscious lack of sureness that we ourselves are
fully and unmistakably human. We all have some tendency, great
or small, to project onto fellow men who are members of other
racial or religious groups, or who are hospitalized with psychiatric
illness, or who in some other respect can be looked upon as alien
to ourselves, the less-than-human creature which we unconsciously
believe to reside in us.
A second manifestation of this same anxiety is seen, I believe,
in our enjoyment of using figures of speech-metaphors, similes,
analogies, and so on-in which a nonhuman creature or an
inanimate object is endowed with human qualities, or in which
human beings are endowed with nonhuman characteristics. I
refer to such sentences and phrases as "He was a raging bull,"
"Her walk had a catlike grace," "a rocklike determination," "a
craggy brow," "the murmuring of the water," "the whispering
leaves, U and so on. The use of such expressions arises not only
113
from the wish to add color to our language; it simultaneously

constitutes a mode of dealing with our unconscious anxiety lest
we become nonhuman. In employing such expressions we reveal
our enjoyment of being able to distinguish between human beings
and the nonhuman environment and, especially, to distinguish
between ourself and the nonhuman environment. It is as if we
demonstrate to ourself our mastery over any anxiety in this regard
by our so freely, and with such good control, comparing or
equating the human with the nonhuman. The psychodynamics
involved here, which I have described, are identical with the
psychodynamics of wit and humor as described long ago by
Freud. We shall see, in a later chapter, that the inability of the
schizophrenic to employ figurative language in that fashion stems
at least in part from his inability to make clear distinctions of the
sort which I have been describing here-s-distinctions between
himself and his nonhuman environment, and between the human
and nonhuman elements of his environment.
I mentioned earlier in this chapter that I would return to the
subject of the mature human being's characteristic relatedness to
the nonhuman environment-that kind of relatedness which is
one of the earmarks of emotional maturity in the human being-and discuss it in more detail. Having discussed, however sketchily
and incompletely, a few of the myriad variations [rom this basic
sense of relatedness, during the preceding few pages, I shall now
deal in more detail with that basic sense itself.
Let me make clear, first, what I am trying to do here. I am not
trying to delineate some extremely narrow band on the broad
spectrum of human feeling-capacities, and label that band "the
mature attitude" toward the nonhuman environment, an attitude
remaining after all other possible emotional responses to this environment have been shorn away, eschewed as earmarks of
neurosis or psychosis. Maturity is in no wise to be conceived of
as a narrow band on a spectrum, or a slender catwalk running
through a gulf in which richly varied neurotic and psychotic
experiences abound at every hand. Quite the reverse is true:
it is mature experience which is broader, richer, and more varied,
which includes the feeling-components that one finds conspicu-
114
ously manifested in neurosis and psychosis and much more

besides.
The mature person is, I believe, capable of feeling the essence
of that which the psychiatrically ill individual feels---otherwise,
psychotherapy would not be possible-and other feelings and
attitudes that in order to be experienced require greater ego
strength and ego differentiation than the psychiatrically ill individual has yet developed. Maturity in face of the nonhuman
environment may be considered to include, for example, the
ability to experience that environment as totally menacing, on
occasions when it is realistic to so conceive it (when, for instance,
one found oneself in an area heavily contaminated with radioactive fall-out). But unlike a deeply paranoid schizophrenic
patient, who might be unable to experience any attitude other
than this one, a fixed and rigid attitude maintained irrespective
of the inherent malevolence or beneficence or innocuousness of
his actual nonhuman environment, the mature person can readily
go on to changing responses as his actual situation changes. And
it is valid, I think, to say that there is a kind of response to the
nonhuman environment which the psychiatrically ill individual
is-so long as he remains ill-incapable of experiencing, and
which forms, by contrast) the core, the essence, of mature experience vis-A-vis that environment. It is this core which I am
now endeavoring to define.
I find it helpful to quote the viewpoint of William James (85),
a viewpoint which differs considerably from my own and one
which may be taken as at least a caricature of much of presentday psychiatry's implied attitude toward this subject, as a starting
point for introducing my own concepts concerning the essence of
mature relatedness in this respect. James says,
Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine
it (IS it emts~ purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable,
hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible
for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No

one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond
The Health')' Individual
115
another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its
events would be without significance, character, expression or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective
worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the specta..
tor's mind [85].2
It is my conviction, in contrast to that of James, that the more

directly we can relate ourselves to the nonhuman environment
as it exists-the more our relatedness to it is freed from perceptual
distortions in the fonn of projection, transference, and so onthe more truly meaningful, the more solidly emotionally sarisfying, is our experience with this environment. Far from our
finding it to be in a state of negativity and deadness, we find in
ourselves a sense of kinship toward it which is as alive as it is real.
James states, further:
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them,
swims, not only for such a transcendentalist writer [as Emerson],
but for
of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas..
that lend it its significance.
an
We feel, he says, that such abstractions as essential goodness,

beauty, strength, significance, justice, and SO on, soak through
all things to which we attribute these qualities, and he says that
Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature
of one of these abstractions . " . in handling the real world we
should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we
might lose these mental objects} these adjectives and adverbs and
predicates and heads of classification and conception.
t While it would be inaccurate to term James'. view solipsistic, it seems
to me but one step removed from solipsism. Of interest, here) are Rapaport's
comments concerning two opposite views. in philosophy! of man and the
world about him: UIn the Berkeleian view) the outside world is the creation
or man's imagination. In this solipsistic view, man is totally independent of
the environment. and totally depend8nl on the forces and images residing
within him; he cannot envisage an external world independent of these inner forces... In the Cartesian world, on the other hand, man is born u
a clean slate upon which experience writes. No forces or images exist in man
except for those which arise from the impingements of the outside world. In
this world) man is totally de"nd,nt on ... the outside world .... Observation confinns neither of these l extreme] views' ( t 17) .
116
. . . beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they

inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common

human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects
has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since [85j].
I concur with James's opinion that "The whole universe of

concrete objects . . . swims .... for all of us, in a wider and
higher universe of abstract ideas .." But I disagree with his
view that it is this state of affairs which gives significance to what
we perceive-which gives significance to, for example, our nonhuman environment. I believe, on the contrary, that the less
marked is this state of affairs, the more significance do we find
the nonhuman environment to possess for us. The more we are
able to relate ourselves to this environment as it really is-s-the
more our perception of it becomes freed from seeing it to be
bathed in Evil or Good or what not-the more satisfying and
rich is our relatedness to it.
My conviction in this regard is based upon my own personal
experience and upon my experience with psychiatric patients. In
the chapters dealing with psychotic and neurotic patients, I shall
describe many instances in which patients' relatedness to their nonhuman environment, and to themselves, is extremely distorted
because these patients react to abstract ideas, figurative concepts,
as though they possessed concrete reality, a reality far more
tangible to the patient than that possessed by all sorts of objects
which are most concrete, most ureal," to the nonpsychotic and,
relatively speaking, nonneurotic person. I feel that the more
completely man can penetrate any such veils of reified abstract
ideas, veils which are at their most blinding in the case of
the psychotic person, the more satisfyingly alive will be his
relatedness to the nonhuman environment.
This is a subject which I find valuably illuminated by the
thinking of Martin Buber, a philosopher and theologian who
has been called "the most distinguished and influential of living
Jewish thinkers," and "not only the representative figure of
Western European Jewry but of world Jewry as well" (54). His
117
UI.T hou" philosophy, or "philosophy of dialogue," contains profound insights which can be of much value to psychoanalytic theory and practice. To bring out Buber's central concept of I-Thou
relatedness and 1...lt relatedness, and to show to what an extent
Buber is concerned here with man's relatedness not only to man
but also to what I call the nonhuman environment, I shall quote
some excerpts from Maurice S. Friedman's recent study of Buber's
thought, entitled, Martin Buber-i-The Life 0/ Dialogue (54):
. . . man's two primary attitudes and relations: "I-Thou' and
"I-It." .. The I of man comes into being in the act of speaking
one or the other of these primary words. But the two Its are not
the same: "The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with
the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken
with the whole being."
The real determinant of the prima,y word in which a man
.takes his stand is not the object which is over against him but
the wa)' in which he relates himself to that object. I-Thou is the
primary word of relation. It is characterised by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity, and ineffability, Although it is only
within this relation that personality and the personal really exist,
the Thou of l-Thou is not limited to men but may include ani
mals, trees, objects of nature, and God. I-It is the primary word
of experiencing and using. It takes place within a man and not
between him and the world. Hence it is entirely subjective and
lacking in mutuality. . . . The It of I-It rna)' equally well be a
heJ a she, an animal, a thing, a spirit, or even God, without a
change in the primary word. Thus I-Thou and I-It cut across
the lines of our ordinary distinctions to focus OUT attention not
upon individual objects and their causal connections but upon
the relations between things, the dauoischen (uthere in...between")
[54a).
"The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly!'
What at one moment was the Thou of an I-Thou relation can
become the next moment an It and indeed must continually do so.
The It may again become a Thou, but it will not be able to
remain one, and it need not become a Thou at all. Man can live
continuously and securely in the world of It. If he only lives in this
world [of It], however, he is not a man, for "all real living is meet-
118
ing." This meeting with the Thou of man and of nature is also a
meeting with God. " . . . in each Thou we address the eternal
Thou [Godf' [54b].
. . . He who treats a person as "another In does not really see
that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling) is really I-It [54c].
"It is only by way of true intercourse with things and beings
that man achieves true life ...." .... true fulfilled existence depends on our developing a genuine relationship to the people
with whom we live and work, the animals that help US.t the soil
we till, the materials we shape, the tools we use [54d; my italics].
As the above passages indicate, Buber's thinking bears much

upon various subjects which I have mentioned in this book, such
as persons' dealing with other persons as being nonhuman, and
persons' dealing with elements of the nonhuman environment as
being human. That portion of his thinking which I am particularly focusing upon here is his concept that the I-Thou
relationship} and likewise the I.It relationship, can exist either
between man and man OT between man and what I am calling
here the nonhuman environment.. It would seem that, in Buber's
thinking, the kind of relatedness which the mature human being
experiences toward the nonhuman environment is identical with
that relatedness which he experiences toward fellow human
beings. I am fully in accord with Buber's view here, a view with
which I became acquainted only after having myself developed
the conviction that the mature human being's essential orienta..
tion toward the nonhuman environment is one of relatedness.. I
found that Buber had already carried much further and had
refined, as is obvious, this concept which in my own thinking had
been left in so crude a state.
I was interested to learn, in addition, that Buber's thinking hCL~
gone through an evolution, over the years of his long and productive life, with regard to the question of whether, as we might
phrase it here, the mature person's characteristic orientation
toward the nonhuman environment is one of subjective unity, or
rather one of relatedness. Friedman makes clear that Buber, in
his earlier writings, considered the feeling of unity to be the
119
highest, the most mature, order of experience in this regard, and

that he came later to conclude that the T-Thou relatedness is,
instead, the most mature orientation.
To turn now, for a moment, to the book by Erich Fromm
which was mentioned earlier in this chapter, we find that in his
thinking, also, the highest order of human existence-termed
by him "the productive orientation't-c-involves a creative relatedness not only with one's fellow man but also with the nonhuman
environment (i.e., nature, the materials of one's work, and so
on) :
Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orien..
tation: the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow
man, to himself and to nature. In the realm of thought, this productive orientation is expressed in the proper grasp of the world
by reason. In the realm of action, the productive orientation is
expressed in productive work, the prototype of which is art and
craftsmanship. In the realm of feeling, the productive orientation
is expressed in love, which is the experience of union with another penon, with all men, and with nature, under the condition
of retaining one's sense of integrity and independence [55; my
italics].
Incidentally, where Fromm speaks in the above passage of

"unity," it is clear that he does not mean the kind of unity which
Buber came to reject, unity in the mystical sense of a dissolution
of ego boundaries. Rather, that which Fromm calls "unity .. "
under the condition of retaining one's sense of integrity and
independence" may be likened to Buber's I-Thou relatedness.
The Psychological
Benefits Which Derive from
a Mature Relatedness with
One's Nonhuman Environment
CHAPTER
Having attempted to delineate, in the preceding chapter, the

essence of the mature person's sense of relatedness with the nonhuman environment, I shall now try to portray the fruitful effects,
in his ongoing personality functioning, which flow from his being
able to experience, vis-A..vis this environment, the kind of related..
ness which I have described.
These fruitful effects can be presented in four broad categories: (1) the assuagement of various painful and anxiety-laden
states of feeling; ( 2 ) the fostering of self-realization; (3) the
deepening of one's feeling of reality; and (4) the fostering of
one's appreciation, and acceptance, of one's fellow men. The
separation of these effects into categories is, of course, a somewhat artificial one.
The excerpts from various works of literature which I shall
present, in illustration of these various beneficial effects, have to
121
do only with one broad segment of the nonhuman environmentnamely) Nature. The works of Nature by no means constitute,
of course, the entirety of our nonhuman world; but they are the
part of it which, not only in me but perhaps in the majority of
persons, strike the deepest chord. By way of contrast to all the
other examples which will follow it is the following excerpt from
Philip B. Smith's (139) account of his experiences after having
received, as part of a scientific experiment, a dose of mescaline;
here we see how warm a relatedness one can feel toward an
inanimate work of man:
I lay down on the floor of the rest room in a patch of sunlight.

I knew this might look foolish, but it was quite satisfying for the
moment. I knew I could not explain it to others, but I could not
care. It fulfilled me! I felt, toward that sunlighted floor, compassion and tenderness! I felt a bitter-sweet compassion for the
existence of any object. I was glad it existed and loved it for
existing! The feeling was much like the warmth one feels for a
beloved pet or the fulfillment one gets in comforting a tired child.
I patted the floor and said, "Bless your little heart." This struck
me as humorous, but is was so purely intellectually funny and so
insipid, compared to the feeling I had for the floor's very existence, that it was worthy of something better than laughter.
when I showed the above passage, in a spirit of hesitancy
and semi-derision toward the author, to a colleague who has a
serious interest in painting, he commented unhesitatingly, "Every
artist feels that way."
Also by way of preface it should be noted that there may be
significant differences in various persons' relationship to various
aspects of Nature. A mountain may be only an object of beauty
to the average vacationer; but to the mountaineer it may be, in
addition, an extreme challenge; and to the geologist it will present
still other interests. For the excerpts which follow, concerning
man's relatedness to Nature, I have selected passages in which
the meaning of this relatedness is not dependent solely upon some
special vocational or recreational interest.
122
The Assuagement Which the Individual Finds in His Sense of

Relatedness with the Nonhuman Environment
This sense of relatedness helps to assuage man's existential

loneliness in the Universe, the loneliness which resides in his
knowledge that he, a self-aware, reasoning being, must always
stand somewhat apart from the rest of Nature. Further, it 3.1leviates his fear of death. It helps him, also, to find a sense of
peace, a sense of stability, of continuity, and of certainty. Finally,
still in much the same general vein, it counteracts feelings of
worthlessness and insignificance.
The assuagement which man finds, in these various respects,
from his relatedness with his nonhuman environment is, I think,
wen shown in the variety of passages which I shall now quote.
These passages vary greatly in fonn and content, and their
sources are very diverse; but each one expresses one or another,
or several, of the kinds of assuagement to which I have been refening. And this is expressed, by each one, with unusual beauty.
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, in his volume of
existentialist philosophyentitled The Courage to Be ( 156), writes:
The anxiety of fate and death is most basic, most universal,
and inescapable. All attempts to argue it away are futile [156a].
The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self...a ffinnation of the
individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation
of the universe [ 156b] .
Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents
of the universe are in him [i.e., in man] [156c].
Like Tillich, the social philosopher Lawrence K. Frank dwells

upon the relatedness of man to Nature as a whole, and points to
the benefits, for human living, which can flow from our recognition of that relatedness. The following passage from his previously
mentioned book, Nature and Human Nature (44) shows some of
his thinking about this subject:
By viewing the human organism . . . as a part of nature,
sharing the same dynamic processes and exhibiting the same
The H84lthy Individual
123
underlying pattern of organization that is operating everywhere

from the atom to the stars, throughout the whole universe, man
begins to emerge from the former beliefs and misconceptions
that taught him to despise his body and to consider human life
of little significance save as a preparation for the hereafter. No
longer need he assume that he is by nature incapable of developing a way of life that will have meaning and significance in
human terms [44a].
William James noted many years ago, in The Varieties of

Religious Experience (85), that
. . . apart from anything acutely religious, we all have moments when the universal life seems to wrap us round with
friendliness. In youth and health, in summer, in the woods or on
the mountains, there come days when the weather seems all
whispering with peace, hours when the goodness and beauty of
existence enfolds us like a dry, warm climate, or chime through us as
if our inner ears were subtly ringing with the world's security
[85k].
Wordsworth's poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above

Tintem Abbey (167) ~ sings of the joy and solace, the peace and
strength, which one can find in one's relatedness with Nature:
. . . Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through aU the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us) so impress
With quietness and beauty, and 50 feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, not all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. . .
124
The Nonhuman Enoironment.
For eight years I have treasured the following editorial from

The New Yo,k Times, an editorial which appeared late in the
month of November:
THE CERTAINTIES
The wind sweeps out of the west, with the faint breath of
blizzard far away; but the skies are clear, without even the shredded, high-flying clouds of storm. And so November leans toward
December, and late autumn creeps past, silent as the stars. The
hush of winter approaches, and short days lie upon the land..
Now is the time that the countryman has the country to him.
self. The visitors are gone, vacations over. Even the migrant birds
are gone. The squirrels go quietly about their business. And a man
has time to survey his world and understand his own place in it,
if he is ever to understand.
Now it becomes clear that it isn't the little pleasures of the
country that make life worth living there. It is rather the big
assurances. The little pleasures are for the casual visitor; but one
must live with the wind and the weather and know the land and the
seasons to find the certainties. The flash of a goldfinch or the
song of an oriole can delight the senses; but the knowledge that
no matter how sharp or long the winter" they win be back again
for another spring provides an inner surety. To see a hillside white
with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty;
but to walk the gray winter woods and find the buds which will
resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.
To feel the frost underfoot and know that there is both fire and
ice in the earth, even as in the patterned stars overhead, is to sense
the big assurances.
Man needs to know these things, and they are best learned
when the silence lies upon the land. No one can shout them..
They need to be whispered, that they may reach the questing
soul "[107].
Thor Heyerdahl's book, Ken-Tiki, the account of the voyage
which he and his three companions made across the Pacific on a
raft, contains many passages which illustrate the point I am
making. One of these is the following, from a chapter entitled
"Halfway" :
125
The weeks passed. We saw no sign either of a ship or of drifting

remains to show that there were other people in the world. The
whole sea was OUI'S) and) with all the gates of the horizon open,
real peace and freedom were wafted down from the firmament
itself.
It was as though the fresh salt tang in the air, and all the blue
purity that surrounded us, had washed and cleansed both body
and soul. To us on the raft the great problems of civilized man
appeared false and illusory-like perverted products of the human
mind. Only the elements mattered. And the elements seemed to
ignore the little raft. Or perhaps they accepted it as a natural
object, which did not break the harmony of the sea but adapted
itself to current and sea like bird and fish. Instead of being a
fearsome enemy, flinging itself at us, the elements had become a
reliable friend which steadily and surely helped us onward. While
wind and waves pushed and propelled, the ocean current lay
under us and pulled, straight toward our goal [77a].
Admiral Byrd, in his book entitled, Alone (22), gives an account of the four and one half months which he spent in 1934 on
the Ross Ice Barrier, 123 miles directly toward the South Pole
from Little America, living alone in a hut, with the South Polar
night prevailing most of the time outside, where the cold was as
low as 84 degrees below zero) Fahrenheit. In passages of poetic
loveliness he describes the peace, the exhilaration) the reassur...
ance, and the relief from loneliness which he found in his sense
of relatedness with his nonhuman environment:
About 1 o'clock. in the morning [of his second day alone], just
before turning in, I went topside for a look around. The night
was spacious and fine. Numberless stars crowded the sky. I had
never seen so many. You had only to reach up and fill your hands
with the bright pebbles. Earlier, a monstrous red moon had
climbed into the northern quadrant, but it was gone by then. The
stars were everywhere. A sailor's sky, I thought, commanded by
the Southern Cross and the wheeling constellations of Hydrus,
Orion, and Triangulum drifting ever so slowly. It was a lovely
motion to watch. And all this was mine: The stars, the constellations, even the earth as it turned on its axis. If great inward
126
peace and exhilaration can exist together, then this, I decided my

first night alone, was what should possess the senses [22b].
Took my daily walk at 4 p.m, today [about two weeks later
on], in 89 degrees of frost. The sun had dropped below the
horizon, and a blue--of a richness I've never seen anywhere else
-flooded in, extinguishing all but the dying embers of the sunset.
Due west, halfway to the zenith, Venus was an unblinking
diamond; and opposite her) in the eastern sky, was a brilliant
twinkling star set off exquisitely, as was Venus, in the sea of blue.
In the northeast a silver-green serpentine aurora pulsed and
quivered gently. In places the [Ross Ice] Barrier's whiteness had
the appearance of dull platinum. It was all delicate and illusive.
The colors were subdued and not numerous; the jewels few; the
setting simple. But the way these things. went together showed
a master's touch.
I paused to listen to the silence. My breath} crystallized as it
passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The
wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind
cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My
frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead.
The day was dying, the night being born-but with great
peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the
cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That
was what came out of the silence-a gentle rhythm, the strain of
a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.
It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself
a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's one...
ness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was
too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind
chance-that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and
that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot.
It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of
man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as
were the day and night [22c].
A man's moments of serenity are few, but a few will sustain him
a lifetime. I found my measure of inward peace then; the stately
echoes lasted a long time [22d].
127
The Role of the Individual's Sense of Relatedness with His
Nonhuman Environment in Fostering His Self-Realization

This same sense of relatedness-usually when coupled with aclive working in relation to the nonhuman environment-fosters the
individual's self-realization. That is, it helps him to gain a deeper
sense of personal identity, of individuality; it helps him to develop
his creative capacities; and it helps him to gain a fuller realization of the extent of his abilities and of the limitations upon those
abilities.
Brooks Atkinson, in his introduction to Walden and Other
Writings of Henry David Thoreau (154), tells us how important

to Thoreau, as regards the development of a deepened sense of
personal identity and the flowering of his creative capacities, was
his long sojourn at Walden. He tells that Thoreau's watching and
listening, studying, thinking, dreaming, attending to the varying
moods of the pond, writing in his journals, and weighing the
virtue of the great outside world against simple truths of his
secluded existence, brought the philosopher's career to fruition.
Although, Atkinson says, Thoreau supported himself, after leaving the hut, by such homely crafts as surveying and pencil
making, he had found at Walden the path to a wise approach to
life, and from then on his destiny was clear to him. In Thoreau's
own incomparable words,
I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I
often did better than this. There were times when I could not
afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,
whether of the head or hands.. I love a broad margin to my life.
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed
bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in
a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undis..
turbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted
noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west
window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant
highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those
seasons like com in the night, and they were far better than any
work of the hands would have been [154e].
128
Erich Fromm says, of man, that
He emerges from nature by mastering her; he develops his

powers of co-operation, of reason, his sense of beauty. He separates himself from nature, from the original unity with her, but
at the same time unites himself with her again as her master and
builder. The more his work develops, the more his individuality
develops [55g].
Incidentally, I wish to point out here that the unfortunate

child who, in his growing up, is often treated by his parents as
being of less importance than many of the elements of his nonhuman environment (furniture, other furnishings in the hornet
and so on) is greatly handicapped, during childhood and during
his adult life also, when he tries to deal with inanimate objects in
such a fashion as to develop his own creative powers, whether in
work or play. He has a deeply ingrained attitude of exaggerated

respect for, of deference to, such inanimate objects-whether
they be, now, a piano which he is trying to learn to play upon,
or various materials of work with which he is trying to cope, or
what not. He experiences, in exaggerated and persistent form, the
kind of timidity which the sculptor Henry Moore describes as
typical of the sculptor who is using material new to him:
When first working direct in a hard and brittle material like
stone, the lack of experience and great respect for the material,
the fear of ill-treating it, too often result in relief surface carving,
with no sculptural power [60].
Concerning creativity, I am inclined to believe that it is essential to the creative process that one become open to feelings of
intense relatedness, and even oneness, with the totality of one's
environment (including, of course, the nonhuman environment) ;
or, to put it another way, that one become open to the experiencing of very early ego states of oneness with the totality of the
environment. W. Clifford M. Scott, in his paper entitled "Narcissism, The Body, The Body Image and The Body Scheme)'
( 131), states that "In a primitive form many phenomena which
129
later tum out to be ... creative acts are first recognizable during momentary regressions," and he speaks of "infantile, omnipotent creativeness." Kris, too} speaks of "ego regression during
creative processes" (89b).
Likewise in the valuable book entitled The Creative Process
(60), edited by Brewster Ohiselin, one finds a number of hints
that creativity may involve such a phase of regression to very
early ego states. states of oneness with the totality of the environment. Note, for example, in the following paragraph from Ghise-
lin's introduction, how closely his description of the early stages

of the creative process compares with psychiatric descriptions of
very early ego states--as being featureless, oceanic, and so on:
Creation begins typically with a vague, even a confused excitement, some sort of yearning, hunch, or other preverbal intimation
of approaching or potential resolution. Stephen Spender's expression is exact: "a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be
condensed into a shower of words." Alfred North Whitehead
speaks of "the state of imaginative muddled suspense which
precedes successful inductive generalization," and there is much
other testimony to the same effect.
In some invention there is consciousness of a stage yet more
primitive, a condition of complete indecision-in the words of
Isadora Duncan, Ilea state of complete suspense"-in which
nothing tends toward determination, nothing of a particular
character seems to be implied, in which, therefore, all is still
apparently free [60a].
Ghiselin~s book reproduces an account, by Christian Zervos,
of the latter's interview with Picasso. Included among Picasso's
paraphrased views concerning art are the following:
The artist is a receptacle of emotions come from no matter

where: from the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure,
a cobweb. This is why one must not discriminate between things.
There is no rank among them. One must take one's good where
one finds it [60b].
The painter passes through states of fullness and of emptying.
That is the whole secret of art. I take a walk in the forest of
130
Fontainebleau. There I get an indigestion of greenness, I must

empty this sensation into a picture, Green dominates in it. The
painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his
sensations and his visions [60c].
I think that this same point concerning creativity is reflected,

similarly, in the following statements by the painter Julian Levi,
quoted in Ghiselin's book:
There is another aspect of an artist's choice of his subject
matter which I think could be profitably explored. It is that I
believe he is affectively related to certain fonns and designs. I
believe his choice is channeled by the compulsion to find an
objective vehicle for inward plastic images. I certainly do not
know why" but I am stirred by certain geometrical relationships,
certain rectangular forms and arabesques out of which grow
particular harmonies and rhythms.. In deciding what subject I
shall paint I am irresistibly drawn to objects which contain the
skeleton of this type of plastic structure. Whether I am spending
the swnmer on Barnegat Bay or on Cape Cod or merely sketching
along the Harlem River, I somehow contrive to find the exact set
of lines and contours which this inner appetite demands [60d].
And Tillich comments that

Most important is the creative individual, the genius, in whom,
as Kant later formulated it, the unconscious creativity of nature
breaks into the consciousness of man.. Men like Pico della Miran..
dola, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Shaftesbury, Goethe,
Schelling were inspired by this idea of a participation in the
creative process of the universe [156d].
In Chapter III (on page 88) I mentioned that the nonhuman

environment constitutes a milieu which facilitates the child's exercising of, and his becoming aware of, his own abilities-his
finding out in what various respects he is potent, but not omnipotent. Even after reaching adulthood, now, he continues to engage in this same process vis-a-vis his nonhuman environment,
131
and I wish now to say something of this particular function of

this environment in man's adult existence.
Human beings are continuously finding, individually and collectively, through struggle with the nonhuman environment, that
they possess previously unsuspected-and, in some instances,
previously undeveloped-capacities, capacities which tend not to
be evoked through man's relations with his fellow men alone, but
which are discovered in this process of his coping with the larger
nonhuman environment surrounding all of mankind. To give but
two among myriad examples, only within the past year (at the time
of my writing this) has a human being run a distance of one mile in
less than four minutes, for the first time in recorded history; and
only thus recently have human beings first set foot on the top of
Mount Everest. As Admiral Byrd, whose own experiences enable
him to speak with extraordinary authority about this, phrases it,
Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting
the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of
strength that are never used [22e] .
We never cease to thrill at accounts of the reaching of new
heights of physical, intellectual, artistic, or spiritual achievement,
by one or another of our fellow representatives of the human
species, in their individual, and mankind's collective, ongoing
struggle with the nonhuman environment. It may well be that
each such victory represents to us, symbolically, a surmounting
of the nonhuman part of our own personality by the human
being in us.
We gain a sense of exhilaration, of deepened self-appreciation,
through identifying with our fellow men who have reached such
heights. And, as is shown by the impact upon us of the following
passages from King Solomon:s Ring (100), a book by the naturalist) Konrad Z. Lorenz) we can get this same kind of sensation
through identifying even with creatures of a nonhuman species,
creatures alive like ourselves, in their triumph over that part of
our nonhuman environment which is, perhaps, most alien to us-the inorganic portion of it:
132
In the chimney the autumn wind sings the song of the elements,
and the old firs before my study window wave excitedly with
their arms and sing so loudly in chorus that I can hear their
sighing melody through the double panes. Suddenly, from above,
a dozen black, streamlined projectiles shoot across the piece of
clouded sky for which my window forms a frame. Heavily as
stones they fall, fall to the tops of the firs where they suddenly
sprout wings, become birds and then light feather rags that the
storm seizes and whirls out of my line of vision, more rapidly
than they were borne into it.
I walk to the window to watch this extraordinary game that
the jackdaws are playing with the wind. A game? Yes, indeed, it
is a game, in the most literal sense of the word ~ practised movements, indulged in and enjoyed for their own sake and not for
the achievement of a special object. And rest assured, these are
not merely inborn, purely instinctive actions, but movements that
have been carefully leamed. All these feats that the birds are
performing, their wonderful exploitation of the wind, their
amazingly exact assessment of distances and, above all, their
understanding of local wind conditions, their knowledge of all
the up-currents, air pockets and eddies-all this proficiency is
no inheritance, but, for each bird, an individually acquired accomplishment.
And look what they do with the wind! At first sight, you) poor
human being, think that the stonn is playing with the birds, like
a cat with a mouse, but soon you see, with astonishment, that it
is the fury of the elements that here plays the role of the mouse
and that the jackdaws are treating the storm exactly as the cat
its unfortunate victim. Nearly, but only nearly, do they give the
stonn its head, let it throw them high, high into the heavens, till
they seem to fall upwards, then, with a casual flap of a wing, they
turn themselves over, open their pinions for a fraction of a second
from below against the wind, and dive-with an acceleration far
greater than that of a falling stone-into the depths below.
Another tiny jerk of the wing and they return to their normal
position and, on close-reefed sails, shoot away with breathless speed
into the teeth of the gale, hundreds of yards to the west: this all
playfully and without effort, just to spite the stupid wind that
tries to drive them towards the east. The sightless monster itself
must perform the work of propelling the birds through the air at
The H8Qlthy Individual
133
a rate of well over 80 miles an hour; the jackdaws do nothing

to help beyond a few lazy adjustments of their black wings.
Sovereign control over the power of the elements, intoxicating
triumph of the living organism over the pitiless strength of the
inorganic! [100aJ.1
An unusually beautiful and inspiring example among the accounts of man's own triumphs in relation to his nonhuman en..
vironment is Annapuma (76), by Maurice Herzog, the leader of
a French expedition which scaled, for the first time in history,
that Himalayan peak. This is a record of almost incredible courage, determination, skill, and endurance of physical suffering;
Herzog himself almost died, after the peak had been reached,
from exhaustion and from gangrene of the extremities which required repeated amputations.
Lucien Davies, himself prominent in French mountaineering
circles, writes in his preface to Herzog's book:
That wonderful world of high mountains, dazzling in their

rock and ice, acts as a catalyst. It suggests the infinite, but it is
not the infinite. The heights only give us what we ourselves bring
to them. Climbing is a means of self-expression. Its justification
lies in the men it develops, its heroes and its saints. This was the
essential truth which a whole nation grasped when it offered its
praise and admiration to the conquerors of Annapuma. Man
overcomes himself, affirms himself, and realizes himself in the
struggle towards the summit, toward the absolute. In the extreme
tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe
disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering,
no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple. As on the
crest of a wave, or in the heart of a cyclone, we are strangely
calm-not the calm of emptiness, but the heart of action itself.
Lorenz's book is one of great value to anyone who wishes to read further
about the over-all subject of this present volume. And I think that the feelings one experiences while reading his book attest to the sense of kinship,
dormant but strong, which we possess toward other living creatures: as one
reads his accounts of successful communication between animal and man,
and his descriptions which help one to see new meaning in the interactions
among fUh or among birds or among animals, one experiences an extraordinary sense of fascination and, often, joy.
134
Then we know with absolute certainty that there is something

indestructible in us, against which nothing can prevail.
A flame so kindled can never be extinguished. When we have
lost everything it is then we find ourselves most rich. Was it this
certainty that all was well that gave Maurice Herzog the steady
courage to endure his ordeal?
The summit is at our feet. Above the sea of golden clouds
other summits pierce the blue and the horizon extends to infinity.
The summit we have reached is no longer the Summit. The
fulfillment of oneself-is that the true end, the final answer?
[76a].
Herzog himself thus describes the feelings which he experienced upon attaining, with one of his comrades, the top of the
mountain:
Our mission was accomplished. But at the same time we had
accomplished something infinitely greater. How wonderful life
would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to at
tain one's ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfill oneself. I
was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt happiness
like this-so intense and yet so pure. That brown rock, the highest
of them all, that ridge of ice-were these the goals of a lifetime?
Or were they, rather, the limits of man's pride? [76b].
I believe that each time we-and here I refer not only to such
outstanding persons as Herzog, but to all of us more ordinary
persons as well-have achieved some triumph in coping with our
nonhuman environment, some triumph which has called forth
our very utmost powers, the satisfaction which we experience has
to do not alone with our having discovered previously unrevealed powers in ourself. The satisfaction has to do also, I believe,
with our having seen, beyond doubt, that we are not omnipotent.
There can be in this a sense of relief, of comfort, which I think
may truly be called satisfying. I find such a kind of satisfaction
expressed in the following passage by Herzog:
In overstepping our limitations, in touching the extreme boundaries of man's world, we have come to know something of its true
135
splendor. In my worst moments of anguish, I seemed to discover

the deep significance of existence of which till then I had been
unaware. I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong. The
marks of the ordeal are apparent on my body. I was saved and I
had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose, has
given me the rare joy of loving that which I used to despise. A new
and splendid life has opened out before me [76c].
Byrd expresses this more explicitly, this sense of relief and selfacceptance which one can gain from an experience which hac;
delineated the very utmost limits of one's capacities, an experience which brings home to one, beyond the possibility of any
doubt or conflict, that one is not omnipotent. He tells thus of his
eventual departure from the hut where he had endured long
months of isolation, bitter cold, and, before a rescue party was
finally able to reach him, near-fatal carbon monoxide poisoning:
I climbed the hatch and never looked back. Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08" South: what survived
of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism.
On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not
fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and
miracle of being alive, and a humble set ~f values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I
live more simply now, and with more peace [22].
The Deepened Feeling of Reality Which the Individual Finds

in His Sense of Relatedness with His Nonhuman Environment
The third fruitful effect of the mature human being's sense of

relatedness with his nonhuman environment-an effect which is
perhaps so closely interwoven with the second effect, just discussed, as not to warrant a separate presentation here--is the
enhancement, the sharpening, the deepening, the strengthening,
of the individual's experiencing his own existence, and the existence of the world around him, as being Teal.
To illustrate this point, I find that the following passage from
Walden (15 4-) serves, once again, superbly well. Thoreau writes
that
136
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had

all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view
to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from
a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing,
from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close
at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to
me,-anchored in forty feet of water) and twenty or thirty rods
from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch
and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious
nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or
sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted
in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration
along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of
dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up
its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand) some
horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was
very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had
wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to
feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link
you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line
upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which
was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with
one hook [154f].
Thoreau's description of his solitary) noctumal fishing and

thinking can be looked upon, for our purposes here, as beautifully symbolizing the importance) for one's maintenance of con..
tact with reality, of one's preserving at least a slender thread of
awareness of, and acceptance of, one's relatedness with Nature.
In working with psychotic patients, by contrast, one finds with
great regularity that their intolerance of their own "animal"
needs and impulses is such that they have become overly absorbed in "vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres." That
is, they have become so greatly preoccupied with highly abstract
problems--of morals, of ethics, or various other intellectual problems of a highly cerebral sort-that they have fostered their own
becoming cut off from the awareness of their own kinship with
137
Nature and, by much the same token, cut off from their own
unconscious.
As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, one finds in intensive
psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients that those relatively
infrequent patients who appear most "animallike," most subhuman, are those who are most harshly repressing their own normal
animal needs. And, as I said, one finds that in these persons their
animal needs are struggling to break through the repression and
bring the patient back into contact with a reality which seems to
him abhorrent, but which in actuality can be of life-saving, or
at the very least sanity-saving, value for him. The normal human
being, on the other hand-the person who never becomes either
psychotic or markedly neurotic--does not shut himself off from
the awareness of, and acceptance of, the circumstance that he is
a member of an animal species and that he has, therefore, animal
needs which are natural and normal and which must be heeded.
However many hours a day he may spend in thought of however
abstract a sort, the way to his own unconscious remains open, the
way to this recognition of his animal needs remains open, the way
to his experiencing moments of relatedness with his nonhuman
environment-s-with all the refreshment, invigoration, peace and
assurance which this sense of relatedness brings-remains open.
The Individual's Finding, Through His Sense of Relatedness
with His Nonhuman Enoironment, a Deepened Appreciation
of, and Acceptance of, His Fellow Men
I have mentioned, and have given illustrations of, the relief
from striving-toward-omnipotence--or, to put it another way,
the increased self-acceptance-s-which one may gain through one's
relatedness with the nonhuman environment. By the same token)
to the extent that one can perceive one's fellow men as being)
like oneself, chained in many ways by an innate structural and
functional relatedness with the nonhuman environment and, at
the same time, transcended by that environment) dwarfed by it
~to that extent one tends to have an appreciative, accepting
138
and, above all, compassionate attitude toward one's fellow human

beings. All men become, to that extent, brothers, brothers who
share the same biological end, brothers all of whom, individually
and collectively, find themselves alone in a nonhuman environment which is incredibly more vast than mankind-alone and
yet, at the same time, hopelessly wedded to that environment by
indissoluble. bonds which exist, as I have mentioned earlier, at
multiple levels (at the level of biological similarity, at the level of
similarity of chemical structure, and so on). To the extent that
we can find the courage to look squarely at our common situation as human beings, we find that an attitude of appreciation,
acceptance, and compassion toward ourselves and one another is
the only attitude which is tenable.
Farthest removed from such an orientation of mature compassion---or, one could put it, most afraid of experiencing such
feelings of compassion-is the paranoid schizophrenic person. His
orientation toward other persons as well as toward himself is
predicated upon the conviction that all human beings are poten..
tially omnipotent. He cannot conceive that other persons are
unable to better a situation; it is only their malevolent workings
which account for whatever dissatisfaction, suffering, and tragedy
he encounters or has encountered in the past .. By the same token,
he cannot accept, either, his own inability to make the whole
earth a Paradise. One of my patients, for example, who spelled
out such convictions with unusual clarity, W~ convinced that no
one is ever ill or injured except through the malevolent agency of
another human being; that no one ever really dies, but is only
changed into some other fonn by malevolent persons who operate
what are purported to be funeral parlors; that no one grows old
through natural causes; that there are no phenomena of weather
and climate which are not perpetrated by human beings; and so
OD. She used to assert, for instance, that
There's no reason for anybody in the world to be unhappy or

miserable in the world today. They have antidotes for everything.
They just keep pulling the wool over people's eyes..
People don't die. . . . [She went on to say that in actuality
139
people who are thought to be dead have been "changed," moved

about over the face of the earth" placed without their own knowledge into the casts of motion pictures, and so on] It's a government that has girded the earth with horror and hell.
(She asserted, with evident conviction) on the morning following
a nocturnal thunderstorm:] That thunderstorm-thing. That was
the taxpayers' money going up in flares.
For approximately two years, this woman devoted the bulk of

the time during her psychotherapeutic sessions to a violent condemnation of me and of everyone else about her. It quickly
became evident that an unconscious struggle against repressed
self-condemnation-self-condemnation so intense that it threatened to annihilate her-lay behind her so persistent viewing of
other persons as being incarnations of evil. This woman's compassionate feelings were finally reached, little by little, only after
the therapeutic relationship had survived two years of her venting
such condemnation upon me, as well as murderous feelings of great
intensity. It eventually became clear that at the heart of her illness lay long-repressed, intensely conflictual feelings toward her
mother-murderous feelings coupled with deep tenderness and
compassion.
PART
THREE
IN PSYCHOSIS AND NEUROSIS
Confusion Between the Self

and the Nonhuman Environment
CHAPTER
I discussed in Chapter II the basic situation of the young infant's

inability to distinguish himself as a human individual, distinct
from his environment-distinct not only from the human beings
in his environment but also from the nonhuman dements in it.
I indicated that in psychiatrically ill individuals-particularly in
schizophrenic patients, from whom most of my data comes--one
sees abundant evidence of an inability to distinguish between the
self and the nonhuman, as well as the human, environments. This
confusion in the chronologically adult patient may be regarded as
a testimony both to (a) some degree of failure to achieve at the
nonnal time) in infancy, as clear-cut and profound a differentiation of the self from the total environment as is achieved by the
healthy infant; and (b) the depth of the present-day regression,
coming as a result of the impact of very' intense anxiety, and
involving the reactivation of this mode of experiencing one's
144
existence as being chaotically undifferentiated, this mode which

is presumably characteristic of all infants, even normal infants, at
a very early phase of ego development.
Initial Review of the Literature

In Chapters II and III, in discussing the infant's and young
child's ego organization, I described the areas of convergence and
divergence as between the views found in psychoanalytic literature on the one hand, and my own concepts on the other hand.
These same areas of agreement and of difference apply now ipso
facto in the interpretation of the regression found in schizophrenia.
Hartmann, despite his having introduced in 1937 the valuable
concept of dedifferentiation (67),1 continues to adhere, in his
paper in 1953 entitled "The Metapsychology of Schizophrenia,"
to Freud's concept of withdrawal of libidinal cathexis in schizophrenia:
Freud (1911), in the Schreber case, has given us a classical
description of the pathological process in schizophrenia, the withdrawal of libido from the objects and its subsequent investment
in the self. . . . I think that Freud's correlation of reality loss
with libido withdrawal is very likely true [70a].
Hanns Sachs (122), in his paper in 1933 entitled, "The Delay

of the Machine Age/' also follows Freud's concepts:
Freud found the change in libido distribution which forms the
basis of schizophrenia to consist in a regression to narcissism.
In catatonic conditions this expresses itself directly as a complete
withdrawal of libido from object-investment. . . .
Sachs's theoretical explanation for the delay in the machine

age, although as I mentioned it fits very well with my concept of
nonclifferentiation from the nonhuman environment, makes this
point only by implication; it focuses primarily, instead, upon
a A term
abo wed by Werner (162.).
Psychosis and Neurosis
145
Freud's concept of a narcissistic conflict. This is the same reasoning which Tausk, despite his immensely valuable introduction
of the concept of loss of ego boundaries in schizophrenia, pursues
in explanation of the delusion of the influencing machine:
The feeling of strangeness is a defense against libidinal cathexis,

no matter whether it concerns objects of the outer world) one's
own body,- or its parts. .
When, in paranoia, the feeling of estrangement no longer
affords protection, the libidinal drive towards the homosexual
object is projected on to the latter and appears, by a reversal of
direction, as aggression towards the loving one (the patient himself) in the form of a sense of persecution. Strangers become
enemies. The enmity is a new and more energetic attempt at
protection against the rejected unconscious libido.
The narcissistic organ libido in schizophrenia may undergo a
similar transformation. The estranged organ-in OUf case, the
entire body-appears as an outer enemy, as a machine used to
afflict the patient [153a].
Bak (5), although as I have mentioned he thinks of schizophrenia as involving regression to an undifferentiated phase, and
although he says of this phase such things as: "Retained selfobservation refers to this phase, as: 'I'm becoming an animal,' or
'I'm turning into a protoplasmic mass' . . . ," nevertheless limits
his conceptual frame of reference to the infant-mother relationship, rather than seeing the nonhuman environment as important
in its own right, and employing a "phylogenetic" frame of reference. He subscribes to the usual psychoanalytic concepts:
There is substantial agreement among psycho-analysts that in

the schizophrenic illness three processes are largely involved: First,
the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from object representations;
second, the regression of the ego to primary narcissism; and third,
the attempt at restitution.
In my own work with schizophrenic patients I find neither
of the first two concepts helpful; as for the third, an attempt at
restitution is always discernible in any human being, schizo-
146
phrenic or otherwise, at any time, and is to be seen in any symptom of schizophrenia. To me, a much more adequate explanation
of the phenomena in question is to be found in Werner's (162t)
description of the schizophrenic process as consisting in regression
to primitive modes of perception, thought, and emotional experience, in which there is a dedifferentiation, or "syncretism," in
all these spheres. An experiencing of both inner and outer worlds
persists, but unbeknownst to the patient it is grossly distorted by
psychological contents which, "belonging" in an outer or inner
direction, have lost their differentiation as such. Werner bases
his views upon the findings of Schilder, Storch, Piaget, and other
psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as upon those of a multitude of investigators in related disciplines .
To return to Hartmann for a moment, we see that he moves
far in this very direction when he says that the more differentiated an organism is, the more independent from the immediate
environmental stimuli it becomes (67g), and that "the fusion of
self and world [is] a central problem in the symptomatology of
schizophrenia" (70b) In this regard, I have found it of interest
that, for a number of my most deeply and chronically schizophrenic patients, it has required several years of intensive psychotherapy before} in each instance, sufficient ego differentiation
-including sufficient independence from the immediate environ..
ment-e-has been achieved so that the patients can now experience
dreaming and fantasying as such.. When such patients begin
therapy no such realm of subjective experience exists for
them, and the first dream or fantasy is often described with both
wonder and pleasure. In each case, over the earlier years of our
work the patient had reported an abundance of what would
objectively be labeled, by me or any other observer, as fantasies or
dreams, but he. had experienced them as representations of real..
ity; t so until now he had been unwittingly denied not only the
benefit of more realistic appraisaJ of reality, but also the pleasure
and freedom of subjective fantasy and dreaming.
t
-I til) of course, normal for any dreamer to experience his dream .. a

representation of reality) while he il dreaming; but these patients had experienced them thus even later, while describing them to me.
147
Eissler (31) has described the symptomatology of a schizo-
phrenic woman who seems to me an excellent example of dedifferentiation to a level at which there is subjective oneness with other
human beings, but at which the differentiation between human
beings (including oneself) and the nonhuman environment has
not been wholly sacrificed to the relatively moderate schizophrenic process. Of her) Eissler says that
.. she was fixated to a level which may be called a social
animism. Her outlook on the social group was based on the
principle that any emotion she experienced in the presence of
others had to have a palpable social effect. . . . It is remarkable
that this basic principle never spilled into the representation of
the physical world but was strictly limited to the social area.
As he beautifully describes, this woman at times of increased

anxiety experienced a feeling of deadness. We might say that at
these times she regressed to an ego state analogous to one of the
developmental phases of infancy which I have postulated: a
phase in which the infant is aware of certain figures in the outside world-c-e.g., his mother---as being alive, but in which he is
not yet aware of aliveness as a quality which he himself also
possesses. The loss of distinction between animate and inanimate
- ( l loss which Eissler's patient evidently only partially underwent-has been termed "de.. animation" by Elkisch and Mahler
(33).
The previously mentioned papers by Ekstein (32), Furman
(56 ), Lisbeth Sachs (123), Mahler (102), and Elkisch and
Mahler (33) all contain relevant material illustrating, in each
instance, a schizophrenic child's equating himself with machines,
or otherwise revealing an inability to distinguish between human
and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. In the authors' interpretation of such material, however, as I described in Chapter
II, the emphasis is always upon interpersonal matters; the importance of the nonhuman environment as such, that is to say in its
own right, is entirely ignored. In the paper by Elkisch and Mahler, for instance, the machines which fascinate and terrify the
148
psychotic boy are only considered to be, for him, concretizations

of inner impulses which in tum are traced exclusively to his
relations with people. In the paper by Mahler, the inanimate
object is held to be, in the world of the psychotic child, only a
"symbol for the introject"; and although she says that in autistic
children one finds an inability perceptually to discriminate animate and inanimate, and hence an inability to perceive the
mother as a living being, she persists in tracing the etiology of
this to the child-mother relationship.. It seems to me that we
should not neglect the possibility that the infant needs, for example, a certain measure of stability in his nonhuman environment as such, in order for him to evolve, out of this foundation, a
picture of his mother as a living entity.
Clinical Material
On page 51 I gave examples of one schizophrenic patient's

inability to distinguish clear boundaries between his self and his
nonhuman environment, and I shall now give a few more such
examples from other schizophrenic patients) before taking up,
a bit later in this chapter, other matters of psychodynamic theory.
In subsequent chapters there will appear many additional instances of patients' confusion in this regard, in the course of my
tracing out some of the ramifications of this central theme..
A deeply confused schizophrenic woman, twenty-two years of
age, muttered in one of her hours with me about a post in her
head, wondering if she had gotten it out. Her communication
had the shocking, horrifying impact which I have regularly found,
and is found by my colleagues also in similar situations) when a
person is conveying to us their confusion of their animate self with
inanimate objects. On another occasion this woman shockingly
conveyed to me the statement that the whole left side of her head
ais gone . caved in," speaking as if in reference to an inanimate object; one sensed her own horror and despair about this.
Oftentimes she plucked at her scalp, and in so doing spoke, on
one occasion, about bugs; this, together with her speaking of
herself on another occasion as being "bugs," suggested that she
149
experienced her psychosis as a matter of, quite literally, having

bugs in her head, and her scalp plucking seemed an effort to,
as it were, get the crazy ideas out.
She once demanded of a nurse, "Why did you take that piece
out of my head?') referring to her head as though it were an
inanimate thing. In an hour with me she spoke about having
gone canoeing one time, and added, "It wrecked my body." The
tone of this comment was the significant thing, and impossible for
me to reproduce in writing; it conveyed a sense of shock, as if she
were referring to her body not as being her living corporeal self,
but rather an inanimate object which had been irreparably
damaged. To another nurse she once confided that she (the pa..
tient) had cotton in her head, shoulders, and legs. To think of
such communications as reflecting merely the patient's literal
phrasing of what is, in her, a figurative concept does not, I think,
do justice to the degree of anxiety and confusion which she is
experiencing; I personally have no doubt that to her the cotton.
the post, and so forth, were experienced quite literally.
Both in this woman's history and in her hours with me, I found
further evidence of her inability, during her psychosis, to distinguish between her own ego and the surrounding nonhuman
environment. The hospital to which she had first been admitted,
a year before her transfer to Chestnut Lodge, reported that "She
seemed to have the feeling that in some way or other things were
'changed,' but was unable to express what these changes were or
why she was so concerned about them." It is my impression,
based on long work with her, that she was experiencing what
were basically internal, psychological changes taking place in her
during the development of her psychosis as being physical changes
in the surrounding nonhuman environment. The first hospital's
report further says that "She has expressed the idea that her
father is in some way bringing about the strange sensations that
she experiences-movements of the bed, movements of the wall
. . ." She did at times evidence, at the first hospital, delusions as
to the shape and color of her body, and in one of my own hours
with her she said, "I feel as though I'm turning into a Negro.."
looking at her arms as she said this. On two or three later oc"
150
casions she gazed closely at her right hand, as though fascinated

and perplexed by its appearance, and confided to me at one such
time, "My hand looks big to me."
When I first went out walking with her] on the grounds, a
week or two after her admission, she conveyed to me in her mut ..
tered, fragmentary comments that she felt the surrounding
buildings and landscape to be constantly changing in a terrifyingly
confusing fashion. This reminded me of the dreams one sometimes hears from neurotic patients, in which a house, for example,
may be now one's childhood home, now one's adult, marital
home. At another time she said to one of our nurses, in much
anxiety, "The wall is moving . . . I don't know what's wrong
with my hands, but I can't keep them still," as though her hands,
like the walls, seemed to her to be uncontrollable inanimate objects. There are abundant data further to indicate this woman's
evident inability to distinguish between her self and her nonhuman (as well, of course, as her human) environment, and her
confusion about both, indiscriminately.
Another schizophrenic woman who was no longer hospitalized,
when she now began to go, in therapy, into a deeper exploration
of her intensely ambivalent feelings about her mother, feelings
which were at the heart of the psychosis which had earlier overcome her, commented anxiously after coming into my office that
she noticed that the floor of the building (over which she had
walked for these many months, to and from her hours) wac;
sagging; it was significant that she had evidently been unaware
of this fact until now. Still another schizophrenic patient, a man,
while in the hospital kept asserting, almost incessantly during his
psychotherapeutic sessions, that he was now well and fully able
to live outside the hospital; but every once in a while he would
reveal a nagging alarm lest the building might fall to pieces at
any moment. The precarious state in which he felt the building
to be actually was quite true of his own personality functioning,
as experience with him showed. Here it seemed that he could not
distinguish, at an unconscious level, between his own ego and the
building in which he was housed and had his psychotherapy; the
151
fragility of his own ego organization was projected onto the

structure of the building..
An acutely schizophrenic man, looking about in bewilderment
at the very simple furnishings of his room, seemingly struggling
conceptually to grasp these relatively few elements of his nonhuman environment, asked with regard to the window in his
door and the light in the ceiling, "What's that for?" Such incidents remind one that the infant and very small child, in normal
development, may be similarly unable to cope with more than
the simplest sort of nonhuman environment, may be as susceptible as are these schizophrenic patients to becoming quite overwhelmed with confusion when exposed to a very complex and
shifting nonhuman environment.
In the recorded staff presentations of patients here at Chestnut
Lodge, given by the various therapists, the detailed accounts of
patients' histories often reveal that there were markedly traumatic
circumstances, of one sort or another, in the patient's relatedness
to his nonhuman environment in infancy and childhood. The
following excerpt, from the staff presentation of a woman with
unusually profound overt schizophrenia, shows one example
among a great many, similar in terms of broad import but greatly
varying in terms of individuals' life circumstances:
. . . much of the time the patient and her mother lived in

San Francisco or at their country place which is a modem house
and which the patient describes as being a place where there is
constant shifting around going on, that there are additions and
rooms being added. The father [a building contractor] gets new
ideas of a structural nature, builds something new, and then there
is a shifting around. She even put it as directly as that she
wouldn't know which bed she was going to sleep in from one
week to the next, that sometimes her mother would be in her
bedroom and she would be in her mother's, etc. and she seemed
to make quite a point of that.
The last sentence in the above excerpt gives a hint that, in
normal upbringing, a greater stability of room arrangements can
152
give the child support in the struggle for individuation from the
mother and in the struggle against incestuous impulses.
This same woman had undergone various changes of residence
in childhood, in addition to her having lived, as described above,
in the ever-changing country home. One wonders if this past experience did not have much to do with the patient's impaired
sense of personal identity, as indicated in the following passage
from a later part of the presentation) where the therapist is
describing one of his therapeutic sessions with her:
I said that 1 was interested in hearing about her and what she
was doing here. I believe I put it in terms of "I want to hear
about Miss Baldwin [the patient's name'] . " She said, "Well, I'm
not Miss Baldwin. She lives at such-and-such a number Pacific
View in San Francisco't-e-which was the residence of the family
at one time. "I am Miss Williams,," Well, that [name] registered
only as one of the graduate nurses that we had here in training
for a while ......
In my own work with one of my patients, a schizophrenic
woman, I saw a more clear-cut indication that her sense of
personal identity was linked with the familiar nonhuman environment. This particular woman on many different occasions
revealed how tenuous was her sense of personal identity. Repeat...
edly, for example, she spoke poignantly of how much more
competent, how much less harried by anxiety about myriad
things, she had felt before her overt illness, by contrast to her
present suffering. She would wonder longingly "what became of
myself," indicating that her sense of being herself had been lost,
through the intrusion of all the strange new psychological experiences in which her psychosis had enveloped her. But I wish to
quote in particular a communication from her which indicated
that one factor in her experiencing, or not experiencing, a sense of
personal identity was the presence or absence, respectively, of a
familiar nonhuman environment. This communication came during an hour in which she was describing her having gone, from
Pseudonym, as is each
or
the patients' names used in this book.
153
her home in the suburbs of a large Southern city, into the city's
business section to begin working as a stenographer. She was
speaking in a very puzzled, halting way, with a confused expression on her face:
That's funny-162 Central Avenue--I wonder what became of
me, going down there? [said in a tone which clearly conveyed
that she had lost her self in going down there}--that wasn't a
residential section-aU those great big buildings-very imposing
buildings [awed tone]-that was a business section-it wasn't a
residential section, like the section where I lived . . .
She went on, later in the hour, to make statements which
indicated that she experienced a similar loss of her sense of personal identity currently, upon the occasions of her coming over
from an outlying building where she was living to the relatively
large main building of the hospital, where my office is located,
for her sessions with me.
So much, then, for the mere presentation of examples of this
confusion between the self and the nonhuman environment.
Next, let us see what effect it may have upon the individual to
experience the loss, or the threat of loss. of elements of the nonhuman environment which possess the above-noted significancethe. loss, that is, of things which he reacts to as being parts of his
self.
What we find, in essence, is an effect which bears out the
theoretical formulation put forward by Stiircke ( t 45 ) in his
classic paper in 1921 entitled, "The Castration Complex," which
I mentioned in Chapter II. It will be recalled that he portrayed
the situation of the infant's being weaned from the breast as being
a primal castration. In essence, that is, be stated that the infant
reacts to the loss of the breast as constituting the loss of an inestimably important part of himself. The point I now wish to
emphasize is that for such patients as those referred to immediately above, the 10M of various elements of the nonhuman environment, elements which have become part of the person's
body image, may be experienced as a mutilation of the physical
154
body itself, entirely similarly to the reaction which may be felt

upon the loss of another person, or (as in the instance of the
mother's breast, in the paper by Starcke) a part of another
person, which has been experienced heretofore as a part of the
body image. In other words, it is my impression that the patient
reacts to separation from significant elements of the nonhuman
environment with the same feelings of having been physically
mutilated, as though he had been physically castrated or dismembered.
I cannot present clinical material which is sufficiently unequivocal to elevate this point beyond the level of a hypothesis. My
conviction concerning its validity is based chiefly upon work with
psychotic patients, work in which the decisive data concerning
this point consisted in feeling-tones conveyed by the patients and
responsive feelings aroused within myself upon my registering
their communications, which cannot be adequately reproduced
here in writing.
For example, the woman who was previously quoted as having
expressed to me the feeling that the left side of her head "is gone
. . . caved in" many times spoke with precisely the same tone
(of being physically mutilated) in many muttered, bereft references to the (quite real) desolation as regards the furnishings
of her room, whose barrenness contrasted so poignantly to the
beautiful furnishings of the home in which she grew up. It was
unforgettably moving to hear) among the great confusion of
fragmentary utterances which she made, references here and
there, as she looked at the bare-topped dresser and the few other
items of furniture which stood in her room, to the "beautiful
linen tablecloth," the "rug," the "lovely silver," and so on, with
the most bereft of facial expressions. The suffering which she
experienced in this regard-s-suffering which various of her other
symptoms made impossible to alleviate at all quickly-s-seemed
fully as immediate and intense as though she were experiencing
feelings of loss of parts of her body. In the early months of the
therapy she often used to grab at my penis, my glasses, my wrist
watch, and my belt, talking fragmentarily of her own desolation
at not possessing these, and it was my distinct impression that the
155
watch, the glasses, and other inanimate possessions caused her

to feel as painful a lack in herself as did my penis.
Another patient, a man in a manic psychosis, while also on a
disturbed floor, clearly seemed to me, over the first few months
of therapy there, to be holding onto some vestiges of rationality
chiefly through his desperate acquisition of, and clinging to,
many of the kinds of inanimate belongings-snch as beautiful
books) expensive clothes, and so on-in which he had found a
kind of shaky, social-prestige self-esteem for many years.
Schilder (128c) says,
Starcke has postulated that in psychosis the castration complex
plays the same part as the Oedipus complex plays in neurosis.
This would not be true if we considered only the genital part of
the castration complex; but there is some truth in his statement
if we consider the fear concerning the integrity of the body as a
whole, which comprises the pre-genital activities as well as the
genital ones. Fear of mutilation of any kind is based upon the
narcissistic love of our whole body. The dismembering motive
is the expression of the castration complex on the level of narcissistic self-love; in melancholia especially, where the sadistic
tendencies are so cruel and strong, disruption of the postural
model of the body is common. The melancholic subject denies the
existence of almost any part of the body. He complains that his
intestines have gone, that he can no longer urinate and defecate,
that he has no limbs; or he may complain that his limbs have
become enormous.
When one takes the above quotation from Schilder and puts
it together with those other passages previously quoted {rom his
volume, one sees that he has actually given us all the elements
needed to form the hypothesis which I have presented-namely,
that if various inanimate objects are experienced as being parts
of one's body image, then separation from those objects may be
experienced as a physical dismemberment, or other mutilation,
of one's body itself. Schilder did not go on to reach such a
hypothesis, however; Starcke had reached it as a theoretical reconstruction of what must have transpired in the life of the
156
normal infant, but did not present clinical data-as I have tried
to do here-indicative of this feeling-experience within the adult
patient.
In this connection it is useful to quote briefly from Admiral
Byrd's valuable book entitled, Alone:
The silence of this place is as real and solid as sound. More
real, in fact, than the occasional creaks of the Barrier and the
heavier concussions of snow quakes . . . It seems to merge in
and become part of the indescribable evenness, as do the cold
and the dark and the relentless ticking of the clocks. This evenness
fills the air with its mood of unchangeableness; it sits across from
me at the table} and gets into the bunk with me at night. And no
thought will wander so far as not eventually to be brought up
hard by it. This is timelessness in its ultimate meaning. Very
often my mood soars above it; but, when this mood goes, I find
myself craving change---a look at trees) a rock, a handful of earth,
the sound of foghorns, anything belonging to the world of movement and living things [22]..
And Thoreau, who during his two years of living alone in his
hut at Walden Pond, with only the barest of civilization's artifacts to sustain him, had likewise an extraordinary opportunity to
think upon the meaning of some of the elements of what I am
here terming the nonhuman environment, elements which exist in
the lives of most of us in such profusion that it is hard for us to
assess their importance to us:
We don garment after garment) as if we grew like exogenous
plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin} which partakes not
of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal
injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular
integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark,
which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the
man [154].
. . . a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which
he can afford to let alone [154a].
Psychosis and N eurosis
157
The latter of the above two quotations from Thoreau reminded

me of a newspaper photograph which appeared following the
death, a few years ago, of Mahatma Gandhi, showing the rnaterial possessions which this great man, whose spiritual richness
has probably seldom been exceeded in all of history, had at the time
of his death. They included only some ten articles--a pair of
sandals, two or three books, a pair of eyeglasses, a garment, and
a few other things. The total material worth of these articles was
less than two dollars. But Gandhi and Thoreau are surely exceptional in this regard; for most of us, myriad material possessions
form an integral part of our existence.
I have been dwelling upon the feelings of physical mutilation,
or intimate personal deprivation, which may ensue upon one's
having lost various elements of the nonhuman environment which
have constituted parts of one's body image. Closely related, of
course, is the anxiety experienced by one who is threatened by
such a loss which is impending. Such anxiety is most clearly discemible, in my experience, in those persons who have already,
as a consequence of rapidly advancing psychosis, lost contact with
nearly all of their nonhuman environment (as well, of course, as
their human environment) and are striving desperately to hold
onto, as it were, those few things with which they are psychologically in contact. On page 151 I described a young man who,
upon being admitted to the hospital in a state of acute schizophrenia, showed to what a great degree he had lost contact with
his nonhuman environment by gazing wonderingly at each of two
simple, inanimate objects in his environment--thc overhead light.
and the window in the door-and asking, in the naivete of a very
small child) "What's that for?" One sensed how utterly unable he
was to cope with any complexity in his environment, and how
desperately important to him was his ability to register the perception of these simple items in his surroundings.
Another young man, in psychoanalysis because of an obsessivecompulsive neurosis, remembered in detail his experiences when,
some years before, he had undergone schizophrenic symptoms
which had nearly, but not quite, overwhelmed him. These came
upon him with almost instantaneous suddenness, in a setting
158
which threatened him with the recognition of previously deeply

repressed oedipal conflicts. In the course of less than two hours
he had become so submerged in strange somatic experiences, so
subjectively cut off from the human beings--his mother and
father-about him, that he was in imminent danger of completely losing contact with reality. There was one thing) however,
with which he managed to retain a sense of contact: a picture,
on the wall of his bedroom, of a landscape. This one element in
his environment provided him with a sufficient feeling of possessing
a thread leading to reality, so that he was able to fall asleep and,
by the following morning, the psychotic symptoms had become
partially re-repressed, so that he was able to keep functioning, although these symptoms thereafter remained partially incapacitating for nearly two years.
Savage, in another, as yet unpublished article concerning LSD
psychoses, has reported a similar bit of clinical material:
. . . we forbade anyone to take the LSD in the absence of

medical supervision. One person [who was not a psychiatric
patient] decided to take LSD anyway. He took 100 micrograms
of LSD and holed up alone with an audograph to record his
experiences . . . [Then, as time passed, after he had experienced
various other symptoms: ] He felt as though he were wrapped
around with gauze and that an electric field insulated him from
the rest of the world. He could barely change the record.. He felt
that he was being sucked or drawn into the machine. He was then
faced with the fact that he was completely unable to shake off the
effect, that he was overwhelmed by it, that he had lost control
and that he was totally incapacitated.
. . . Some of his comments are quoted: "I heard a noise, thought
it was the repair man coming to replace me. I thought I heard
the repair cart ~ . They turned on this machine to shake me
.. It certainly is a good torture device, being hooked up to
a mind-reading outfit) thoughts being broadcast to the whole
world."
. . . he hated the recorder, felt chained to it, wanted to smash
it, but was not sure if he would not be destroying himself. . . .
[After about six hours] he alternately paced the floor and sat and
Psychosi: and Neurosis
159
stared at a piece of candy he had. He wanted desperately to eat

the candy but felt that it was his last link with reality, and that
if he ate it his last hold on reality was gone and he would be
permanently crazy [127].
Here we see that to this individual in an LSD psychosis the

audograph, although in reality an inanimate object, felt to him
to be an indissoluble part of himself, and likewise another inanimate object, the piece of candy which constituted to him a last
link with reality, possessed as much importance as though it were
a part of himself which it would be disastrous to lose.
In the last portion of his paper Savage ventures, on the basis
of such clinical experiences as those which he has been reporting,
a critique of the established modes of dealing with individuals
who are in a state of acute schizophrenia:
I would like to suggest that our treatment of the acute schizophrenic reaction is all wrong.. At a time when the schizophrenic
is desperately trying to hold onto some vestige of reality, we do
everything in our power to destroy his hold on reality. We take
him from his home, from there to the police station, from there
to the emergency hospital, from there to the admission ward, and
from there either to the treatment ward or to the mental hospital.
We cloud his sensorium with soporifics, and shock, dealing a blow
to his grasp on reality. We isolate him. We put him in a quiet
room, which seems about as unreal an environment as one could
ask for [127].
Although Savage is focusing in this paper primarily upon intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, not explicitly stressing the
importance of the nonhuman environment as such, it is implicit
in the passage just quoted that a considerable part of the trauma
suffered by the acute schizophrenic patient in the process of being
"treated" conventionally as Savage has described-treated in
such a way that his hold upon reality is further loosened rather
than strengthened-resides in his being forcibly separated not
only from persons at home who are familiar to him, but also from
the familiar nonhuman environment of his home. Freud long ago
160
described a symptom of the early stages of schizophrenia which

has been subsequently described as being frequently encountered in
this condition: a fantasy that the world is coming to ail end (46).
This has been ascribed, in the psychoanalytic literature, to a withdrawal of libido from other human beings in whom the patient's
libido had been invested (40b). Presumably an additional detenninant of this symptom, in those patients who have been
subjected to such a chain of changes in environment as Savage
describes, is the actual fact that the patient's known "world,"
the world which is familiar to him both as regards the other
persons in it and the nonhuman elements in it, has been taken
away from him,"
In the light of this integral importance which various items of
the schizophrenic's nonhuman environment can possess for him)
one sees how shockingly castrative is the coldly unfeeling disregard with which the parents are so often found to have dealt with
such things. For example, a schizoid youth who had no friends
was raising some ducks on his parents' farm, and loved to feed
the ducks and to spend his time watching them. His mother,
annoyed by the noise which the ducks made in the mornings,
summarily had them sent away, with no regard whatsoever for
their importance to her son. It was shortly after this that he
developed an overt paranoid schizophrenia, which led to a series of
prolonged hospitalizations. I do not mean, of course, to imply
that this was the sole precipitating cause of his first psychotic
break; I did get the definite impression in my work with him,
however, that this had constituted an important trauma. When
I undertook therapy with him, some years after the incident of
the ducks, he was in his fourth hospitalization and had been committed as being hopelessly insane. Early in my work with him I
had an interview with his father, who was also the legal guardian.
I stress this unfortunate side of patients' removal from their home surroundings because I feel it has been too little emphasized in the professional
literature, The potentially beneficial aspect of this procedure has more often
been pointed out, in such comments as this one by Rapaport (117): c' . the
removal of the patient from his usual surroundings to a hospital, and psy.
chotherapy itself, tend to deprive those defensive structures which have be..
come part and parcel of the patient's pathology of their stimulus-nutriment"
and thereby undermine their eHectiveness and persistence."
161
The father commented that he had just had a chat with his son
earlier that day, and had found him to be perturbed upon the
father's mentioning that he had just sold the young man's favorite
car. This car had been of the same order of importance to the
patient as a bosom friend would be, and the {ather showed an
utter lack of recognition of how much the car meant to his SOD,
both as a personally cherished object and as a symbol of the hope
that he might some day become able again to live outside the
hospital. The father commented to me, in the same chillingly
unfeeling way, that he had recently thrown away a lot of letters
which his son had received from a girl friend-the only person
with whom the son had been able to maintain a somewhat close
relationship prior to this hospitalization.
Similarly in the case of a thirty-six-year-old schizophrenic man,
his automobile was of the greatest importance to him, both as
having been a kind of most intimate personal friend and as being,
now that he was in the depths of an unusually profound psychosis, a major symbolic link with life outside the hospital. His
pleasure and confidence in driving had been, apparently, among
the last of his normal activities to become invaded by the psychotic process, In the course of an interview which I had with
his mother and father, at a time when it was touch-and-go as to
whether the patient could ever manage to respond to our therapeutic efforts, and when he desperately needed the reassurance
that his own family members cared for him and were genuinely
dedicated to his recovery, his mother casually mentioned to me in
an utterly matter-or-fact way, in passing, "We've sold his car. We
haven't told him about it. We thought if he ever got out [her tone
here being that with which one might comment, "if it doesn't
rain tomorrow," or "if the morning paper doesn't come"] we
could get him another one, anyway."
Another measure of the emotional significance which nonhuman objects can possess for human beings is the grief that
evidently wells up in a patient who, having long been hospitalized
in rooms necessarily quite barren as contrasted to the surroundings to which he had been accustomed in his life at home, is
suddenly exposed to surroundings relatively rich in those non-
162
human elements, serving to remind him of the so much fuller life

he had known before the onset of his psychosis.
I think, for example, of one young woman, long hospitalized
on the disturbed ward because of a severe schizophrenic psychosis,
who upon starting to come to my office for her hours, at first
seemed quite overwhelmed by the grief occasioned by her seeing
my glass ash trays, the rug on the floor, the attractive desk, the
drapes at the window, and so on-all being of a sort which are
quite unremarkable by ordinary standards, but quite impossible
to afford to persons as destructive as she had been. She made
clear that the pain and grief which these caused her had to do
with her being reminded of the furnishings of the beautiful home
in which she had grown up. This woman, incidentally, is the
same person whom I mentioned earlier as being some one whose
feelings of physical mutilation seemed to be in part attributable
to her having been separated from her familiar nonhuman environment. Material possessions, and other nonhuman elements,
had been of much more than ordinary importance in her upbringing, deficient as it was in love from the human beings about
her.
As a second example of this same point, I shall mention briefly
my work with a schizophrenic man who helped me to see, quite
clearly, what may in many cases be the psychodynamics at the
basis of the frequently seen circumstance that schizophrenic persons want all or nothing. That is, they function in the following
terms, and often actually verbalize them: "I have to have my
life just as it was before, or I don't want anything. I'm not
interested in simply having the opportunity to go into Rockville
or Washington; I want only to have restored to me all my life as
it was.') In other words, they seem to demand the whole loaf;
they show no interest whatsoever in having a quarter of the loaf,
or half of it, or even nine tenths of it.
This particular man made me realize that it was, in a sense,
much lese; painful for him to remain constantly in bed, not doing
anything, than to walk about out of the hospital and about the
nearby conununity. When he began doing this latter, he would
see people tending their lawns and their flower gardens, and this
163
overwhelmed him with grief and nostalgia about the lawn and
the flower garden which had been, as it were, his dearest companions at home. Some of my frustration at this man's extreme
slowness in leaving my office, at the end of each psychotherapeutic session, was resolved when I realized that he was lingering not
primarily because he wanted to make life difficult for me, but
because he loved to sit and look at the telephone} which was to
him like a piece of his former life} a piece which he was not able
to sit and gaze upon during his life on the ward. So I came to
realize, in short, that it was more tolerable to him to have, as it
were, nothing of his former life in the nonhuman environment
about him now than to be exposed to various inanimate reminders of that life, a life which he could not yet have in anything like
its entirety. It is my belief that such a process is at the basis of
many patients' great difficulty in making the transition from
living on a sparsely furnished disturbed floor to living in an
unlocked hospital building, or an outpatient residence, where
they are now exposed to so many grief- and nostalgia-stimulating
elements in this more complex nonhuman environment.
In this same connection I shall mention briefly two other clinical examples. I recall feeling profoundly moved by a description,
given by a woman newly admitted to the hospital for a chronic
manic-depressive psychosis at the moment in a hypomanic phase,
of how she had felt upon being allowed to spend a day or two
in the marital home where she had lived for many years with her
husband and her three children, a home which she had not seen
for several years because of prolonged hospitalization. She had
only this brief interlude in her home before having to come, at
the insistence of her family and the advice of the doctors, to
Chestnut Lodge for further hospital treatment. All the children
were grown up and had left this home some time before. What
was most poignant in her account was her description of her
treasuring the time she could spend with the inanimate but
deeply cherished furnishings of the horne, including furniture,
pictures on the wall, and so forth, which she had known and
cared for long ago, before her illness began. It seemed so clear
to me that it had been to a great degree upon these things that
164
her love, over the years before her illness, had been bestowed. My
impression was that her husband and children, who had much
reason to shun her because of the dominating, devouring quality
of her efforts to give them love, had given her to feel that it was
only these inanimate things in her environment which did not
reject her reaching out-which could, as it were, accept her love.
Similarly, another patient, upon returning to Chestnut Lodge after
her first visit to her marital home in two and a half years, told her
therapist that she came to realize, during that visit, how much of
her feelings had been directed, all along, toward objects rather
than toward people.
The next point I want to make is a hypothesis that the ideational content of a psychosis may be looked upon as an effort to
fill the void left by the loss of reality-including, importantly, the
loss of the familiar nonhuman environment, as well as the loss of
contact with important other persons.. 'That is, my clinical experience has suggested to me that-as I have been indicating by the
foregoing clinical examples-the loss of the familiar nonhuman
elements of the patient's environment leaves in him a greater feeling of loss (whether conscious or, more often, unconscious) than
we have realized, and, further, that such psychotic phenomena as
his hallucinating of abundant nonhuman as well as human figures may constitute an unconscious attempt on his part to avoid
experiencing the fullness of this loss.
Although the dread which we hear expressed by neurotic or
prepsychotic patients, concerning the horrors which the prospect
of "going crazy" holds for them, is perhaps most often couched in
terms of their anticipating that insanity would bring into their
life various experiences which would be in themselves terrifying,
it is not a new concept in psychiatry that, when such dreads (con..
cealing often, as is well known, unconscious longings) are swept
aside, the really greatest trauma that psychosis actually brings,
the actually greatest suffering that it causes when it comes, is to
be found in the loss which it entails-the loss in the sense of relatedness to other human beings, the loss of psychological and
physical functions which regression involves, and-I wish to
stress here-the loss, too, of those myriad nonhuman elements in
165
the home environment which have formed an integral part of

the individual's personality functioning.
In this connection, we find that Fenichel has stated that
In neuroses two steps must be distinguished ~ (a) the repression
of the objectionable demand of the id, and (b) its return in a
distorted form. In the development of psychoses two analogous
steps can be seen: ( a) the break with reality, and (b) the
attempts to gain the lost reality.
However, as Freud has pointed out, there are characteristic
differences. In neuroses, the second step, the return of the repressed from repression, is of more importance in producing the
illness; in psychoses, loss of reality causes the pathological result
[4Oc].
And he comments, concerning delusions, that they represent
"an attempt to supplant the lost parts of reality" (40d).
Thus Fenichel stresses the importance of the loss inherent in
psychosis, although, as usual, he implies that he has in mind only
the loss of other human beings. Hill shows at least a cognizance
that what I am terming the nonhuman environment is of some
importance when he says, concerning the changes in an individual's subjective experience upon his becoming schizophrenic, that
UWhat is lost is an adequate grasp upon the perceivable environment, particularly the human environment, and the ability to
evaluate its meanings" (78b; my italics) .
Even such an implication that there is a nonhuman environment, which may possess psychological significance, is rarely encountered in psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature.
Werner states that
. . . in the incipient stages of schizophrenia the invasion of
the subjective forms of activity into the objective world is felt
not as an enrichment of the content of the personal life] as with
normal primitive types] but as an impoverishment. A patient
says: "Reality, as it was formerly, no longer exists. Real life has
suffered a decline." 5 There is a specific sign, a sign not present
This clinical item is from Storchls volume (148) t now out of print.
166
in other primitive types, which is characteristic of schizophrenic

reality, and that is its insubstantiality. Provided that the schizophrenic is not already completely wrapped in his own delusions,
is not making himself at home in an entirely autistic reality, he
will frequently feel this de-differentiation of objectivity as a loss
of a stable, substantial, secure world [162u].
Furman (56), in her description of a severe ego disturbance in

a girl about three and a half years of age, includes a comment
which suggests how great a loss, in one's experiencing of the surrounding nonhuman as well as human environments, may result
from the utilization of denial as an ego defense:
Carol used internal and external denial extensively. She would
not see or hear. . . As she began to express herself verbally,
she summed up her defense once, when she saw a block building,
by saying, "Sometimes I am angry with the building, and then
it's not a building."
The impoverishment of the perceived world for some adult

schizophrenics I have known, traceable in part to this mechanism
of denial, is difficult to exaggerate, and approximates that of the
subject in the isolation experiments described by Heron et al.
(74) and Lilly (95). In these latter situations, as is by now well
known, hallucinations occur as if to fill the void caused by the ex..
perimentally induced sensory deprivation. With one of my adult
schizophrenic patients whom I had long known to be hallucinating frequently in auditory, visual, and oHactory spheres, it came
as a source of amazement to me when she was able to convey
how unpeopled and otherwise bleak was the basic perceived
world, for her, upon which these hallucinatory phenomena-were
projected. In one hour with me, for example, though sitting only
a few feet from me and looking into my face, she anxiously conveyed to me that she felt herself to be on a deserted street; her
anxiety about this went far beyond what a mere reproach to me,
for not being more interactive with her, would imply. Another
patient finally confided to me, after years of therapy, that she had
long doubted that anyone really exists. Another schizophrenic
167
woman (the patient of another therapist on the staff}, to whom

I gave a lift in my car on the hospital grounds, asked with a
bereft facial expression and in an anxious tone as she sat down
next to me] "Do you think there is any world there?" I replied,
wannly and reassuringly, "Sure-there's plenty of world there..
You doubt it sometimes?" To this she said, in a way which left
me deeply moved, "I doubt there is any world left, because of my
experiences." 6
In the previously mentioned account by Admiral Byrd there is
a passage which is of value for this particular point. During his
almost unendurably lonely months at his Antarctic outpost he
became exposed after a time to carbon monoxide fumes, from
a defective engine] which nearly cost him his life. In his description of the despair which he experienced when his physical state
was at its lowest ebb, he gives us a profound glimpse into the importance which one's nonhuman environment-as well, of
course, as one's human environment-possesses in giving one's
life its dearness, its deepest meaning:
The dark side of a man's mind seems to be a sort of antenna
tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions. I found it
so with mine. That was an evil night. It was as if all the world's
vindictiveness were concentrated upon me as upon a personal
enemy. I sank to depths of disillusionment which I bad not believed possible..... eventually, my faith began to make itself
felt; and by concentrating on it and reaffinning the truth about
In this unconscious denial of outer reality, as in the instance of every
other symptom of schizophrenia, there can be discerned evidence of not only
a pathologic process, but also of a restitutive, or striving-toward-health
process. This latter is revealed in the circumstance that the denial of outer
reality serves to provide the patient with a more or less blank screen upon
which a necessary reprojection of pathologic introjects, an externalization of
mternal conflicts derived from the past, can now be effected. This unconscious denial of the outer world can be seen) thus, to provide a tool analogous to the relatively "neutral screen" atmosphere which the psychoanalyst
deliberately attempts to foster) in working with the neurotic patient, in the
knowledge that such an atmosphere promotes this potentially useful projecting and externalizing. The psychot.i~ patient is usually so overwhelmed
by the welter of Introjects which emerge, onto the blank screen which I have
described, that it is difficult for the therapist-who often finds himself overwhelmed by the welter of projections coming from the patient-s-to realize
that there is this potentially constructive side to the matter.
168
the universe as I saw it, I was able again to fill my mind with
the fine and comforting things of the world that had seemed.
irretrievably lost. I surrounded myself with my family and
friends; 1 projected myself into the sunlight, into the midst of
green, growing things. I thought of all the things I would do
when I got home; and a thousand matters which had never been
more than casual now became surpassingly attractive and important. But time after time I slipped back into despond. Con...
centration was difficult, and only by the utmost persistence could
I bring myself out of it. But ultimately the disorder left my mind;
and, when I blew out the candles and the lantern, I was living
in the world of the imagination-a simple, uncomplicated world
made up of people who wished each other well, who were peace...
ful and easy-going and kindly [22a; my italics] .
I do not possess unequivocal clinical data concerning this

point; that is my reason for terming it only a hypothesis. That is,
I cannot present clinical material clearly portraying patients'
utilization of psychotic ideation to fill the void which has been
caused by the loss of familiar reality, in particular nonhuman
reality. But the following clinical vignette, despite its "human"
frame of reference, shows the kind of process which is, I believe,
at work also as regards the nonhuman environment.
The patient was an ambulatory schizophrenic young man who
was in psychotherapy with me in an outpatient clinic. His paranoid
ideation was so formidable that he could barely maintain himself
outside a hospital and he lived, of course, an extremely isolated
existence. He initially sought psychotherapy partly because of
his being tortured b-y obsessive thoughts of a homosexual nature.
Mter a time, as he began to respond to psychotherapy, I noticed
in one of the hours that there were now two indications that he
was improving: he no longer referred to his feeling of loneliness
as something constant, but rather as being, now, intermittent;
and he mentioned that he was no longer having the "perverted
thoughts," as he called them. But then, during the next hour,
in emphasizing to me his loneliness, he said in a distinctly regret..
ful tone, "I don't even have the fears [that is, the "perverted
thoughts"] I used to have. Sometimes 1 compare which is worse
169
[the "perverted thoughts" which he used to have, or the loneliness which he now feels]. Before, I had so much to think about
that I didn't have time to think about feeling lonely. Now I
haven't anything to think about. It's all loneliness."
Throughout much of this chapter I have been emphasizing that
the nonhuman environment is more than normally important to
the ego of the developing individual-typically a very lonely
individual-who subsequently becomes schizophrenic. On the
immediately preceding few pages I have been stressing the importance which the loss of this nonhuman environment represents, therefore) to the individual who, having become psychotic,
is now separated from that environment which had been familiar
to him and had formed, to a considerable extent, a part of his
very ego.
There is another form of "loss" of the familiar nonhuman environment, a more chronic state of affairs, which can be seen in
neurotic as well as psychotic individuals. This is actually more
accurately described as a failure to develop an even average degree of relatedness with one's nonhuman environment, because
of one's need, in growing up in a home setting of much intrafamilial tension, to be constantly alert to emotional undercurrents
flowing among other persons, and between oneself and these
other persons. Similarly, some children are hampered in their
development of a feeling of direct relatedness to their nonhuman
environment if their parents "spoil" them by incessantly bathing
them in a kind of basically destructive admiration and approval,
or scorn and disapproval, for the children's way of dealing with
various nonhuman objects in the environment. In such circumstances, the child's need to become acquainted with his nonhu...
man environment in its own right is interfered with by reason of
his becoming convinced that this nonhuman environment is not
to be meaningfully related to directly, as giving pleasure which
can be an end in itself, but rather only as a means of gaining the
parents' approval or of avoiding the parents' disapproval. There
are many moments in a child's life when he or she needs to be
given the privacy to relate to the nonhuman environment, and
when a parent at such a moment starts to shower praise, for
170
example, on the child, this does indeed "spoil" what has been an
important ego-building experience. In a subsequent chapter I
shall present clinical data bearing upon this point. .,
This latter kind of "loss" of the nonhuman environment seems
to be more characteristic of those persons who are still striving
for interpersonal acceptance; the more deeply ill persons) those
who have become largely reconciled to their own unacceptability
in the eyes of the human beings about them, are the ones who
tum to their nonhuman environment and endeavor to make the
most of it.
I have expressed my conviction that the normal individual and
the schizophrenic individual are alike in having experienced a
developmental phase in which the ego is subjectively indistinguishable from the surrounding environment, including the nonhuman elements in that environment; and, further, alike in that the
unconscious (now, in the schizophrenic, to a considerable extent
in consciousness) possesses much content material which is of
nonhuman origin (that is to say, which originated from past perceptions of elements in the nonhuman environment). I have
stated that one sees in the schizophrenic person, by contrast to
f Since this passage was written I have come upon a paper> U yet unpublished, by Brodey (19) which presents relevant data from his work at
The National Institute of Mental Health. He participated in a most interesting investigation, beaded by L. Murray Bowen, which involved the plychothecapy of schizophrenic patients and their familles, housed on the same
hospital ward. On the basis of two years of experience in this study he presents, among other findings, evidence of the schizophrenic patient's blotting
out much of external reality and reacting to the mother's inner workings 35
if these were the on ly reality.
Incidentally, this schizophrenic experience of external reality which Brodey
reports is reminiscent of the lack of significance attributed, in such psychoanalytic literature as that by Elkisch and Mahler, Spitz, Tausk, Hartmann,
and the others whom I have mentioned, to the nonhuman environment in
its own right. It seems to me that these writers have assumed, as the prototype of the normal ego state in infancy, a state of affairs in the infant-mother
relationship which is in actuality highly pathological-namely, such a state
of affairs as is found by Broder to exist between the schizophrenic and his
mother, in which the mother's own ego organization is so fragile that the
child must accept her projections and denials as constituting his only
external reality.
Brodey's data are closely comparable with some of the transference data
from my individual work with patients. See, for example, the data (p. 352)
indicative of a patient's apparently experiencing me as comprising the totality
of her external reality---comprising even the walls of her room.
171
the situation obtaining in the normal person, an impairment of

the ability to distinguish between the self and the surrounding
nonhuman environment, with, at times, extraordinarily intense
anxiety in this connection. As this volume proceeds I shan endeavor, from time to time, to explain why the schizophrenic
differs from the normal person here. For the moment, let me
bring up only one of the developmental factors which, I think,
make for this difference: the schizophrenic person had, as a child
and as an adolescent, to tum more than did his normal counterpart to various elements in his nonhuman environment~to
books, to animal pets, to trees, and so on-in search of the
companionship, the relatedness, the reassurance of there being a
meaning in life, which he was not finding to an adequate degree
in his relations with other human beings.
From the history of, and from intensive psychotherapy with,
one schizophrenic person after another I have found abundant
data pointing toward such a lonely early life, a life in which the
nonhuman environment was not merely of great importance but,
it would not be too much to say, of life-saving importance.
In the instance of one schizophrenic patient I have treated,
our social worker included the following remarks in her report
of an Interview with the mother: "From the mother of the
patient I get a picture of a conforming child who realized that it
would be easier for her if she did not do things which annoy the
mother, Her childhood may have been isolated because I got
nothing of friends and playmates in the picture. Material posses..
sions were bountiful and the girl and her brother both went to
the very best of schools, had parties, etc. When she got out of
school she had a Packard convertible." In my own work with
this patient I found evidence that the "material possessions" had
been of as much importance to her as though they had been,
literally, of her own flesh and blood. I have seen a number of
instances in which a schizophrenic patient had evidently succeeded, for many years, in staving off the eventually overwhelming psychosis, chiefly through the maintenance of a relationship
with a dog, a dog that provided the individual with the com..
panionship, the love, and the assurance of being needed by the
172
individual, which were unobtainable from the available human

beings.
One such patient revealed, upon the outbreak of his schizophrenic psychosis, a capacity for psychological insight which his
family members had never suspected; one of the statements now
made by this man who had been, they felt, entirely contented
with what had been in actuality a life almost incredibly desolate
as regards human relationships and rendered supportable mainly
by a faithful cat, was, "People should love people, not cats."
Much later, after many months of psychotherapy, this man man..
aged to convey to me his cherishing of our relationship; he had
not yet achieved the ability to express fond feelings in an unambivalent way, but when on one occasion he protested to me,
"Why have you treated me like an animal here?" his tone was
actually one of love and gratitude which quite overbalanced the
ostensibly condemnatory content of his question. It was evident
here that, for him, being treated "like an animal" meant being
treated with genuine love---Iove such as he had bestowed upon
his cat over the years, for lack of family members who could
receive and value it--despite the usual conventional meaning of
that expression..
A schizophrenic woman had been reared in a very strict
Methodist rural home in the Midwest, with very little companionship beside her paranoid mother, her paranoid maternal
grandfather, her bullying elder brother, her dog, and a number
of horses, I have never had experience with another such therapeutically resistant, paranoid folie deux as that in which this
patient and her mother were enmeshed. It was not surprising to
find that the modicum of emotional health which persisted in
this patient had been) apparently, a function of her experience
with nonhuman elements in her home environment. The nurses
used to report that) on the ward, she was "acting horsey't-s-just one
of the indications that she had formed identifications with the
horses who had supplied so much of her childhood's healthy companionship. This patient, whose name was Miss Holden, was still
childless as her childbearing potentiality was drawing to a close,
173
and for some years she had been poignantly expressing her desire
to carry on the family name (there being no married male siblings) by naming a succession of her horses "Holden
/'
"Holden
," "Holden
~u and so on. In one of her
psychotherapeutic sessions) although she never showed grieI about
the separation from the human beings of her childhood, she once
said, looking out at a tree neat her window, "There's a tree like
that down in Reedville (the small community at the edge of
which she had grown up]," with tears streaming down her
cheeks. Two of the few occasions when I felt that I was being
allowed a glimpse into the nonpsychotic areas of this deeply ill
woman's personality came during a few walks in which I accompanied her about the hospital grounds. On one such stroll, the
trees were covered with sparkling ice on a beautiful winter's
morning, and she showed appreciation of this scene in a rare
moment of freedom from psychosis. During another walk, in the
spring, as we went by a barnyard where two horses were standing, she approached them) patted their heads and spoke to them
tenderly, with a kind of confident familiarity) a freedom from
anxiety, such as I had never seen her manifest in relation to any
human being.
Hill gives us a description of a somewhat similar patient,
whose emotional relatedness was, likewise, strikingly in reference
to her nonhuman environment:
I recall one patient who, being afraid that the house was wired,
would not talk to me in her home but insisted on walking in the
garden, through which ran a stream.. To my moderate distress
she picked out of the stream a little red scorpion, a tadpole, and a
frog and insisted that I hold them while we talked. It developed
that this girl lived what to her was her real life out in this garden.
She was on intimate terms with all the cold-blooded animals and
a good many of the plants. I made some comment upon the
absence of human beings, and the girl informed me that she
would have supposed that I, a psychoanalyst, would interpret the
scorpion-a little red fellow-as having to do with her father's
penis. She went on to add that she could not tolerate her father
174
in any form and was glad to know that I had not regarded the
scorpion as representing him. She then went on to explain which
of the cold-blooded animals represented her mother. One turtle in
particular reminded her of mother in its well-encased defensiveness, Others of the animals represented a sister and a dead
brother. I never found out which of them represented me. This
girl had some ability in writing poetry, none of which made any
reference to human beings other than herself [78a].
I come, now, to this chapter's final theoretical point: the inability of the schizophrenic to make clear distinctions between
himself and his nonhuman environment, and between the human
and the nonhuman elements of his environment, fonns one of the
roots of his inability-an inability described by Goldstein (62),
Benjamin (to), and others-to employ figurative language
knowingly, Le., knowing it to be figurative. Do we not see that
first-mentioned inability reflected in, for example, the following
language peculiarities of the schizophrenic as described by Arieti?
If one says, "When the eat's away, the mice will play:' a
normal listener will understand that by cat is meant a person
in authority. A schizophrenic patient gave the following literal
interpretation of that proverb: "There are all kinds of cats and
all kinds of mice, but when the cat is away, the mice take advantage of the cat." In other words, for the schizophrenic the word
"cat" could not acquire a special connotation. . . .
Many beginners in the field of psychiatry get the impression
that schizophrenic language and thought are highly metaphorical
and poetic. In reality it is not so. . . . For instance, a schizophrenic will be able to identify a man with a wolf on account of
a common characteristic, greediness, but will not be able to
accept the concept wolf as a symbol of greedy men [4a].
That is, in my experience, the schizophrenic patient's thinking
is largely restricted to a literal, concrete level because he must
struggle to distinguish bettueen, for example, human beings and
animals, or human beings and inanimate objects. He is not able
to make such distinctions sufficiently easily to be able to move 00,
175
in his thinking, to the higher level of being able to refer to alI

these in abstract, figurative terms, terms which so often involve
equating one kind of perceptual object with another, in many
ways very different, kind of perceptual object. He is too prone to
mixing all of them up, in his thinking-too vulnerable to confusing them with one another, even at a literal leveL
A schizophrenic man was sitting, during a therapeutic session,
on the couch near me, looking at my face as he talked in a pleading, protesting way, asking for answers to various questions. As
usual, I was not attempting to answer these, but rather was pressing to hear more of the thinking which lay behind them. He
seemed to be trying, as was his long-established custom, to get
some reaction from me, by trying to get me to give answers, or by
trying to make me laugh, or what not. His demeanor kept conveying that he felt it hopeless to make me behave toward him
differently from my being, as he interpreted my investigative approach, "always angry-my therapist is always angry at me."
He next said, in very much the same tone of discouragement and
exasperation, that his father had recently purchased some heavy
floor lamps for the parents' apartment, lamps so heavy that one
could move them only with great difficulty.
I commented) "And you feel, perhaps, that your therapist is
like the heavy floor lamps-very hard to move?" I was trying
to encourage his expressing his feelings-feelings which had
been communicated for many months by his facial expressions
and his verbal tone, but which he had never actually verbalized
in any detail-eonceming my way of responding to him.
At this comment he laughed as though it were ridiculous,
saying, "No, I know you're not a floor lamp, Dr. Searles." I
persisted, "But do you feel there's some similarity-that both the
floor lamp and I are heavy, hard to move?" He replied, still
laughing as though the idea were utterly ridiculous, ccNo-I
know you're not a floor lamp. There's a floor lamp," he said,
pointing to the one in my office, "and there's Dr. Searles," he
finished, pointing toward me.
For somewhat more than two years, this man repeatedly expressed to me his conviction, an unmistakably sincere conviction,
176
that I was crazy. He was sure of this for the reason, among
others, that I use such figures of speech as that described above.
It eventually became clear that the precariousness of his own ego
boundaries, a condition which had been inconspicuous because
of his fairly good social facade, was such that he was not yet able
to think in such figurative terms. One indication of his proneness
to confusion in this regard was his extreme concern, shown for
some months during his life on the ward) to keep his material
possessions from becoming "mixed up with" those of other
patients. After approximately three and a half years of therapy,
this man began to show the very fundamental change of now
being able more and more to think and converse effectively in
figurative terms and, by the same token, in comparative terms.
It was now possible for him to compare one person with another
and one relationship with another; to compare his own feelings,
so mixed and rapidly changing, with the changeable weather
which sometimes included simultaneous rain and sunshine; and
so on. His thinking was now at last freed from its attachment to
the concrete, the literal; and the therapy accelerated as if it had
found wings.
Clinical experiences of this kind indicate that, in normal development, the establishment of finn ego boundaries is necessary to
the evolution of metaphorical (and other varieties of symbolic)
thinking} as a number of writers (41, 45, 90) 91, 97, 98, 138)
have stated. But we find in this material a hint, too, that the
process works in the other direction as well: the evolution of
symbolic thinking is one of the factors which helps to free the
child (or the adult who is recovering from schizophrenia) from
his erstwhile identification with the nonhuman world.
I have mentioned Kris's discussion of the reasons for the late
appearance, in the history of art, of caricature; he pointed to the
evidence of a decrease in peoples' belief in image-magic} and I
mentioned that the same evidence he adduces suggests) also, that
people had achieved, by now, a sufficiently comfortable differentiation from the nonhuman world that they now found it not
sinister} but humorous, to see themselves caricatured as animals
177
or inanimate objects. One passage from Kris's chapter on this

subject was very reminiscent, to me, of the above-described man's
significant new freedom from concrete experience:
The birth of caricature as an institution marks a conquest of
a new dimension of freedom of the human mind, no more, but
perhaps no less, than the birth of rational science in the work
of Galileo Galilei {8ge].
Anxiery Lest One Become,

or Be Revealed As, Nonhuman
CHAPTER
The psychopathological phenomena which will be presented

from now on, in this chapter and in all the subsequent ones in
Part Three, are referable to the basic ego defect 1 which I have
just been discussing: the inability of the psychotic patient-and
to a lesser degree, of the neurotic patient-fully to distinguish
between his self and the nonhuman environment about him.
These phenomena will be seen to be either facets of, ramifications of, or in some instances contributory causes of, that basic
confusion.
1 When I say "the basic ego defect" I mean, of course, basic 10 far as this
special subject of the nonhuman environment is concerned; I am not trying
to say that this defect is more basic or important than various ones which
have to do with the patient's int.,personal relatioDi--8uch as his not yet
having achieved a clear realization, at a deep Ievel, of the ego boundaries
deiimiting his self from other people. Always, in this book, I am deacribing
what] believe to be a major s'gment of developmental psychology and psychopathology~ rather than the whole of these subjects.
179
& has been indicated already, in the small bits of clinical data
which I have presented thus far, this basic confusion results in, on
the one hand, disturbances in the patient's conception of his self,
and, on the other hand, disturbances in his conception of his environment. These two broad consequences thus provide us with
two categories-admittedly arbitrary and somewhat artificial-into which the clinical data about this entire subject, this actually so unitary subject, can be arranged for the sake of an
organized presentation.
Chapters VII through IX will focus upon disturbances in the
first of these two broad categories - disturbances in the concep..
tion of the self-and Chapters X through XII will deal with
disturbances in the conception of the environment. Chapter
XIII, the final chapter of Part Three, will discuss both such
disturbances as seen in the setting of the patient-therapist relationship.
So) now, I shall begin with one of the manifestations of the
psychotic or neurotic patient's warped conception of his self: his
anxiety lest he become, or be revealed as, nonhuman.
In 1952 Szalita-Pemow (152) made, in a paper concerning
schizophrenia, the following important comment: "While the
term regression is used primarily to designate a definite defense
mechanism, I consider that regression in its main structure is
what we defend ourselves against."
In my own work I have seen this statement convincingly
documented in a number of instances, by patients who showed
an unmistakable-and well-founded-anxiety lest they regress to
an infantile state, with all the devastating loss of adult functions
which such a change would entail. One might, it has seemed to
me, think of this as one form of castration anxiety; certainly it is
hard to think of a more effective form of "castration" than such
regression, when it actually occurs, brings with it.
But the concept which I wish now to advance goes a step
further and, to the best of my knowledge, has not previously been
stated in the literature. That is, I believe that we (l.e., human
beings in general) have anxiety-usually at an unconscious level,
and under extraordinary circumstances at a conscious level-
180
not merely lest we regress ontogenetically (to an infantile or an

intrauterine state, for example) but also lest we regress further,
phylogenetically as it were, to an animal, vegetable, or even inorganic state. Such anxiety is particularly intense, in my experience, in neurosis and psychosis-above all, in the latter.
Evidence for this concept presents itself in a number of areas;
I shall deal with the more general of these areas before tuming
to that of my own major interest, psychotherapy with schizo..
phrenic patients.
The myths of ancient Greece and Rome reflect mankind's
anxiety and fascination with this subject, in their richness in
incidents wherein. human beings are changed, sometimes by
wicked beings, more often by avenging gods, into animals, trees,
or stones (66). A few among many examples are the Gorgons
(creatures with wings and scales, and with snakes instead of
hair on their heads) turning into stone whomever gazed upon them
(66a) ; the enchantress Circe's turning men into swine and other
animals (66b); Niobe's being changed into a stone by the gods,
because of her arrogance toward them (66c); and Callisto's
being changed into a bear by jealous Hera) whose husband Zeus
had fallen in love with this young maiden (66d). The following
myth of Dryope, being brief, can be given in full:
With her sister lole she went one day to a pool intending to
make garlands for the nymphs. She was carrying her little son,
and seeing near the water a lotus tree full of bright blossoms she
plucked some of them to please the baby. To her horror she saw
drops of blood flowing down the stem. The tree was really the
nymph, Lotis, who fleeing from a pursuer had taken refuge in
this form" When Dryope, terrified at the ominous sight, tried to
hurry away, her feet would not move; they seemed rooted to the
ground. Iole watching her helplessly saw bark begin to grow upward covering her body. It had reached her face when her husband came to the spot with her father. lole cried out what had
happened and the two, rushing to the tree, embraced the still
warm trunk and watered it with their tears. Dryope had time only
to declare that she had done no wrong intentionally and to beg
Psyohosis and Neurosis
181
them to bring the child often to the tree to play in its shade, and
some day to tell him her story so that he would think whenever
he saw the spot: "Here in this tree-trunk my mother is hidden."
"Tell him too," she said, "Never to pluck flowers, and to think
every' bush may be a goddess in disguise." Then she could speak
no more; the bark closed over her face. She was gone forever
[66e].
Fairy tales likewise show mankind's concern with this subject;

in them, also, the tragedy often presents itself in the form of the
hero's or heroine's being turned into some nonhuman form, and
the final triumph is represented by a liberation into human fonn
once more, or, in some instances, liberation into some beautiful
form of animal life. Two of Hans Christian Andersen's tales may
be mentioned as examples. In The Wild Swans, eleven princes
are turned, by their stepmother, the wicked queen, into wild
swans, and are eventually freed into their human form again by
their devoted sister, who casts over each of them a shirt which
she has knitted out of flax made from stinging nettles, thus
breaking the spell (2). In The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, an arrogant, selfish little girl falls into the clutches of a witch who
turns her into a statue. She is eventually liberated, many years
later, by a child's sympathy and by her
contrition, and flies
away as a bird (2a).
In the Bible (Genesis 19: 26) we find, of course, the oft..
repeated story of God's turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt.
And Christian sects have long held that man is separated from
the Godhead primarily by reason of his own "animal" impulses
-sensuality, greed, and so on.
Dante's Inferno (27), the classic conception of Christianity's
Hell, which was written in approximately 1307 t describes, as a
punishment of one group of the damned, their having been
turned into stunted and poisonous trees:
own
Not green the foliage, but of colour dusky; not smooth the
branches, but gnarled and warped; apples none were there, but
withered sticks with poison [27a].
182
And Dante tells of his experience with them, when, unknowinglyThen I stretched my hand a little forward, and plucked a
branchlet from a great thorn; and the trunk of it cried, UWhy
dost thou rend me?"
And when it had grown dark with blood, it again began to
cry: "Why dost thou tear me? hast thou no breath of pity?
"Men we were, and now are turned to trees: truly thy hand
should be more merciful, had we been souls of serpents" [27b].
In general literature, too, we find not infrequently the theme

of a person's turning into some nonhuman form. In Robert
Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (147), the quite
civilized Dr. Jekyll turns at times into the subhuman monster,
Mr. Hyde. In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (86), a man
awakens one morning to find that he has been transformed into
a giant insect. These horror stories are only two of the best known
among many such accounts. John Collier, a specialist in what
the Germans call Galgenhumor (literally, gallows humor), mixes
amusement with horror in his short story, Green Thoughts (24),
about a carnivorous plant, among the fronds of which the heads
of its victims appear in succession. Such stories occupy a fairly
prominent place among those which fill the pulp magazines of
fantasy and science fiction; irrespective of the literary merit of
such magazines, the popular appeal of such stories-which a
glance at any newsstand shows-is a significant psychological
fact, and is the point which I am making here.
I shall present clinical material, concerning the anxiety lest
one regress to an infrahuman level, from two schizophrenic
patients. Data to be found later, concerning subsequent theoretical points, will be seen to substantiate this point also. One
might phrase it thus: the habitual utilization, in the face of
recurrent or chronic anxiety, of this particular ego defense,
namely that of dedifferentiation, or regression, to a state of
subjective oneness with the nonhuman world, interferes, more
than does the utilization of other ego defenses (such as, for
instance, the intellectualization employed by the obsessional or
Psychosu and
~euro~
183
the dramatization employed by the hysteric) with the development and maintenance of a sense of humanness, an identity as
a human being.
A thirty-one-year-old paranoid schizophrenic woman, whom I
saw in intensive psychotherapy for somewhat more than two and
a half years, showed this type of anxiety as one of the most
prominent elements in her complex delusional system.
For example, here is a portion of a nursing report:
Between 1 and 2 A.M. lying on hall seat-looking thoroughly
miserable. "I feel tenible all over, and if they tum me into a
fish again I'll die" (It was storming at the time-rain just pouring down).
In one of her psychotherapeutic hours, she mentioned to me

that she had been shaking lately, and demanded to know what
was coming next, protesting that she had already been "every
sort of animal in the Ark, and birds, too." Her conversation
throughout the hour repeatedly returned to the theme of "fright."
Although at times this woman would produce such material in
a facetious tone, there were many occasions when she produced
it in obvious terror, in unmistakably genuine anxiety lest she be
turned, not figuratively but literally, into a fish, or a cow, or a
tree, or a stone. During another of her hours with me she ges..
tured, in great anxiety, toward another woman patient on the
ward who had been nearly always, for months, standing mute and
motionless in the hall, and loudly demanded, "Why, look at Grace
Phillips! Is there any difference between her and a cow chewing
its cud or a hOISe standing in a pasture? Why, this is the most
unhealthy environment In She then went on to emphasize her
own determination to keep talking, giving me the distinct impression that she felt threatened here lest she regress, as she evidently
considered various of the other patients to have done already, to
an animal state.
I found, in many hours with her, much evidence that this
threat under which she labored wast in a sense, quite real: her
archaic superego was so crushingly strong vis...a-vis her extremely
184
T he Nonhuman Environment
weak ego, that nearly every one of her daily activities had to be
struggled through, by her, in the face of heavy taboos. As one
example, many of the normal activities (such as work in the
occupational therapy department) which she managed to continue were the cause of much misgivings to her; she felt them to
be contributing to the cause of various malevolent persons whom
she hated, and she brought herself to these activities only because
she felt her life simply could not be borne without them. In this
same vein, it is quite understandable why she felt threatened by
seeing a considerable number of the patients about her to be
tremendously inhibited in their activities; it was as if they were
being even more defeated by their superego than she was.
In another of my hours with her, something of the psychodynamics of this particular anxiety of hers emerged unusually
clearly:
Near the beginning of the session) she said, "My throat hurts,"
and added determinedly, "They're not going to turn me into a
tree. I was a rock once," she went on} in a tone as if to say, "and
I'm never going to go through that sort of thing again I
She then continued, at length, to deplore and protest about
the-to her-e-fact that "they tum people into trees." She emphasized the absurdity of this practice, in view of the fact that
there is no lack of trees from natural sources-from seeds of
other trees. She mentioned, in passing, "I used to dig up seedlings
and transplant them, and take care of them,' as if to illustrate
that trees can be obtained from natural sources.
She said, "One time I was in a place where they turned
people into trees. It was on the West Coast} supposedly. They
were called 'liveoaks,'" she emphasized, looking at me signifi..
cantly, as if to indicate that this name was a giveaway. She went
OD, looking squeamish and distinctly anxious, "It was eerie-I
don't want to talk about it." Later, with some encouragement
from me to continue} she added, "There was an ann---a branch
[correcting herself]-tom off one of them, and it didn't look
like wood. You could see the fibers, like muscle fibers," She
looked unusually uneasy and squinny as she said this.
Later in the hour she said, protestingly, "It would be underU
PS'Ychosis and Neurosis
185
standable if they got bored and wanted to turn a tree into a

person-make a friend-as the next project," but, she emphasized, there is no lack of people or of trees; so why do they tum
people into trees) and trees into people, she protested. This
particular statement had a very poignant quality; it conveyed
her intense--though always, of course, stoutly denied--loneliness,
her need for a friend. I noticed that at one point in the hour she
made a reference-unusual for her-to her two young children,
saying that for all she knew they were grown up and married
and had children themselves now, "But I don't have anybody,"
she said, feelingly.
On two occasions during this hour) the superego inhibitions
under which she labored became apparent. At one point) she
said that she would like to subscribe to a magazine, The American Home, which she used to read at home before her hospitalization, but that she now felt very uneasy about doing this,
because all the numbers and initials which she found on the
subscription card might, she felt, refer to part of "the plot," and
she feared that if she subscribed she might unwittingly be volunteering to become turned into an animal, or some other nonhuman entity.. At another point, she mentioned that she did not
like to tell me the things she heard around here, because what
with the matter of persons' being able to disguise themselves as
some one else, she might, without meaning to, incriminate innocent individuals.
Thus, when one looks over the material from this hour, one
sees a number of likely determinants for her anxiety lest she be
turned into something nonhuman: ( 1) Her need for a friend
drives her to the wish-fulfilling delusion that trees can be turned
into persons-which carries with it the possibility that she might
be able to acquire a friend in this way-and this opens up to
her the frightening conviction that this process works the other
way, too: persons can be turned into trees. (2) Her need for
love contributes to the delusion that she might be turned into
trees: trees are things which are cared for; she mentioned that
she used to "take care of them." (3) Her hostility, her wishes
io dismember people, are glimpsed in the comment about the
186
liveoaks; it is as if she were so eager to see people dismembered)

in retaliation for the suffering they have supposedly brought
upon her, that she unconsciously likes to think that damaged
trees are really people who have been dismembered. But, of
course, if persons can be turned into trees, then this presents the
threat that this might happen also to her. (4) Her crushingly
self-punitive superego, as already indicated, constantly threatens
progressively to stamp out her human activities, her personality
functioning, until she reaches a state which she literally considers
to be that of a cow or a tree, for example.
In touching upon some of the determinants of this kind of
anxiety, I am anticipating the material of the next chapter. In
that chapter, concerning the desire, conscious or unconscious, to
become nonhuman, the matter of such determinants will be
explored in detail.
This woman's anxiety in this respect is very similar to that of
a male catatonic patient, the psychodynamics of whose illness
was described in a highly illuminating paper by Nunberg, A
passage from Nunberg's paper (109) shows this similarity:
Since a detailed discussion of the entire delusional system would
take us too far afield I wish to limit myself to the most essential
features only: And what first strikes us as least clear is the fearful
delusion that the patient might change into an animal, a worm.
This "procedure' as our patient called his "Theory of Transfermation" is not restricted to human beings, it is rather a process that
takes its course in the entire world, for all living creatures go
through a "migration," changing successively into ever-lower
beings, until they become inanimate objects like plants, minerals,
dirt, and so on. From dirt, however, new life springs, a reverse
transformation starts in tum, up to the human being; and that
continues endlessly. Not only are men subjected to this process of
transformation, but also the earth, the whole world.
The delusions of these two patients bear considerable likeness

not only to the beliefs of ancient peoples such as the Greeks
and Romans ( as reflected in their myths), but also to the
beliefs of present-day followers of Buddha, who believe that the
187
imperishable soul of a human being has been at times in the

past, and will be at times in the future, incarnated in various
animal forms as well as human ones.
The second patient, a twenty-six-year-old man who upon
admission to Chestnut Lodge was suffering from acute catatonic
schizophrenia, undertook psychotherapy with another of the
therapists on the staff. This colleague, in a presentation of the
patient's case before the staff, mentioned a number of points
which indicated anxiety on this man's part lest he become nonhuman" Prior to his hospitalization, the patient had been noted
at times to walk stifily, "like an a utomaton." He manifested,
early in his stay in the hospital, a loss of ego boundaries, such
that he sometimes felt at one not only with other persons (such
as his wife, his hospital roommate, and so on), but also with
nonhuman objects" He referred to himself at times as "it," while
crouching on the floor in a fetal position. On one occasion he
said to his therapist, confusedly, "1 am not the whole ward-I
am not a ward of the hospital." One could interpret this latter
in figurative terms, particularly because there had been in the
past-although not recently-some talk of committing him; but
to him this seemed to have a quite literal meaning: it was as
though he were unsure that he was not a ward, a section, of the
hospital.
William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (85),
provides a vivid description of this anxiety, as recounted to him
by an individual who had suffered a period of melancholia:
. . . suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just
as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own
existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired
youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day
on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his
knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt,
which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire
figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking
absolutely non ..human. This image and my fear entered into a
188
species of combination with each other. That shape am 1, I felt,

potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that
fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.
There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own
merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I
became a mass of quivering fear" [85b].
It will be recalled that the individual reported in Savage's

unpublished paper concerning LSD psychoses, the person who
unauthorizedly administered LSD to himself and then closeted
himself with an audograph to record his experiences, experienced
anxiety lest he become part of his nonhuman environment:
"He felt that he was being sucked or drawn into the machine"
(127) .
It has appeared to me that the phenomena of uncertainty
as to whether one is male or female, a phenomenon long known
to occur frequently among schizophrenic individuals, often
overlies-masks, as it were-a more basic uncertainty as to
whether one is human or nonhuman. I was interested to find
that Nunberg, in his account of the catatonic man who was
anxious lest he "change into an animal, a worm," says of this
man at another point that "According to his statement he has
always been uncertain to which of the sexes he belonged." Nunberg goes on to quote the patient, here, as saying, "I am at one
time a man, at another time a woman" (t09a).
A patient whom I have treated, a young man whom I began
seeing upon his becoming hospitalized for acute schizophrenia,
catatonic type, provided some suggestive material concerning
this hypothesis; I have encountered comparable material with
the majority of all my schizophrenic patients. As a sample of
the kind of data this man produced in this regard, I shall give
some portions of one of the hours I had with him while he was
continuing psychotherapy on an outpatient basis, after the subsidence of the acute phase of his illness.
Early in the hour, he spoke of "wanting to be sure" whether
he were going to obtain a certain college-faculty position which
189
he had been seeking. He showed considerable tension in saying

this. I suggested, "Let's see what 'wanting to be sure' brings to
mind."
He replied, in a small voice, after some blocking, "Wanting
to be sure whether you're a man or a woman." The "you"
seemed to be referring to myself, rather than to have been used
in a general sense. Later on in the hour, after material some of
which I shall mention below, when I came back to this "Wanting to be sure whether you're a man or a woman" and asked
for associations to it, he replied, "I said 'you'; but I had myself
in mind."
This was only one fragment of data, among many which
emerged during my over-all work with him, suggesting that he
felt uncertain not only about my sex, but about his own. What
I wish to emphasize here is the kind of material which he produced
in the interim, in this hour, before I returned to this theme of
"Wanting to be sure whether you're a man or a woman." The
free-associational material in this interim consisted in detailed,
unusually fond recollections of the relationship which he had had
as a child with a Negro handy man in the household-a relationship whose emotional richness evidently stood in marked contrast
to the relatively barren relationship he had with each of his
parents--with occasional, similarly fond, references to his (the
patient's) dog; he had long since made clear, in the analysis,
that this dog had been very dear to him.
At one point along here, when he was reminiscing about the
servant's telling stories to him and showing him how to do various
jobs about the house and grounds, and about his own love of
playing pranks on the servant-a kind of teasing which the
handy man. had evidently enjoyed as much as had the boy himseH-I commented on the contrast between the fond, lively,
enjoyable relationship between him and the handy man, and
the in many ways tense, unhappy relationship he had had with
his father. He agreed, indicating he had not had such a pleasurable, close relationship with his father, and added, moreover,
"or with my mother." Somewhat later in this interim, he brought
190
out material which clearly showed how much despair he had felt
about trying to identify with either his father or his mother.
On the basis of such material as this, substantiated by confirmatory data scattered through preceding hours) I suggested
to him that his uncertainty about his own sex seemed to overlie
a deeper uncertainty as to whether he were a person, pointing out
his felt inability to identify with either his father or his mother,
and his childhood experience of feeling, instead, emotionally
closer to his dog and to the Negro servant who had been, I conjectured, perhaps not regarded by him as being a person. He
promptly nodded assent at this last, saying, "He wasn't considered to have any intellect." The patient, who at this phase of
his analysis was seldom receptive to interpretations, seemed to
accept this particular formulation as a meaningful one to him .
The Experiencing of Parts of One's Self As Being Nonhuman

Next I shall consider those patients, whom one encounters
from time to time in clinical work, who react to various parts
of themselves as being nonhuman" It is as if such patients have
particularly abundant reason for their anxiety lest they become
wholly nonhuman, for parts of themselves have already, in their
subjective experience of these parts, become so.
In Chapter VI were described, in illustrating the basic confusion between the self and the nonhuman environment, a few
patients who showed this particular phenomenon. Recall, for
example, the patient who demanded of a nurse, "Why did you
take that piece out of my head?" referring to her head as
though it were an inanimate thing, and who on another occasion
shocked me by saying that the whole left side of her head "is
gone" .. caved In," again as if referring to an inanimate
object.
Such patients, in reacting to parts of themselves as being nonhuman, are utilizing a primitive form of projection whose origin
has been described by Fenichel as follows:
The first judgment of the ego distinguishes between edible and
nonedible objects: the first acceptance is swallowing, the first
191
rejection is spitting out [51]. Projection is a derivative of the

first negation; it has the content of "I want to spit it our' or, at
least, of "I want to put distance between it and myself," Projection is essential in that early stage of development of the ego
which Freud has called the purified pleasure ego [48] in which
everything pleasurable is experienced as belonging to the ego
(Usomething to be swallowed"), while everything painful is experienced as being nonego ("something to be spit out")"
So long as the line of demarcation between ego and nonego is
not yet sharp, which is true in the early years of childhood and
again in psychoses, the mechanisms of the state of the purified
pleasure ego may be used by the ego for defensive purposes"
Emotions or excitations which the ego tries to ward off' are "spit
out" and then felt as being outside the ego [40c].
One schizophrenic woman, while standing during an hour

with me, stuck out her left arm rigidly toward me and said, in
a tone of loathing and hostility, "Here, you want to fix the
tennis racket?" A feeling of awed, shocked discovery came to
me, that she was literally unsure but what her arm were really
a tennis racket. The reader may find such an interpretation
incredible; he may think that the patient was merely highlight..
ing what a boob of a therapist she had, who did not know his
patient's arm from a tennis racket. I can only re-emphasize my
conviction as to what she was experiencing here, a conviction
based upon my sensing her anxious confusion about herself
(conveyed behind, as it were, the loathing and hostility), and
based upon my discovering on many other occasions that she
was far more confused about herself than I had thought possible.
A patient of one of my colleagues confided to his therapist a
delusion that a wolf had gotten into the patient's stomach and
had gradually eaten up more and more of his insides, growing
bigger and bigger, until now the wolf had replaced all of him
except his skin. One of my patients indicated that she felt her
voice not to be her own, because it said things which she would
never say.
I once treated a thirty-one-year-old woman who had been
hospitalized because of a depressive condition. Although her
192
symptomatology was neurotic, with mixed depressive, hysterical,

and obsessive-compulsive features, her basic personality structure
was predominantly narcissistic in the immaturity of her object
relationships. As therapy progressed, I was interested to discover
that she showed a single basic orientation toward ( a) other
persons, (b) the elements of her nonhuman environment, and
(c) parts of her self which were, subjectively, nonego: all
these were experienced by her as being equally unmanageable,
inanimate objects. Her reacting in this spirit to parts of her self
is, of course, the aspect of her situation which is of special relevance here. In the course of my two years of work with her} she
vituperated against various of her own psychological functions,
physiological functions, and anatomical parts. In aggregate these
rejected functions or parts comprise a long list, of which the following are only some examples: her poor memory, her tears,
her chronic nasal discharge, her hand in which she still at times
experienced pain following a severe bum some years before, her
menstruation, her brain ("It's a hell of a brain l" ), her round
shoulders, and her chilly body. At times, she spoke of each as if
it were an inanimate object outside her.
The price which a patient pays for his utilization of such a
defense, in terms of the jeopardizing of his conception of his
over-all seH as being human, can be seen in the following more
detailed description of such a case.
This thirty-one-year-old woman evidenced, at the time I
undertook intensive psychotherapy with her, paranoid schizophrenia with, as it were, an extraordinarily hard shell of chronic
defenses against anxiety. She had already been hospitalized for
two and a half years, and a previous therapist here had stopped
work with her in discouragement at the resistivity of her delusional thinking and of her other psychotic defenses.
One of her most prominent delusions was that, as she put it,
"I'm a machine .. I have no control over myself.') She was
convinced that machinery had been installed into her abdomen
and that a chain had been fastened upon her heart, long ago, in
order to control her, and that her head had likewise been
193
tampered with for the same reason, She retrospectively misinterpreted the purpose of several surgical operations which she
had undergone, earlier in life, to fit in with these delusions. That
is, she was convinced that a frontal sinus operation, done when
she had been a child of seven) had consisted in "their)' putting
a hole in her head as a way of running her as a machine; that
a removal of a benign tumor from her left breast, at age
fourteen, had consisted in "their" placing a chain upon her
heart; and that an appendectomy at age nineteen had amounted
to "their') installing machinery, designed further to ensure
"their') control over her, into her abdomen. She had been making, for years here in the hospital, incessant demands to be sent
to a "real hospital" where she could have operations by trustworthy surgeons who would remove the machinery and the
chain.
Although it was, as the reader may surmise, relatively easy
to find figurative meaning in what she said about these things,
the manner in which she expressed these delusions left no doubt
that she meant them liteTall~that, for example, she was quite
literally convinced that there was an actual chain upon her
heart, and actual machinery in her abdomen.
It quickly became apparent that a repression of various af
fects was at the basis of her experiencing these, and various
other, parts of her body as being essentially nonhuman instruments of "their" will, or laden with inanimate objects (the chain,
the machinery) .
At the beginning of my work with her, her general demeanor
conveyed the degree to which, figuratively speaking now, this
repression had rendered her machinelike. Her face, instead of
reflecting the spontaneous, frequently shifting play of feelings
which is shown in the facial expressions of normal persons, was a
mask of tense musculature. In my notes concerning one of our
earliest hours I described her facial expression as one of "stony
hopelessness," and I was reminded of this phrase when, months
later in therapy, she revealed her anxiety lest she be "turned
into a rock." Her massive repression did indeed tend to render
194
her rocklike-figuratively so to the observer, literally so in her

own subjective experience. Her speech, too, bad a flatness of
tone and a stereotyped repetitiveness of phraseology which were
distinctly machinelike.
As time went by in my work with her, her experiencing of
herself as being so largely nonhuman-so largely being comprised
of, or filled with, metallic or otherwise hard, inanimate partsgradually resolved into a freer expression, and evidently greater
subjective awareness, of the various emotions which had been,
while under their former repression, evident to her only in this
congealed, delusion ally distorted form. For example, in the fifth
week of our work, when she said that she was constantly "filled
with radioactive material," her erstwhile stony demeanor had
already come to reveal so much evidence of anxiety (trembling
hands, dilated palpebral fissures, and so forth) that it was easy
for one to translate "radioactive material" as "anxiety"-although at this point she still had largely to deny to herself any
such translation of it.
.
Likewise when, after about a year of our working together, her
grief started to come closer to her awareness, she began to do a
great deal of weeping. Still for some months, however, she evidently did not experience the grief in awareness} but was aware
only that something--perhaps, she thought, poison gas liberated
by "them" into the room where she was sitting--was causing the
"cords in my neck to tighten, and tears to come to my eyes." At
first she would describe such experiences in a strikingly dispassionate way, as if she felt herself to be merely an observer at a
mechanical performance being worked upon her body. In one
hour, when she was more trusting toward me than usual} she
confided that she felt that "the church must control my tear
ducts, because tears just suddenly corne out without any ideas
connected with them." I replied, "So that makes you feel that
they must be caused to come by some outside source?" She said,
"Yes." I went on, "You don't feel that they may be coming from
inside?" She replied, uncertainly, "Well, sure, I know there's a
subconscious [the first such acknowledgment by her in more than
nineteen months of my work with her]; but with that, at least
Psychosu and
JVeuro~
195
you have an idea" along with the emotion. This helped me to see
how understandable was her impression that the weeping was
being caused by some controlling agency outside herself.
In the same period of our work together, about nineteen
months after we had begun, when her feelings of both grief and
fondness were emerging much more openly and her formerly
almost incessant paranoid tirades had become a rarity, I realized
that I had not heard anything for months now about the chain
upon her heart, which she used to complain of, or rage about,
in practically every hour. It was as if a chain had been, indeed,
removed from her positive feelings.
Over this same period of time, her references to "machinery"
in her abdomen changed into progressively more meaningful
communications-communications which shed increasing light
upon the basically emotional, interpersonal, origin of this delusion. In the sixteenth month of our work, she put it that "different parts of my anatomy have been compromised by different
nations," i.e., controlled by different nations-her gut by one
nation, her heart by another, and so on. She went on to give data
about her childhood which strongly suggested that this delusion
was traceable to conflicting loyalties toward various servants of
different nationalities. She still had largely to repress any feeling
of fondness or dependency) however, and so could not yet ex..
perience her conflict in psychological terms; she still loudly asserted that she cared for no one, and never had cared for anyone.
For some time still, she expressed her abdominal sensations in,
as it were, inanimate terms: she kept demanding to have an
abdominal operation to "cut the strings" which bound her to
various persons-particularly persons whom I could see to represent mother figures to her, whom she consciously hated and
feared, and toward whom she unconsciously felt tender and dependent. But in the twentieth month she expressed this, now, in
frankly human terms, so to speak, when she protested feelingly,
not in the usual paranoid-raging fashion, but in a vigorous effort
to get me to see how she feels, "Why, I'm not even myself! If you
don't think that's humiliating 1 Those people are in my bowels
and in my stomach and in my heart! If you don't think that's
196
humiliating!" She then reverted quickly to her demand that she

be sent to a cereal hospital" for an operation to "cut the strings"
that bound her to those people.
The long and productive work which we carried out subsequently} which I cannot detail here, carried much further, and
established in the form of increasing emotional health, the trendfrom inanimate to animate, from nonhuman to human---of which
I have sketched, above, the early phases.
In the literature there are two case reports, one by Ekstein
(32) and one by Lisbeth J. Sachs (123) which, despite those
authors' traditionally psychoanalytic interpretation of their clinical findings} portray their patients' evolution from a predomi..
nantly nonhuman identity to a predominantly human identity in
the course of successful psychotherapy} very reminiscent of my
experience with this woman"
Ekstein, in his paper entided, "The Space Child's Time Machine," reports, from his work with a borderline schizophrenic
boy who had been nine years of age when therapy had begun
and was now twelve, the evolution in the patient's fantasied time
machine as the therapy progressed. Whereas it had been at first
a weird contraption, much removed from ordinary human experience, it came to be a lovely little house with colorful doors
and windows. With this latter revelation the boy poignantly
asked: "Does that mean that I'm getting better now that I'm
building things that look like houses even if they are not?" Also,
this time machine no longer took him back millions of years but,
for example, five years only, and Ekstein tells us that "He now
did not speak about the past in archaeological and historical
terms but the past had now assumed personal significance. It
was the past in his own life."
Lisbeth J. Sachs, in her paper entitled, "On Changes in Identification from Machine to Cripple," gives an extraordinarily
moving accout of the changes in a boy who, when he began
therapy at the age of five years, showed much evidence of regarding himself as a machine, and who over the course of three
years of treatment reached a firmly established conception of himself as a human being, although as yet a crippled one. At the
Ps~cho~
and lVeurostl
197
beginning of therapy he avoided human companionship and

spent his time in solitary impersonation of machines, uttering
weird sounds and showing machinelike behavior. When asked
to draw a person, he drew a machine. As therapy proceeded, his
behavior and speech became more and more human in quality,
and his drawings-a series of which are reproduced in the paper
-took on increasingly human characteristics:
The changes in identification were clearly expressed in his

drawings. As "treatment progressed, Robert drew a machine with
such human features as eyes. Gradually the drawings began to
resemble human beings, though they looked more like embryos
than boys of his own age, as would be expected from a healthy
child. Later he was able to draw people, quite sophisticated, with
a considerable amount of detail} but these figures were crippled.
They were either peg-legged or hook-armed [123].
Still later in the therapy, the boy went on to draw normal human
beings, both children and adults. Sachs shows, in the course of
her paper, that the boy would transitorily revert to his identification with machines at times of increased stress, after this identification as a persistent and predominant modus vivendi had been
relinquished."
Incidentally, I believe that the clinical data I have presented
here, from this paranoid woman who at the beginning of our
work had felt herself to be so predominantly a machine and who
became subjectively human as therapy proceeded} help to fill at
least some of the gap in OUf scientific observations which Tausk
(153), in his paper on the influencing machine in schizophrenia,
mentioned:
"One of my adult schizophrenic patients, who for yean had shown evidence of a predominantly nonhuman identity. recently indicated to me that
she felt there to be a flower growing out of her leg Her tone, in indicating
this by a few words along with a gesture toward her leg, made clear that
she found this a pleasurable rather than a grotesque experience. It was as
though she felt, here, a cherished remaining link witb the nonhuman world
of which she had felt herself to be, earlier in her illness, 10 predominantly
a part,
198
It is necessary to assume . . . that the influencing apparatus

represents the terminal stage in the evolution of the symptom,
which started with simple sensations of change. I do not believe
that heretofore the entire sequence in the development of the
symptom could have been studied completely from a single case .
But I have observed the connection between at least two stages
.. " and I have no hesitation in maintaining that under especially
favorable circumstances it may be possible to observe the entire
series of developmental stages in a single patient.
Since Tausk's day, the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, although still highly imperfect, has developed to the point where,
in at least some instances, as in the case of this woman I have
described and in the instance of the boys whom Ekstein and
Sachs have described, we have the good fortune to see a [auorable
evolution of these phenomena, rather than the evolution in the
direction described by Tausk-namely, into increasing depths of
illness.
The Genesis of This Anxiety: Its "External" Root
The genesis of this anxiety-the anxiety lest one become, or be

revealed as, nonhuman-is a complex subject. For the sake of an
organized presentation here, it may be thought of as possessing
two roots, one based in causes "external" to the individual (i.e.,
causes operative in the environment in which he spent his formative years), and the other based upon the "internal" psychodynamics of the individual himself. Such a dichotomous portrayal
of this over-all causation is, of course, to a degree artificial, rather
than being inherent to the nature of the psychological processes
which obtain in the over-all, actually unitary, field comprised of
the individual-in-his-environment. a
lIt is probable that there is also, in each Individual instance, a third root
which I shall not attempt to discuss here became it u a nonspecific one: any
anxietyll from whatever source-i-whether from the surging into awareness of
previoully repressed incestuous feelings, or murderous feelings, or grief, or
whatever other affect---which is sufficiently severe to precipitate the patient'l
regression toward the ego state of the infant's subjective oneness with the
nonhuman environment, can be thought of 8J one of the roots of this
particular anxiety which I am discusling here.
199
In the next chapter I shall deal with the "internal" root of this
particular anxiety; there, the thesis will be developed that much
of such anxiety is a cloak for, and consequence of, the individual's repressed desire to become nonhuman.
For the moment I shall deal only with the "external" root:
the individual's having been dealt with by his parent(s), during
his upbringing, as being nonhuman (an inanimate object, an
animal, or whatever). That is, my experience suggests to me that
the individual was dealt with in this fashion often enough, and
long enough, and by a person or persons whose opinion of him
was sufficiently important to him, that he developed a now-repressed conception of himself as being other than human.
My data have consistently indicated to me that the basis for
the parent's functioning in this fashion resides in the parent's own
anxiety about closeness with the child, and consequent need to
react to the child as if he or she were on an utterly different plane
of existence, were an entity of an entirely different species, from
the parent. An aspect of this whole matter is that the child is, as
it were, left alone to deal with his "animal" impulses- his need
to be cuddled and stroked, his desires to stroke the body of the
parent, his need to kiss and be kissed, and, as time goes on, his
developing sexual feelings. The subsequent experience of finding
that the parent pays little or no heed to his own individual ideas,
opinions, intellectual interests, and so on, only adds to the child's
conception of himself as not fully possessing the dignity of a
human being, as being instead, more or less, something subhuman.
During an interview with the mother of a schizophrenic girl,
I heard a memorable expression of how a woman who is anxious
about her own "animal" desires may feel upon becoming a
mother and relating herself, now, to that veritable bundle of such
desires, her infant offspring, She said, regarding each of her four
children in their infancy, that she wanted intensely to hold them
but, knowing that she herself had been nervous in childhood and
adolescence, she was afraid her children would become so. Her
anxiety about this was heightened by something she read in a
Government pamphlet about child rearing, which "stressed that
200
if you picked up babies or handled them much it would make

them nervous." She went on, "I enjoyed it so intensely, holding
them, that I wondered if there were something wrong with me.
You know-having a baby's head on your shoulder, and cuddling it." There was much poignancy in this; I felt she possessed
a great deal of maternal tenderness} but was intensely anxious
about this in herself. She added, in a very uncertain tone, "Over
the years I've wondered about that feeling"-wondered whether
it was a normal feeling. In recent years, she said, she had been
pleased to find that she felt this same feeling toward her grandchildren when she was holding them. "So I felt it was me, and
not because of my glands, like a mother kitten." But she said
that she still wonders about this, and does not understand it.
It is not hard to imagine something of what it must do to the
infant and, later, to the growing child, who is on the receiving
end of such a maternal attitude, in terms of the developing conception of the self. This particular mother seemed to me remarkable not in terms of having such an attitude, but in being able
to express it; I have seen many such mothers of schizophrenic
patients who exhibited such an attitude but, their anxiety in this
regard being probably still greater, were not able to verbalize it."
One sees precisely the same sort of anxiety-about-closeness in
many fathers, too.
Such parents are described in detail by Kanner in the third
of his series of articles concerning what he calls "early infantile
autism," which he considers the earliest possible manifestation
of childhood schizophrenia, occurring as early as within the first
two years of life. I do not mean to imply that all the adult patients, from whom I have presented and shall present clinical
material, are to be thought of as having manifested, in infancy
and very early childhood, the particular syndrome to which
Kanner gives the title "early infantile autism"-although, indeed, one of these patients has been reported} by Darr and
Worden (28) as such a case; it is Kanner's description of these
Hill, in his previowly mentioned book, lays, A few of the mothen lof
schizophrenic patients1 report that they discontinued nursing because they
found it pleasurable" (?8e).
201
parents in which I am interested here, for they sound just like

the parents, so far as I have known them at first or second hand,
of adult patients who manifest the anxiety lest they become nonhuman..
By way of a preface) it should be mentioned that Kanner describes early infantile autism as follows:
the characteristic features consist of a profound withdrawal from contact with people, an obsessive desire for the
preservation of sameness, a skillful and even affectionate relation
to objects [by this, Kanner means inanimate objects], the retention of an intelligent and pensive physiognomy, and either mutism
or the kind of language which does not seem intended to serve the
purpose of interpersonal communication [87].
[Concerning the parents of these children, Kanner says] One
is struck again and again by what I should like to call a mechanization of human relationships [87a].
The parents' behavior toward the children must be seen to be
fully appreciated. Maternal lack of genuine wannth is often conspicuous in the first visit to the clinic. As they come up the stairs,
the child trails forlornly behind the mother, who does not bother
to look back . The mother accepts the invitation to sit down in the
waiting room, while the child sits, stands, or wanders about at a
distance. Neither makes a move toward the other. Later, in the
office, when the mother is asked under some pretext to take the
child on her lap, she usually does so in a dutiful, stilted manner,
holding the child upright and using her arms solely for the
mechanical purpose of maintaining him in this position [87b].
The children were, as modern phraseology usually has it,
"planned and wanted." Yet the parents did not seem to know
what to do with the children when they had them. . . The
mothers felt duty-bound to carry out to the letter the rules and
regulations which they were given by their obstetricians and
pediatricians. They were anxious to do a good job, and this
meant mechanized service of the kind which is rendered by an
overconscientious gasoline station attendant [87c].
Brodey (18) presents interesting data from a mother-child

relationship, data suggestive to me of how the child, in this par-
202
ticular kind of interaction with. the mother, would tend to grow

up equating his own individual self with an inanimate object:
This mother whom I shall call Mrs. Crompton had come to the
children's clinic because she was terrified that something dreadful
would happen to her 5-months-old child because she stated "he
could not burp." The over-all picture indicated, it was mother
who was moving rapidly into a psychotic episode. Her hypochondriacal symptom she had externally located in the body of
her child. I watched Mrs. Crompton play with her infant boy,
I noted that she was only aware of movements in the child that she
herself had "initiated"-if the child smiled in response to his
mother's smile, the mother responded. If he smiled of his own
accord, Mrs. Crompton, though desperately clinging to the child's
every move, was entirely unresponsive, and it seemed, unaware.
The child's autonomous smile did not seem to exist for her, in any
way. It did not alter even the timing of Mrs. Crompton's frantic
efforts to have the child smile. Mrs. Crompton was aware that her
baby did not burp as she expected. She concluded "logically" then
that the baby "must be full of gas," It was this lack of symmetry
with mother's expectation that became the focus of Mrs. Crompton's fears for the baby's welfare, and her diagnosis that the child
was sick.
The operations of this relationship are quite different from
those of the mother who responds to the child's smiling however
it happens to smile. Mrs. Crompton did not at any time acknowledge the child's lead. The child existed only as a distant "herselj,"
an image superimposed on the child which denied its separate
existence. This image she must energize and direct.
It may well be partly as a result of such mothering as Kanner

and Brodey describe that we find a patient functioning as though
he were an inanimate object. A particularly vivid example of such
patients is the boy described by Elkisch and Mahler (33) who
was fascinated with light switches and other kinds of machinery
and who, as they tell us, behaved as if he himself were a rnachine:
Stanley appeared to be unable to express his emotions and
affects other than in the most primitive and extreme forms . . .
203
If he displayed any emotion at all, it would be either in a state

of extreme panic, or in orgiastic ecstasy. At other times he showed
complete apathy or even a catatoniclike stupor. As these two
crudely extreme fonns of affective behavior sometimes alternated
within one treatment hour, sometimes even several times back and
forth, it seemed to the observer as though the boy were switching
himself, as it were, from one mode of behavior into the other.
Once he had switched himself u on/ ' it often seemed as if the
emotion were generated from within him, as from an enginean engine gaining momentum and running so powerfully that
the child had no way of stopping it. Moreover, the emotions
which Stanley seemed to turn "on' and "off," like one of his
switches, were created by him in a most peculiar and rather
"unemotional" way. The child, evidently knowing that certain
emotional expressions were expected of him by his environment
and, in his attempt at adaptation, trying to comply with those
expectations, at times gave the impression that he made himself
"learn" emotions.
Stanley, in his apparent effort to "learn" emotions, is very

similar to the schizophrenic woman described by Eissler (31 ) ,
who in many interpersonal situations experienced herself as being
dead, and "The feeling of deadness set up a tabula 1'D.saJ so to
speak, upon which the ego artificially could put the socially required emotion, like a painter puts the correct pigment on the
canvas."
Next I shall present brief clinical material, from nine different
patients, to highlight this etiological factor which I have described.

1. A schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age at admis..
sion, a person with whom I carried an intensive psychotherapy
for some years, often functioned in what might be caIled a nonhuman manner. At times she painted herself, and moved, like a
marionette; at other times, like some kind of indescribable apparition. She often made sounds which were like nothing human.
This brief portion of a nurses' daily report is one among many
of the same kind:
"Patient on ward at change of shifts, at end of hall cackling
204
like a hen and squealing like a puppy getting his tail twisted."
At various phases of the therapy, personnel members were in
agreement that her laugh sounded now witchlike, now like a
chicken, now like a yelping dog. In one period, she spent her
psychotherapeutic hours, for more than two months, standing
motionless in a comer of my office, silently, obdurate to either
verbal encouragement or physical efforts to help her to sit down;
later on she divulged that she had felt herself to be treated "like
furniture" here in the hospital-i.e., utterly ignored-and hence
was determined to behave "like furniture."
She showed, for several months following her admission to the
hospital, terror lest she be raped. Much of this was traceable,
historically, to her relationship with her father, who was extremely anxious about sexual feelings, and had taught her to look
upon sexual activity as literally robbing one of one's status as a
human being. This became clear when, as her terror about sex
gradually subsided so that she was able to start talking about this
subject, she made the following statements in an hour with me =
"There must be some other way [to have a baby] than by a man's
penis. There must be., through food or something .. Sex from
the waist up is enough to satisfy any man . . . My father said
people turn into animals [during the sex act]."
An incident which occurred a few months after her admission
helped to make clear that her terror about sex had partially to do
with an intense sadism with which, in her experience-particularly
her experience with her father-sex had long ago become linked.
One of our female psychiatric aides, assigned to be present during
a visit by the father to his daughter, was amazed at what she saw
taking place. The patient behaved, not surprisingly-for this was
typical of her behavior here in the hospital at the time-in a seductive fashion, with her skirt up above her knee, and giggling. The
thing which stunned our aide was that the father reacted to this by
poking at her, nudging her, not in any friendly, playful way, but
as if his daughter were some sort of strange animal which he were
poking with a stick.
Later on I had occasion to see repeated in therapy this patient's
father transference, as well as her identification with her father
205
in this same respect. She had established a transference toward a

male psychologist on our staff as a father figure, a transference
which was remarkably unyielding, for a long time, to therapeutic
efforts. It was decided that he and a woman therapist here, who
had been working as a team in sitting in on therapeutic sessions
in cases where treatment was going poorly, should do so in this
case.. It was hoped that this might in general help to clarify my
relationship with the patient, and that it might specifically help
to clarify something of the patient's transference to the psychologist, whom I shalI refer to as Dr. Graham. The postinterview
notes which I made during that consultative period} written long
before I had developed the concepts embodied in this book} are,
I think} of considerable value here:
Second session: During this session I got some new. slant on possible psychodynamics in Betty. I was noticing how very much she
was treating Dr. Graham like an animal) oftentimes teasing and
tormenting him, sometimes doing it in what seemed an uncruel
way, but always doing it as though he were a type of organism
essentially different from herself.. Along with this, she made some
comment during this hour about how "it would be uncivilized"
(or her to want something or other-I think she mentioned that
it would be uncivilized for her to want any vigorous sex with
Dr. Graham. . . . What I wondered, regarding Betty's psychodynamics, was whether she may have some repressed conception
of herself as being an animal, a conception which she projects
onto other persons, including Dr. Graham, and treats them as
animals.
Third session: What particularly impressed me about this hour

was that, even more than yesterday, she talked to Dr. Graham
in a tormenting fashion which kept reminding me of a person's
pulling the wings off a fly and causing it to die slowly, or of a
jailer's teasing, taunting, tormenting (often with a pseudo affection and solicitude) a prisoner before killing him.
Sixth [the final] session: At the beginning of the hour, she came
and sat at Dr. Graham's feet, as has often happened before; but
this time her expression was clearly son-awful rather than seductive, and throughout the hour, even though she went through a
206
lot of puppy-dog, marionette, and to some extent prostitute sort

of behavior, her mood was clearly a heavy-hearted one.
She repeatedly spoke to Dr. Graham in terms of his being her
father, and often asked, "Don't you think I look like a puppydog?" At one point she kept trying to get him to say whether she
would not look better if she put Imra [a depilatory] on her eyebrows, and then put on eyebrow pencil.
2. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-five years of age,

early in my work with her often misidentified herself, not only
as one or another among many other persons, but also as one or
another sort of animal. In one hour she confided, with forced
casualness, "Of course, I'm Rin-Tin-Tin,' a dog which she had
seen in a motion picture shortly prior to her hospitalization. For
several months, as she later brought out in therapy, she had been
seeing many movies each week, and identifying so strongly with
various of the characters in them that she literally felt herself to
be-not only during, but long after, any particular movie-this
or that figure in it.
When I expressed incredulity at her statement about Rin..TinTin, she said, nonchalantly, "Oh, people can turn into animals."
I asked, "Do you mean that they can become animallike in their
feelings or behavior, or actually in their physical form?" She
replied that she meant they can become so in their physical form,
and asked, "Did you see that picture, Fantasia [a Disney cartoon
movie]?" I replied that I had. She reminded me, with unmistakable seriousness, that in that picture people tum into animals.
The reader, here, may think that the patient was merely pulling my leg; but my work with her convinced me beyond doubt
that she was genuinely so deeply confused about her own identity,
and so unable to distinguish a cartoon movie from reality, as
literally to consider herself to be a dog.
During another hour, referring to a rash upon her skin, she
explained that she was "getting a new skin; I do this every year,"
as if she felt hersell to be a snake. In still another session with me
during the acute phase of her psychosis, she mentioned her having seen a movie about a vampire woman, and added uneasily,
207
looking at her left hand, "That changed me for quite a while

afterward." Then, still looking at her hand and starting to flex
the fingers, she mumbled something about "claws." In many
other hours, she produced material which suggested that she
conceived of herself, consciously or unconsciously, as being an
animal-usually a dangerous kind of animal. Her anxiety concerning her murderous feelings constituted one of the greatest
problems in therapy.
Throughout the fifteen months of my partially successful work
with her, she proved to be the most intensely scornful individual
whom I have ever known. It developed that she perceived other
persons as being as devoid of humanness as, in the above-quoted
comments, she felt herself to be. She sneeringly referred to the
social worker as "a functionary .. just an appendage of Dr.
[the psychiatric administrator]'~; to the psychiatric
administrator as "just an obstacle in my path [said in a tone as if
she were referring to an inanimate object]"; to her father as
"just nothing-s-he's a cipher"; to her fellow patients as though
they, too, were subhuman; and often-as I shall detail in the
next chapter-to myself in equally dehumanizing terms.
It was only with the greatest difficulty that this defensive
scorn, almost flintlike in its adamancy, was eventually eroded
through sufficiently to reveal glimpses of the derogation which she
had suffered in childhood, which had originally caused this de..
fense to be erected within her. Such derogation had come chiefly
at the hands of her mother. The mother was much interested in
community activities, and inherited wealth had enabled her to
gain much social prestige through her lavish contributions to
various organizations. She and her husband had been separated
when her daughter was six years of age; and every year from then
until the girl was seventeen, the mother sent the daughter off,
from the home in the Midwest, to one or another among a long
series of boarding schools in New England, in Canada, and later
in Italy and Spain. The girl suffered tremendous loneliness and
anxiety in these various schools, in the instances of those in Italy
and Spain was unfamiliar with the language spoken there, and in
a number of these schools was much derided by the other girls
208
for her American ways. At the age of nine, from a school in Italy
she wrote to her mother, "Unless you take me out of here by next
Monday, I'll kill myself." This threat failed to work, however.
Each of these schools was selected upon the whim of the mother,
apparently primarily upon the basis of how impressed her social
acquaintances might feel upon learning that her daughter was
attending this or that distant and expensive school. The girl saw
her father, who spent most of his time in pursuing medical treatment for various psychosomatic symptoms, only on rare occasions.
After this kind of childhood and adolescence the mother enrolled her in a girls' college in the eastern United States. Then,
because of steadily increasing schizophrenic symptoms, she
flunked out at the end of the first year, and was now too ill to
make any show of continuing her education anywhere else. Her
mother, denouncing her as an idiot-UI never thought I would
have an idiot for a daughter'I-e-admitted her to a psychiatric
hospital. There, shortly after admission, the girl stabbed herself
in the chest with a knife, so seriously that only extraordinarily
prompt medical attention saved her life.
Later, at the time of her second hospital admission, again for
acute paranoid schizophrenia, the admission physician wrote:
"I then saw the mother and heard her complaints about the
daughter's aggressive and unpleasant behavior, the mother missing or not being much concerned about the delusional aspects of
the girl's behavior. The mother's principal complaint was that
the daughter did not treat her with sufficient deference. Also [she]
told of an argument she had had with the girl when she told her
daughter she was a poor investment, that she had spent a lot of
money on her treatment and that she wasn't getting any dividends out of It." Her having called the daughter "a poor Investment," referring to her as if the daughter were something inanimate rather than a human being) seems to have been typical of
the mother.
The girl was in her fourth hospitalization when I became
acquainted with her. During the period of my work with her,
relatively brief in terms of the severity and chronicity of her illness, she never became able to reveal more than a few details of
209
the slights which she had suffered) as indicated above, at the hands
of her mother and other persons in her past. Much more often
she expressed such feelings in terms of the treatment she felt she
was being accorded here in the hospital. It was in this context
that she most often revealed her feeling of being treated as if she
were an inanimate object. She would say to me, for example,
with a kind of flat bitterness, "People don't do things for me;
they do things at me," and "I'm in the position of being thought
at.J.J
3. A thirty-two-year-old woman with paranoid schizophrenia
of many years' duration, the most assaultive woman with whom I
have worked in psychotherapy, had grown up in a home with
her mother and maternal grandmother, both of whom were
themselves distinctly paranoid. These two women had evidently
needed, for the sake of preserving their own precarious psychological defenses, to have some one close to them whom
they could cast down, as often as the need arose in them, into
the hell of their condemnation. The girl had been elected for this
with great regularity.
She was able to tell me, usually in fragments, something about
the way in which she had felt herself to be treated at home. For
example, in one hour she started telling, at first allegorically and
gradually in more direct terms, about cats) about the houseowner's telling the cats to scat, then finally she said, "My grandmother said to me 'Scat I-and when I say scat I mean scat!' "
She then went on to tell about once, at home, hitting a cat with
a shovel and chasing it about the yard, up a tree, onto the garage
roof, and so on. The grandmother let the cat into the house, but
would not allow the girl herself to come in " 'until you learn not
to be mean to cats.' " This incident seems to have epitomized the
girl's conviction that she was even Jess acceptable, to her mother
and grandmother, than an animal. To be sure, her behavior on
that particular occasion had been such as to draw intense condemnation from almost any parent figure; but all the evidence
I obtained, both from the patient herself and from repeated in..
terviews with her mother, convinced me that the child had been
forced irresistibly into such an intrafamilial integration. During
210
the approximately eight months of my work with her, we failed

to resolve her conception of her mother as a kind of saint, the
personification of all love and virtue, and of herself as an innately
murderous creature who was, therefore, hopelessly unacceptable
among human beings.
4. Another woman with paranoid schizophrenia, twenty-nine
years of age, revealed in an. hour with me her feeling, like that of
the patient described immediately above, of being worth less even
than subhuman forms of life. In describing her having had an
electrocardiogram, recently carried out despite her vigorous protest, she emphasized what a futile, wasteful procedure it had
been. She told of how much paper it had consumed, indicating
with her hands a length of perhaps three feet, "Almost," she said
in protest and concern, "a whole tree:" What she conveyed to
me, by both her words and her tone, was her conviction that she
was not worth all that paper, which she considered so great a
part of a tree. Her statement was so poignant that tears came to
my eyes and, feeling more tender toward her than I had in almost
two years of working with her, I said simply, "You're worth more
than all the trees on earth."
The infinitesimal state of her self-esteem had been revealed
many times before in the therapy. One major cause of this had
been her having been treated during her childhood, particularly
by her mother, as some one who had little or no importance in
her own right, but had usefulness chiefly as some one upon whom
the mother-an. overtly schizophrenic woman, evidently, throughout the girl's developmental years-could project her own unacceptable feelings and attitudes, and through whom the mother
strove to achieve, vicariously, satisfaction for her own grandiose aspirations. As in the immediately preceding case, above, the father
had evidently been more able to give the girl love, but had been
too much under the domination of the mother to enable his
daughter to develop a sound ego.
5. The following passage, from another therapist's staff presentation of a woman with latent schizophrenia, gives us a glimpse
of one kind of childhood experience which tends to inculcate in
Psychosis and N.eurosis
211
the growing individual a conviction that his innate worth is less

than that of various inanimate objects in the home:
Alice talks of her mother as being unable to love anybody and
as being a compulsive sort of person. The mother's great interest
during Alice's childhood was in collecting antiques. She furnished
a home almost entirely with this, and Alice talks of her mother's
having boasted as [i.e., when Alice was] a very young child, almost
as a toddler, she was playing near one of her mothers antique
chairs and the mother very imperiously said, "Don't!" and after
that the girl never touched that or any other of the valuable
things around the house .. The patient feels that her mother
never liked children or pets. Pets are just something to mess
things up and the less you had to do with them) the better.
6. A twenty-five-year-old man of a hysterical personality struc-
ture, in the course of psychoanalysis, made clear that his upbringing had been such as to convince him that his existence
could be either in the form of (a) a savage animal, or (b) a
cute little doll, but not in the form of a human being. This conception of himself had arisen largely as a function of his relationships with each of his parents, who chronically treated him as
being a cute little doll, and shied away from real ftesh-and-blood
feelings of all sorts, giving the patient the unconscious conception
that any such feelings within him were so unacceptable, among
human beings, as to be in the nature of actual animal phenomena. His father's favorite mode of addressing him in conversation,
was "Kewpie-Boy." His mother, as he came to realize relatively
late in analysis, regarded him less as a flesh-and-blood son than as,
in his phrase, a cute bit of costume jewelry to wear to social
functions."
5 During a psychotherapeutic session, a thirty-seven-year-old schizophrenic
woman who had been hospitalized for several years, whose remnants of selfesteem resided chiefly in her physical beauty, and who had gradually become able to formulate her own very rigid, long-held attitude! about life,
made some memorable comments in this same regard.
"An attractive person is considered a mechanical thing-you know," she
explained, "like a good movie, a book, or a nice dress," She went on to explain, in essence, that an attractive person exists to provide "enjoyment,"
212
The following two dreams} separated by. a period of one year,

helped to clarify this antithetical pair of roles which he felt were
ope~ to him-e-these two so different kinds of creatures which he
bad unconsciously felt himself, all along, to be.
The first of these dreams occurred at the end of about two
years of analysis:
I was-you were in it-I'd been coming over [to my office] and
this time I came over and the whole thing had been changed
drastically. It was no longer this room with the familiar furniture.
It was a very dark, very terrifying jungle-lair. On the floor was
a pile of bones, as if an animal had had many meals there; yet
the pile of bones looked a lot like the piled-up jackstraws I used
to play with when I was little. I walked in and I was very surprised. I looked and in that comer over there [a far comer of the
office] was a saber-toothed tiger, and it started to scream or roar
and bare its teeth, and I screamed and I was startled and I woke
up.
The second dream, occurring a year later, was as follows:
I was with a baby. I didn't know much about caring for a baby,
and I had to give the baby its bottle. This baby was so tiny. It was
alternately a baby and a doll, and the doll had a tiny little head.
I can't breathe, hardly [he interjected; he was showing much
anxiety throughout this account]. Its face would come off, soso it [blocking] didn't have any face. It was faceless, like an unand that if she makes herself unattractive, this is "not proper," The most
striking thing about these comments was the tone in which she uttered them:
her tone was expressive of no protest or doubt whatsoever; it was as if she
were simply making statements about something which, to her, was an
obvious and long-known fact. She was very confused during most of this
session; these were among the few relatively clear concepts which she got
across to me, during an hour of much. confused and confusing verbalization,
Another point which came through fairly clearly was that men are the
ones at the top, and that the attractive person exists to provide enjoyment
to a man, and herself is not supposed to have any feelings-whether of enjoyment, loneliness, physical or emotional pain, or whatever. The history of
her relationship with her father, whose own psychological test results showed
prominent Don Juan tendencies, and who evidently used to take much
narcissistic pleasure in being seen with one or another of his own three beautiful daughters, was such M to make it quite understandable that she should
have developed this conception of an attractive person's raison dJilre.
213
painted puppet. I made some bread pudding, and I ate the pudding, because it was a doll, and if I ate the pudding, it would live
-it was witchcraft. It kept changing from a doll into a baby and
back again.
Data from this hour, and from various other sessions} made
clear that the doll-baby, like the tiger in the first dream, represented an unconscious conception of himself. These unconscious
conceptions of himself were, for a long time during the analysis,
projected upon other persons. For example, later in the same
hour in which he reported the second of the two above dreams,
he was describing a date he had had, recently, with a beautiful
and popular young woman. He enthused, "This girl-this beau...
tiful thing [N.B.]-going with me to a dance! . . ." In an hour
about four months later, he said, exasperatedly, concerning his
conflictual feelings about his sister, "If only you didn't have to
notice feelings and emotions-if only people were kind of dolls
and hollow shells and didn't have any kind of insides-e-things

would be simple." For a long time, all other persons were, in his
perception of them, in one of three categories: ( a ) "normal"
people, whom he reacted to as being empty-headed robots; (b)
a certain few neurotic individuals whom he perceived as being
invested with a totally unreal kind of glamour; and (c) certain
persons whom he considered to possess a kind of animal passion
which both frightened and fascinated him. There were none of
what we would think of as real human beings in the total picture.
There is one other aspect of his situation which I wish to mention here. Abundant evidence indicated that he had been, indeed,
treated less as a person than as an inanimate object-a doll-by
his parents during his upbringing. But now, in his daily life as an
adult, he unconsciously did that which we so frequently find
patients, with whatever kind of psychiatric illness} to be doing:
he strove to maintain a fantasied control over this process which
he experienced, at a still deeper level, as being quite beyond his
controL Specifically, he unconsciously encouraged other persons
to treat him as an inanimate object.
For example, he raged in one hour that his roommate in
214
graduate school "treats me like an inanimate object. This mom..

ing he said to me, 'Do your part of the cleaning!' as if he were
talking to an object I)' But what he had yet to realize was that
his roommate, as in the case of other persons in different situations with the patient, had already gone through the process of
approaching him in a more considerate way, several times over,
until the roommate's patience had become exhausted and, despairing of getting any cooperation from him, had been reduced to
commanding him as if he were an inanimate object, or, for
example, a dog. Or so, at least, I would assume} on the basis of
many experiences of this general kind which I myself had with
the patient.
7. A twenty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman appeared, at
the time of her admission to the hospital and frequently for some
months thereafter, distinctly unhuman. When I went to the
closed ward where she was housed, for my initial interview with
her, I found in the nurses' notes an aide's description of her
which stated that "This woman looks at times like a demon."
I thought, with some amusement, that this must be an inexperienced, overimpressionable aide who had written this. But when
I saw the patient I found that she did indeed look at times like
a veritable demon, reminiscent to me of Lionel Barrymore's
characterization of the mad monk, Rasputin, and of some of
Lon Chaney's grotesque and demoniac portrayals in movies long
ago. Her psychiatric administrator ~ a man with more than thirty
years of experience with hospitalized psychiatric patients, at a
general staff conference nearly a year and a half following her
admission phrased it that "Irma was one of the most repulsivelooking things I've ever seen when she first came in here. She
looked more like some sort of tamed wild animal or something."
He added, "Now that has changed," indicating that she had
become more human in appearance. Incidentally, I may express
my conviction here that one of the most valuable contributions
which Chestnut Lodge makes, toward the recovery of many of its
patients, consists in the ability of personnel members to perceive,
in just such an initially animallike patient as this, a fellow human
being.
215
The head nurse of the ward had the same general sort of impression of this patient, as functioning like an animal. In one of
her notes, for example, many months after the patient's admission, when the animallike quality had become more of a friendly
than a repelling sort, the nurse put the following amused report
in her notes: "Galloping over the pasture-e-er, I mean the ward.
Being very friendly arid overactive . .. ." On another occasion
the patient was described, in the nurses' notes, as having run out
onto the porch, lifted her leg over a wastebasket and urinated
into itt like a dog..
In my work with this woman, I found abundant evidence that
she frequently felt herself to be an animal. I also obtained some
clues as to the etiology of this view of herself; of these I shall
mention only a few.
During the two years preceding her psychosis she had developed a conspicuously stertorous mode of breathing, partly as a
result of unusually severe and chronic sinusitis. Her father, during
my interview with him at the time of her admission, showed
extreme loathing in speaking about this, describing how it
shocked him to hear this breathing when he was near her. Her
mother, likewise, was made tremendously anxious by this condition; neither parent had been able to talk about the matter with
her. A second factor, which presumably at least added to her animalistic conception of herself was the fact that, in the first hospital
to which she had been admitted upon becoming overtly psychotic,
the staff had rarely, if ever, had experience with so deeply and
grotesquely ill a person as she; their report to us strongly suggested that their attitude toward her had been one of shocked
withdrawal. A third, much longer-standing, and undoubtedly
far more potent reason for this patient's conception of herself was
found to reside in an unusually severe, continuing, rejection of
her by her mother} apparently from the girl's infancy, and by the
father from a somewhat later age.
8. A forty..year-old woman, for the first few months of her
psychotherapy, sat motionless as an inanimate object and was
entirely mute throughout many of the hours.. Her catatonic symptoms were sufficiently severe to require one and a half years of
216
hospitalization, and it was only after some years of additional

outpatient treatment that she began evidencing anything like a
healthy physical mobility and freedom of verbal expression
during the therapeutic sessions. There were numerous indications, both from her demeanor and from historical data which
she eventually became able to provide, that prominent aspects
of her personality were comprised of unconscious identifications
with various elements of the nonhuman environment of her
childhood. For example, one important conception of herself was
as a doll. She often dressed like a doll; she lay motionless as a
doll on the analytic couch; in her social life she encouraged men
to treat her like a doll which is to be picked up and played with
when the spirit moves one, and then cast aside until one is, at
some later time, again moved to pick it up; and she also, in the
course of freely associating, late in the psychotherapy, repeatedly
associated herself with a doll.
Such identifications with nonhuman objects were found, in her
case as in most (though not all) other similar cases in my experience, to be traceable mainly to aspects of her relationship
with her mother. For instance, in an hour after more than four
'years of therapy, she said, "Sometimes when my mother looks at
me I feel as if she were looking at a dress-shop dummy." She said
this in a puzzled, uncomfortable tone, as if such experiences gave
her the creeps. I asked, "Sort of speculatively and appraisingly?"
She replied, "Yeah. I feel as though any minute she's going to
tell me I'm a sight and is going to tell me I should dye my hair
and have it cut differently and waved differently, and that I
should wear less conservative clothes, and use a different shade
of lipstick, and so on and on. n There was abundant corroborative
evidence, not only from the patient but from my own interviews
with the mother, that she treated her daughter like an inanimate
object, to be picked up and worried over and remodeled as the
need arose, and then dropped. In a second fashion, too, she
habitually had treated the daughter as inanimate. A very energetic, obsessive-compulsive, intensely ambitious woman who regarded the achievements of her two children as an absolute
217
measure of her own worth as a mother, she treated the patient

as a kind of storage battery which needed continuous recharging,
rather than as an animate human being with abundant internal
sources of energy.
9. This thirty-five-year.. old, unmarried schizophrenic man had
grown up in a family in which conventional success was tremendously overvalued, and human needs were rigidly repressed
in oneself and ignored in others. Each of his' two siblings man..
aged to achieve sufficient worldly success so that the resultant
prestige kept them going, psychologically. But this man had been
a thoroughgoing failure in that regard} and consequently suffered
the most intense derogation by the other family members, who
functioned largely as though he did not exist.
The effect which this long-continued treatment had worked
upon him was reflected in his behavior in the hospital. At times,
it was almost as if he had no existence. A tall but slender person,
he lay motionless and mute in bed nearly all the time for several
months after his admission, looking like simply a somewhat unu..

sually large wrinkle in the bedcover, When he became able, after
some months, to come downstairs to my office, he moved in a very
slow, noiseless, ghostly way. At times I would find him behind
my open door, out in the corridor, standing in the sharp angle
between the door and the wall. Once, having called the ward and
asked the nurse to send him down to the hour, I turned to my
files for a few minutes. When I tumed away from them, he had
materialized in the usual chair, noiselessly, two feet away from
me. During various of the therapeutic hours} which were for a
long time almost totally silent} I often thought, upon looking over
at him, still and crumpled in the chair} that he appeared to be
more an empty sack, or a bundle of clothes, than a person. During warm summer days he began to sit out on the lawn, and a
colleague, upon coming into the hospital one morning, told me
in amazement of how much the patient had looked to him like a
pile of clothes on the ground. As he became, while the weeks and
months went by, a little more alive, he would drag himself in a
small circle, on the front lawn, looking for all the world like a
218
drab, thin bird with a broken wing, and later, as still a bit more
energy became available to him) he roamed the streets of the
nearby community, aimlessly, very much like a homeless stray
cat.
For many years, in the family home, his most "interpersonally'
alive relationship had been, indeed) with his pet cat. Upon his
becoming psychotic, he surprised his family by making a number
of psychologically perceptive utterances, one of which was,
"People should love people, not cats." e During his psychotherapy
with me, his relationship with the cat was recapitulated in the
transference relationship, with his at times treating me as if I
were a cat of which he was fond--once, for example, offering me
candy in a fondly teasing fashion, as if it were a tidbit he was
offering to a cat, trying to get the cat to stand up and meow for
it. On another occasion, when his moving to outpatient status
seemed near at hand, he asked a question in which the verbal
content was full of reproach, but his voice was full of love and
grief in asking it: "Dr. Searles, why have you treated me like
an animal here?" What his question revealed to me was an attitude on his part of which he was not yet conscious, but which
revealed itself to other persons repeatedly: his unconscious attitude, evidently, was that he had been loved and cherished here
as he himself had fondly cared for his pet cat and, although he
consciously wanted desperately to be released from the hospital,
unconsciously he was broken-hearted that we were about to let
him go.
Such sporadic moments of open fondness as the offering-thetidbit-to-the-cat incident merely punctuated, for many months,
long periods of his seeming to feel totally ignored by myself and
the other personnel members. He was convinced that we valued
various inanimate items of property more than we valued himthat we took care of the building, for instance, but gave no
thought to taking care of him. On one occasion he showed great
hesitancy about putting something upon my desk next to his
chair. He brought out, with some encouragement from me) that
This comment. as we!! as some of the other data given in this paragraph,
was mentioned in the preceding chapter (on page 172) .
219
he was afraid he would scratch the desk and then "you would
make me leave.') All these reactions had clear antecedents in his
life at home.
His father and eIder sister, the dominant members of his family, were extremely rigid individuals who were quite unable to
conceive of his becoming, in the COUISe of treatment, anything
but the Charles they had always considered him to be prior to
hisillness. His sister berated him, during a visit, for having "acted
like an animal" during the initial, acute phase of his psychosis.
This condemnation presumably reinforced his own evident conviction that he could only be (a) someone who conformed-as
he consciously had done throughout the years prior to his psychosis-to hisfamily's rigid standards of behavior, repressing his own
needs for interpersonal intimacy and accepting the status of, in
effect) an inanimate object; or (b) an animal.
As a final "clinical example" of the etiologic factor under
discussion-the parent(s) treating the child as nonhuman-I
shall quote briefly from Alberto Moravia's novel, Two Adolescents (106). Fictional though this work is, I find it so perceptive,
psychologically, that I consider it a piece of unusually valuable
clinical material. In passages too long to reproduce in full, the
author expresses beautifully a youth's feeling of being treated as
an inanimate object by his parents, and his feeling of thereby
being relegated to relating to the world of inanimate objects-a
world of inanimate objects which) in this case) are perceived as
being thoroughly hostile to himself.
Concerning the rages to which the youth Luca was chronically
subject, Moravia writes that
More than anything it was the dumb, inert resistance of inanimate objects, or rather, his own incapacity to make use of such
objects without fatigue or injury that threw him into these devastating rages.
Luca becomes convinced of the malignancy of the whole world

around him when, while attempting to repair the house's elec..
trical circuit, he is subjected to a severe and prolonged shock,
220
which he experiences as coming not from the wires alone, but

from the whole hated world surrounding him. And a second
incident of similarly deep significance occurs when, during a train
trip with his parents, he has been led by them to look forward
to having the rare pleasure of a meal in the dining car, only to
find at the last moment that his parents calmly decide, between
themselves, to follow the family's usual practice of foregoing this
bit of luxury, after all:
What offended him most was that neither of them asked his
opinion and that they treated him as an inanimate object, which,
being a mere object, had neither preferences nor ideas, neither
tastes nor wishes ..... [He was filled now with] the usual fury
that assailed him every time he became aware of revolt and
insubordination on the part of things and people in opposition to
his own will . . . In any case, the important thing was not so
much the question of whether he had lunch in the dining car or
in the compartment as the feeling that his parents were made of
the same hostile, defiant matter he was aware of in other things.
And like other things, they could not, with all the love that they
felt for him, be tolerated [106a].
Thus far, in dealing with this matter of the genesis of the

individual's anxiety lest he become nonhuman, I have been focusing upon only one factor-the "external" root-namely, the
individual's being treated by his parentfs), during his childhood,
as if he were nonhuman. But we know that, both for understanding the psychogenesis of any personality type or any type of psychiatric illness, and for psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic
treatment, such a focus is too limited. The human individual,
certainly beginning rather soon after birth, is no mere lump of
clay upon which pathological influences leave their imprint.
Reaching back to some indeterminate but surely very early time
in infancy, his own innate energies and needs also start exerting
a powerful and ceaseless influence upon the development of his
individual personality. So in this instance we must try to grasp
the contributions, so to speak, which the individual himself
221
makes toward the development of this anxiety lest he become

nonhuman.
In the above passage from Moravia's novel, for example, we
see that more is transpiring than simply Luca's parents' treating
him as if he were an inanimate object. We find much evidence
that Luca himself is still largely entrenched in an infantile-om..
nipotent orientation toward the outer world, including the human
beings-his parents-as well as the inanimate objects in that
world. Accordingly, he is so preoccupied with his own desires and
his own frustrations that he himself does not seem, at a real
feeling level, to react to his parents as human beings; he reacts
as though they, along with everything else outside himself, were
in the nature of frustrating inanimate objects which refuse to
meet his needs, to bend to his will It would seem, then, that his
feeling of being dealt with by them as though he were an inanimate object is based only partially upon fact; partially it is based
upon his projection upon them of his own orientation, of which
he is largely unconscious, of treating the other person as an inan ..
imate object.
In each of the nine clinical examples given above, as with
other such patients in my experience} this same process has ap
peared to be at work. With regard to the first-described patient
(the woman whose father, during a visit with her, poked and
nudged her as if he were poking with a stick at a strange animal),
for instance, the psychologist's report of her performance in the
drawing-a-person test is significant, in implying that the patient
herself viewed men as being strange objects rather than fellow
human beings:
The patient's drawings and her responses to them suggest a
very simple form of narcissism, centering around her external
characteristics as an attractive female, with emphasis on clothes..
Part of her dilemma may lie in that the necessary counterpart to
this picture, namely, the male, is really an unknown quantity to
her about whom she knows nothing and cares less [italics mine].
Thus she cannot be effectively attractive to him for long and must
repea tedly meet with un understood rejection.
222
In addition to this element of the patient's projection, onto

others, of his own view of the other person as being nonhuman
(a process which) as I have just indicated, makes him feel that
he is being treated as nonhuman by the other person}, there is
another great "contribution" which the patient himself makes
toward the anxiety lest he become nonhuman, and it is this subject with which the next chapter will deal: his own (largely
unconscious) desire to become nonhuman.
The Desire
to Become Nonhuman
As a Defense Against
Various Feeling-States
CHAPTER
The desire to become nonhuman has, of course, multiple determinants. I shall present only those which seem, in my clinical
experience, to be the most important ones. Furthermore, I shall
spend little time upon those which are relatively accessible to the
individual's own consciousness and which are, therefore, obvious;
my main effort is to delineate determinants which are most
deeply buried in the unconscious.
All the following determinants may be present to some extent
in any "normal" individual as well as in any neurotic or psychotic patient; but nearly all of them seem to exist more importantly, more powerfully, in psychiatrically ill persons than in
"nonnar' persons.
At the outset, I shall simply mention, briefly, the readily
apparent positive aspects of nonhuman existence as we human
beings perceive it, That is, when we see a puppy happily playing,
224
we may desire to become such a puppy, simply because the

puppy's existence, as we see it at the moment, involves having
fun. And when we see a cat dozing contentedly before a fire, we
may wish to become a similar cat, purely to be able to enjoy such
contentment as the cat appears to be enjoying.
All the following determinants (i.e., determinants of the
human being's desire to become nonhuman) which I shall describe in this chapter have to do with the negative side of the
matter. That is, they represent desires to escape from unpleasant
states of feeling. Among such states of feeling, the following seem
particularly important in this connection: (a) anxiety concerning one's own mortality--eoncerning the inevitable eventuality
of death; (b) anxiety concerning the assumption, and maintenance, of responsibility for one's own living; (c) sexual conflicts;
(d) bel plessness: (e) superego pressures; (f) ego instability; and
(g) loneliness.
The next chapter will describe a determinant which is on the
first-mentioned, the positive, side of the matter; there, we shall
see evidence that this desire to become nonhuman can be not
simply a flight from something (such as the present chapter will
portray), but also a positive striving-a striving toward an af..
firmative, constructive goal. Specifically, the next chapter will be
devoted to the presentation of a hypothesis of "phylogenetic regression": the individual's striving to escape from the human
situation in order) as it were, to get a fresh start at becoming an
adult human being.
Anxiety Concerning One's Own Mortality

This anxiety feeds into our desire to become nonhuman, for we
cling to the hope that we can thereby transcend death. The
pharaohs of ancient Egypt presumably hoped to overcome death
\ly having the pyramids built, which have survived for several
thousands of years.' Creative individuals in many fields of en~ Relevant to this conjecture is the following passage from an article conteming Titian: UAfter sitting for Titian) Charles V would permit no other
..tist to paint his portrait. After Titian had finished the third portrait) the
1mperor exclaimed: "This is the third time I have triumphed over
teath!* n (99).
225
deavor-artists, composers) writers, engineers) and so on-probably are activated, in part, by the yearning that, through the
medium of their creations which "live" after them, they may
achieve an existence which conquers their own biological deaths;
they hope to live on by, as it were, "becoming" their nonhuman
creations. It is significant, in this connection, that when we
search our minds for words to pay the highest form of tribute
to creative works which we admire, we think of words like "timeless" and "immortal."
The myth of Hyacinthus provides a beautiful expression of
mankind's yearning to become immortal through transformation
into some nonhuman fonn. Edith Hamilton tells this myth in the
following way:
Another flower that came into being through the death of a
beautiful youth [she says, after recounting the myth of Narcissus]
was the hyacinth, again not like the flower we call by that name,
but lily-shaped and of a deep purple, Of" some say a splendid
crimson. That was a tragic death, and each year it was commemorated by
The festival of Hyacinthus
That lasts throughout the tranquil night.
In a contest with Apollo
He was slain.
Discus throwing they completed,
And the god's swift cast
Sped beyond the goal he aimed at
and struck Hyacinthus full in the forehead a terrible wound. He
had been Apollo's dearest companion. There was no rivalry
between them when they tried which could throw the discus
farthest; they were only playing a game. The god was horrorstruck to see the blood gush forth and the lad, deathly pale, fall
to the ground. He turned as pale himself as he caught him up in
his arms and tried to staunch the wound. But it was too late.
While he held him the boy's head fell back as a flower does when
its stem is broken. He was dead and Apollo kneeling beside him
wept for him, dying so young, so beautiful. He had killed him,
although through no fault of his, and he cried, "Oh, if I could
give my life for yours) or die with you." Even as he spoke, the
226
bloodstained grass turned green again and there bloomed forth

the wondrous flower that was to make the lad's name known
forever [66f].
Anxiety Concerning the Assumption, and Maintenance, of

Responsibility for One's Own Living
From this anxiety, also, one may long to escape by becoming
nonhuman. At times when our lives as human beings seem in..
tolerably filled with complex decisions to be resolved, and with
complex feelings to be borne within ourselves, we may wish that
we could put all this aside by achieving what may appear to us
to be the enviably passive, simple existence of various nonhuman
forms of life, or even of inanimate objects.
I have been interested to see that a person's being legally
conunitted, as being incompetent and therefore unable to maintain responsibility for the guidance of his own affairs, may be
construed by him as providing an unconsciously wished-for nonhuman status of this kind. In a sociologically and legally quite
real sense, the role of a legally committed individual differs from
that of other human beings in our culture, inasmuch as the
patient may interpret his loss of some civil rights and social responsibilities as signifying-even though they do not objectively
signify-that he is no longer regarded as a human being.
One such individual, for example, a paranoid schizophrenic
man who was legally committed throughout my three years of
work with him, frequently vented intense bitterness and resentment about his committed status; he was deeply humiliated by
the essentially nonhuman position which he felt himself to occupy, vis-a-vis other persons. But over the course of the therapy
it became clear to me that his conunitment was fulfilling an
unconscious desire on his part to yield up the responsibility for
his own life to others. Thus, for instance, it was evident that" this
man, who haughtily emphasized how self-reliant he was by nature, was quite unable to make major plans concerning his own
life, and his committed status served to help him avoid the
recognition of his helplessness in this regard. Instead of arriving
at any such recognition, he would tell me bitterly, "Of course,
227
I can't make plans as long as I'm subject to control by others,"

At another point, he was able to say, regarding his ill mother,
"1 think that if I were a free person I would be quite concerned
about her welfare) and would have quite a feeling of responsibility about taking care of her," but that under the circumstances
-with his own being legally committed--it would be pointless
to have such feelings.
This man, several months after having progressed to outpatient status, finally moved, at his own long-continued insistence,
to his distant home on the West Coast. He continued psychotherapy with an analyst there, and when I wrote a report to
that analyst, of my work with the patient, I made one observation
which ties in with what I have been saying here:
It has been my own belief for at least ten months that the
commitment is not necessary; but it has been very interesting to
see how many still-present unconscious needs his commitment
satisfies. As examples: . . . it relieves him from the necessity of
making many decisions for himself, and decisions are very difficult
for him to make, although he would regard this statement as a
great affront; it provides him with a person (other than myself,
who rarely serves this purpose for him) who acts as a representa..
tive of conventional society, in the form of his opinionated uncle
[who was the legal guardian] who is only too ready to tell the
patient that this or that expenditure, for instance, is "sensible'
or "ridiculous!' Once Mr. Martin [the patient] can get his uncle's
opinion, indecision is resolved: he can now proceed to do exactly
as the uncle says, or, as often happens, to do exactly the opposite.
William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience contains

a passage regarding Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit
Order, which is similarly expressive of the desire to become nonhuman. That is, it would seem that in this instance, too, this
desire is determined in part by the individual's longing to yield
up the responsibility for his own human existence:
III ought)" an early biographer reports him [i.e., Loyola] as

saying} "on entering religion, and thereafter, to place myself en-
228
tirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes His place by
His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige
me to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I
ought to set up no difference between one Superior and another,
. . . but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they
fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience.
In the hands of my Superior} I must be a soft wax, a thing, from
which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters) to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like;
and I must put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly
what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has
neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without
resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please anyone j
like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to his
needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the
hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.
"I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular
place, to be employed in a particular duty. . . . I must consider
nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things
I use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never op..
poses resistance" [85c].
A harsh, self-punitive superego is likely, of course) to be found

in such individuals; I shall elaborate upon this factor shortly.
Sexual Conflicts
These may form a powerful determinant of the desire to become nonhuman-specifically, in this regard, to become a
"higher" form of life, leaving behind the conflict-producing
human proclivities for "animal" sexuality. The ascetic Thoreau
asserted that
Chastity is the flowering of man . . . He is blessed who is
assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the
divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for
shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he
is allied [154b J.
229
Next I shall present material from my work with another

psychiatric patient, material showing that this patient, in an
unconscious effort to defend herself against anxiety-laden sexual
conflicts, tended to conceive of herself as a nonhuman thing..
A deeply schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age at the
time when she began psychotherapy with me, for more than two
years showed confusion as to whether she was male or female.
This confusion she expressed indirectly, as in the exchange with
me which is quoted below. Two words of prefatory explanation:
the patient's first name was Nanette; the comments in brackets
are mine.
'IAn ane is a donkey, isn't it?"

[Uin French, yes.. "] "An ane is a donkey in French, yes. It's a
game where you're blindfolded and you pin a tail on a donkey.
That's my name: a-n-e (laughing). The 'a' has that-what do
you call it, over it?-an inverted v.n
e'Let's see what an inverted V brings up."] "My nose is sort
of in the shape of a V. I had a pin that was V-shaped-well, 1
didn't have it. I didn't have any jewelry. It was Ruth's (Ruth:
her younger sister) . . . . ane- I don't know whether it's masculine or feminine.. It doesn't have to be either; it's l-apostrophe.."
Note her repeatedly associating tine~f which she says, "I

don't know whether it's masculine or feminine't-e-with herself.
This confusion about her own sexuality she repeatedly projected onto her environment. She once spoke of a "statue of a
woman in Rock Creek Park," imitating with upraised arms the
posture of the statue, and went on to say that she liked it very
much because of "its masculine grace." I replied, in surprise,
"Its masculine grace?" She nodded and went on speaking. Also,
she described on several occasions, during the first two years of
the therapy, an incident when, prior to her hospitalization, she
had visited, uninvited, the home of a young man with whom she
was having an autistic love affair. Each time she spoke of this,
it was evident that she was confused as to whether the person
who met her at the door was male or female. She was not sure
.230
whether this was the young man himself, or his sister who lived
there with him and their father. In one of her accounts of this,
she at first said she knew the person was a girl, but she kept
referring to the person as "he," saying at one point she "was 60
per cent sure" the person was a boy. She described, however, the
person as having "bright red lipstick and lots of powder, and
blonde hair swept up in back." This person's name, the patient
found upon inquiring, was Janet-very similar to the patient's
own name, Nanette; and the patient herself had blonde hair.
The patient went on to say, giggling tensely, "He looked like a
fashionable sketch," and then added, "The other day Dr. - - [a doctor at the Lodge with whom she had, for a long time, an
autistic love affair] looked like a fashionable sketch." This last
hinted at her confusion concerning the sex of Dr.
, a confusion which similarly emerged on various other occasions. All this
kind of material from her is suggestive that her confusion about the
sexuality of figures in her environment is related to her confusion
about her own sexuality.
It is well known that schizophrenic individuals are frequently
confused as to their own maleness or femaleness. But this woman
presented, further, material suggestive of the previously mentioned special point which is, I think, less well known, and which
constitutes the main point toward which the above clinical excerpts have been leading: this confusion, this conflict, concern..
ing the individual's own sexuality may push toward resolution
by way of the person's conceiving of himself, or herself, as nonhuman-neither male nor female nor both, but instead a sexless
thing. Not only does existing as a subjectively sexless, inanimate
object serve to allay the confusion arising from one's ambivalent
sexual strivings, but the immobilization implied in this self..
concept (i.e., the inanimate aspect of this self-image) serves to
allay one's fear that one will lose control of these strivings.
Some of the material suggestive of this point emerged in one
hour when she
again describing her experiences of going to
the young man's home. She said, "When it came out of the bed..
room it looked just like Fred [the name of the young man]-bright
was
231
lipstick, a lot of some kind of powder base, and hair done up.
Its eyes and nose and mouth were just like Fred's. It was very
tall and broad," she said with a gesture of revulsion. "I've never
seen anything so broad."
If we continue to think of her perception of this other person
as involving much projection of her own conception of her own
sexuality, we see the likelihood that, during this visit to the young
man's home, in circumstances of, for her, intensely conflictual
sexual temptation and sexual threat, her own unconscious conception of her sexuality went in the direction of considering
herself to be a nonhuman, sexless thing (as a fonn of escape from
all this intensely anxiety...p rovoking conflict), with projection of
such a concept of herself onto the person who came out of the
bedroom. Note especially her repeated reference to that person
as "it.' In her tone, also, she sounded as though she were speaking of a weird thing rather than a human being.
Other evidence corroborative of this point was provided by
the patient's own appearance and behavior, for many months
during the psychotherapy: she oftentimes appeared (in her manner of dress and in her use of cosmetics), and behaved, like a
nonhuman thing-a marionette, or an indescribable apparitionnot only in my opinion but in the opinions of other personnel
members who were dealing with her.
I shall not attempt to provide here any detailed material to
show further how terrified this young woman was concerning the
subjective threat of sexual activity. In the words of her administrator, she was "crawling with terror" for several months after
her admission to the disturbed ward, and in her hOUIS with me
she left no doubt that one of her greatest fears was of being raped.
She used to plead for, and demand) assurance that she would
not be raped. The psychotherapy eventually brought to light her
very strong homosexual desires, desires to rape other persons, and
desires on her own part to be raped. She had, as is perhaps by
now obvious enough, intensely conflictual desires to be male plus
a hatred of, and aversion to, maleness. The point I am making
here is that she showed an unconscious tendency to defend her-
232
self against the anxiety concerning sex, about which she had
such a welter of conflictual feelings, by conceiving of herself as
being a nonhuman, sexless thing.
In one hour with her I experienced what appears to have been
a kind of participation in her own intensely anxiety-laden confusion as to her sexuality. She had come into the hour vividly
Ilpsticked and face..powdered and with a very sexy coiffure, and
was lying on the couch with her head propped up and her feet
crossed-a posture which impressed me as masculine. I suddenly
got a strong conviction that she was a man dressed up as a
woman, I kept trying to dismiss the idea as patently absurd, because I knew that the nurses had helped her to change menstrual
pads and had given her baths; so I knew it utterly irrational to
think. that under these circumstances she could have remained on
a female ward for many months. But the idea persisted during
the remainder of that session, and was accompanied by an eerie
feeling which was most uncomfortable. Within the ensuing week,
she produced sufficient verbal evidence (some of which I have
given above) of her own confusion as to her sexual identity, so
as to suggest to me that, as I mentioned in one of my notes during
that week, U my feeling about Nanette as a transvestite probably was not entirely 'imaginary')' i.e., self-produced-probably
reflected Nanette's doubt as to her own sex, a doubt reflected in
her posture, her mannerisms, and so forth."
My belief is that I had experienced, here, a taste of the eerily
uncomfortable feelings which presumably assailed the patient
herself, in connection with her uncertainty concerning her sexual
identity, and that it was partly to relieve just such anxiety as this
that her unconscious conception of herself as nonhuman arose.
One might label this an instance of the therapist's feeling "communicated anxiety" from the patient. I think it also correct to
say that the patient and the therapist were each feeling threat..
ened with conflictual feelings regarding threatening sexual temptation-and-danger in the therapeutic relationship, and were both
utilizing mutually reinforcing unconscious defenses against such
anxiety. I think, that is, that my sensing her to be some kind of
weird, repellent male-female represented a defense against sexual
233
temptation on my own part. But the initial point remains, I believe, valid: I was experiencing a brief sample of the kind of
anxiety which was chronically threatening her, as indicated by
her acting, oftentimes, as a sexless, nonhuman object.
The schizophrenic woman described in Eissler's (31) previously mentioned paper showed an ego defense somewhat comparable with that of the woman I have been describing. In his patient,
similarly, there was what one might call a dedifferentiation to a
state of subjective oneness with the inanimate environment, occurring at times when, for instance, she was threatened by the arousal
of romantic..erotic feelings:
When the patient saw a man whom she loved enter the office,
she was in danger of feeling love in his presence, which would
have made it impossible for her to function; for " . . she was
certain the man would notice her passion and that she would walk
up to him and express her feelings. Under such circumstances she
instantly felt dead" Feeling dead temporarily solved the whole
problem" The production of the feeling of deadness was the main
tool with which she solved the majority of the innumerable social
complications through which she went constantly. " ..
Eissler describes this as though it were a consciously willed

process, a process which the patient was able to tum on and off.
I surmise that it was, rather, a temporary dedifferentiation over
which the patient had only fantasied control.
Hel'plesmess
The desire to become nonhuman is a facet, in some instances,
of the grandiose conception of oneself as being able to be anything, a conception serving as an unconscious defense against
profound feelings of helplessness.
One example of this emerged in my work with the thirty-oneyear..old paranoid schizophrenic woman described on pages 183..
186, part of whose delusional system included her conviction that
she had repeatedly been turned into various nonhuman forms. I
have described her showing apprehension lest she be again
234
turned, imminently, into an animal, or bird, or tree, or what not.

I repeatedly saw how productive it was of anxiety and terror to
her. It was this anxious side of the delusion which was most
obvious for many months. But as time went on, it became more
clear that this delusion was also serving her grandiose conception
of herself: she attributed to herself the power to become, however unwillingly, these various nonhuman forms. One incident
which helped me to see this was when she said in one of the
hours) in a tone of overt protest but of covert boasting, "I don't
see why they knock me out and make me do all these things
[i.e., innumerable dramatic and adventuresome things} many
of them utterly beyond human capacity, and none of them being
actual things which she was doing or had ever done] unconsciously, because I can do consciously all the things they make me
do unconsciously~ except for changing into a bird or fish or
animal." The covert boastfulness left the further implication that
she could do even this last-the "changing into a bird or fish
or animal't-e-unconsciously.
Schilder's previously mentioned book, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, contains some passages which are
relevant here, and which include some observations concerning
normal people in this same regard:
When people wear enormous masks at the carnival in Nice,
they are not merely changing the physiological basis of their bodyimage but are actually becoming giants themselves. One of the
pleasures to be derived from this pageant is the possibility of
playing with the enlargement of our body-image and thus in..
creasing our own importance. Our body-image is in a continuous
process of enlargement and shrinking and we enjoy these changes
in it. The body-image changes continually and we triumph over
the limitations of the body by adding masks and clothes to the
body-image. This is the explanation of the animal masks of
primitive peoples which actually identify the wearer with the
animal [128d].
Ekstein's (32) paper entitled, "The Space Child's Time Machine," provides some excellent examples, from his work with
235
this schizophrenic boy, of how an identification with delusionally

fantasied machines can serve to allay feelings of helplessness.
Ekstein tells us how these space.. and time-conquering projections
or the boy's own self served, for a long time in the therapy, as
safeguards against the recognition of profound feelings of helplessness:
We see . . . that he attempted to master his anxiety about the
present, his fear of death, of destruction and annihilation by
making himself the master of the past. He who could change the
past might thus secure survival and save the future. The helplessness of early childhood, the lonesomeness and the feeling of rejection, his weakness, his smallness, all of it was reversed into its
opposite, and just as once [with the use of a fantasied space ship]
he had governed space, he now was governing time. Rather than
recalling the past and the misery of his early life as he must have
experienced it, he felt himself as a master of the past. Since he
had changed the past, he did not need to change the present and
he did not need to be afraid of the future.
Superego Pressures Toward Omnipotence

Various of the already mentioned factors are obviously heightened in importance-heightened in their capacity to drive the
individual toward desiring to become nonhuman-in so far as
the individual's superego is of an archaically harsh, self-punitive
sort. In particular, anxiety concerning the assumption and main..
tenance of responsibility for one's own living, and anxiety regarding sexual desires and sexual conflicts, are aggravated by the
presence of such a superego. And the profound helplessness which
one eventually finds to lie behind such grandiose delusions as
those of the patient mentioned above (in the section on helplessness) is found to be not so much a helplessness to meet the
demands of reality per se, as a helplessness to meet the impossibly harsh requirements of the archaic superego in the course of
one's living. I wish now to indicate how the demand which such
a superego places upon the individual's ego) namely, the demand
that he be omnipotent, feeds into his desire to become nonhuman
236
-as a means of escape from the tormentingly burdensome superego injunction that he must be capable of doing anything, thai
he must never accept either failure in any endeavor or any imperfection in himself.
Brief material from three schizophrenic patients will serve to
demonstrate that such a superego demand tends to give rise, in
the individual, to desires to become nonhuman, as a form of
surcease from this internal pressure-toward-omnipotence.
The first patient is the forty-year-old woman described on
pages 215-217 as showing various indications of having formed
important childhood identifications with dolls, partly as a function of her relationship with her very hard...driving mother who
treated her more as an inanimate object, a kind of storage battery
which needed continuous recharging, than as a human being
with internal sources of energy. I should now like to mention
that this woman, during the course of four years of intensive
psychotherapy, made clear to me that a prime factor which had
led to her catatonic illness had been her own intensely self-punitive superego. Her superego had driven her incessantly toward
the goal of omnipotence, much as the mother herself was driven
and much as the mother endeavored to drive the daughter.
The patient's doll-like behavior was found to constitute an
expression of her desire to find relief from these excessive superego demands, to find relief through becoming an inanimate
object.. She proved, not surprisingly, to be extremely afraid of
her strivings toward passivity. In one hour, for example, she revealed a long-felt need to get people angry and critical toward
her, lest, in the absence of such stimulating responses from them,
she become completely passive. On further development of this
fantasy by free association, however, she brought out that she
felt she would become like a pig; and she next recalled that, as a
child on her grandmother's farm, she used to envy the life which
the placid pigs had, and used to find glee in stirring them up.
It had required about three years of psychotherapy to unearth
this desire to become a pig. It was four months later that she
brought out the material, referred to above, indicating the iden-
237
tification with the dolls, as well as the following related material:

In the course of freely associating, she expressed some thoughts
about the termination of psychotherapy, putting it in terms of my
"finishing" her. I suggested, "Let's see what the idea of my 'finishing' you brings to mind." She immediately replied, "Somebody
finishing the laundry." I was startled to hear this, startled at the
inertness, the utter lack of initiative, implied here, and instantly
thought that the termination of therapy, which I had been thinking was perhaps not more than a few months off, had now receded many months into the future. But I pulled myself together,
and inquired calmly, "What gives with the laundry then? What
happens with It?" She said, equally promptly, "It's ready for the
next time someone wants to use it."
I still felt dismayed at her conception of the termination of
therapy; it is much sweeter music to one's ears when the patient
associates to, for instance, a young plant, bursting with life and
eager to grow further. But within a few minutes it occurred to
me that these communications probably represented, for her, a
very good step, that she could now so candidly express her longing for passivity, a longing which had been formerly so shameful
and anxiety-provoking to her. It was as though she had achieved)
in the course of our work, a sufficiently clear differentiation of
herself as an animate entity so that she could now dare to recog..
nize a wish to be like the inanimate objects (such as the laundry)
in the world about her-this world of inanimate objects with
which she had been unconsciously so much at one, earlier in her
therapy. She no longer had to act out this wish, by unconsciously
identifying with such objects, but could permit it to enter her
awareness.
Only in retrospect did I see evidence here of countertransference: my alarm, in reaction to her expressions of striving toward passivity, brought me into very close similarity with her
hard.. driving mother. One might well surmise, then, that some of
her ostensible striving toward passivity was a disguised effort
on her part to thwart the mother therapist who was trying to
make her become omnipotent. This surmise is substantiated by
238
abundant data from the therapy; I did have, indeed, such a

countertransference problem, which, as can be seen in the bit of
interview material given above) tended to interfere with my helping her to become free from her own superego's demands for
omnipotence.
The second patient, a schizophrenic woman, twenty-two years
of age) wrote the following description of God, a description
which is vividly suggestive of the archaic harshness of this young
woman's superego:
God
God is burning everlasting hate. God is killing, chaos and everlasting destruction. God is doom. God is fury. God is consuming
fire. God is merciless and deadly. God is ever-lasting war and
vengeance. God is World War ( (ad infinitum!]!!) [underlined
four times]. God is fierceness, wrath and vengeance. God is burning hate, fury, chaos and destruction. God is fighting, war, chaos,
destruction and perdition. God is eternal fire. God is the power
of burning hate, death and destruction eternal. God is pneumonic
plague. God is white hot grinding rock. God is burning hate
everlasting, chaos, destruction and fury. God is everlasting wrath.
God is cancer. God is the temperature of ( ((infinity) )). [underlined three times]. God is all hatred, war, chaos, destruction,
violence, tempest, flood, fire, chaos, earthquake, grinding burning
rock. God is white heat. God is all [underlined tWice] furnace.
God is furnace. Eternal furnace is God. God is the {( ( (opposite)))) of mercy. God is Doom.
Therefore souls shall be destroyed. Personally since I have a
soul that means all souls including mine shall be destroyed eternally. Death and hell and perdition is our fate.
God is a lake of fire burning with brimstone which bumeth
forever and ever which is the Second Death. God is eternal
death, destruction and all perdition. God is the eternal Second
Death.
This young woman, hospitalized with severe schizophrenia

since the age of fourteen, struggling with the kind of superego
portrayed above, poignantly sought freedom from the oppres-
Psychosis and N .eurosis
239
sion of that superego by identifying, oftentimes, with the changing elements of the weather-the clouds, the wind, the rain) and
so forth. She spent much of her time out on the grounds, standing off by herself staring fascinateclly up at the clouds, and when
a storm would come up, she would come into the ward and rush
about delightedly, fluttering her hands and declaring herself to
be the wind, not in a way which connoted destructiveness, but
rather a delicious senseof freedom.
The third patient, a schizophrenic woman, twenty-eight yean
of age at the time of her admission to the hospital, remains in my
memory as having been, for approximately her first two years at
Chestnut Lodge, among the most animaIlik.e human beings I
have ever known. I vividly recall many occasions when, upon
going to our maximum-security ward for women, to have a psychotherapeutic session with one or another of my patients, I
would bear this woman in a seclusion room, snarling and roaring
with animallike rage, and jouncing her bedsprings up and down
in a most frightening manner. Even for one who has been accustomed to witnessing human rage as any psychotherapist is, it
was an awesome, shocking experience to hear this woman: it
sounded for all the world as though the creature in there were a
beast rather than a human being. Seclusion is resorted to only
sparingly at the Lodge; but this woman, short but powerfully
built and violently assaultive, required it not infrequently.
Now, after I had thus formed an impression of this woman
(whom I often saw, looking terribly anxious and confused and
hostile, out on the ward) as being someone who stood with at
least one foot in the realm of savage beasts rather than that of
human beings, I learned from her therapist something which
gave me a quite different view of her, and which moved me
greatly. He told me that, during the height of what one might
calI this nonhumanlike period of her several years' stay at the
Lodge, she spent the vast majority of her waking hours sitting
in her room and writing, reporting in meticulous detail everything which she could set down of the thoughts she experienced,
and of every least physical movement her body made. What
struck me, as he told me about this, was that here was a woman
240
cruelly enslaved by an almost incredibly severe superego, a superego against which she kept trying to rebel with her sporadic outbursts of animallike rage. Her therapist had formed the same
opinion, in the course of his work with her.
She made her notes on large sheets of unlined paper, and
over the months hundreds, possibly even some thousands, of
these sheets accumulated. When one sees samples of these sheets,
one finds an amazing number of words per page; my careful
estimate showed that, in contrast to the approximately 300 words
per page ordinarily taken up by a person's handwriting, one sheet
of this woman's notes contained 1360 of her tiny, careful words,
while another contained 2508 words. I mention this because it is
expressive, I think, of the tremendous constraint under which her
superego caused her to function.
The content of the following excerpts from these notes will be
seen to provide much direct evidence of her self-punitive super
ego. It is also noteworthy that she makes references to her body
functions and body movements as though her body were something inanimate outside her self. I shall present an excerpt from
each of two different sheets. The omission marks were inserted
by me; otherwise the material is given as it was written by her:
I have no esteem of you~we-Paper was on far side of the

am-i-are just invented-Great mixup between
tug on head-Leaned over and looked at paper on other side of
bed--slipped on page--Leaned over and looked at paper on other
side of bed-pencil moved-the thing is to drain a woman and
walk in on her-No idea of accepting him-Leaned over and
looked at paper on other side of bed-Frankly, no acceptance
whatsoever by woman-s-absolutely uncontrollable remark made by
those Above--you realize you are absolutely uncontrollable why
don't you show acceptable deportment-went into other room
and saw some cookies on the bed and ate them--saw some sandwiches and ate them-That is not proper deportment say those
who are Above-I'm an absolute screwball we can't control- . . .
bed~Paper-I
Leaned back-it could-stop me from doing spellbinding" . Thought why do you wear that suit- . . Made me think
241
of Self Made Man -Handled pencil-Woman walks down

hall to remind me-- .. Peachie- . You go to hell-s-Difficulty of writing to young man-. . . -Dangerous-Am not
sure-Iousy- . . . -Whistle these examinations are difficultStupid- . . .-Look at whole paper and all these examinations
I hope to pass--Caught-Got up--- . . -Finger placed on
paper- . . . - Thwnb placed across paper-s-pcor-c-I'm exhausted-Air through nose- . . .-being refined-blew through
nose-- ....
For months she spent almost every waking moment) from
morning till night, in making such notes.
One might well think of her note taking as representative of
her struggle to retain her status as a human being, a struggle to
keep under control her "nonhuman" id impulses, impulses which
succeeded sporadically in breaking loose and causing other persons to shrink from her in the way that I myself inwardly shrank
from her upon hearing her during her overtly disturbed periods,
when she sounded for all the world like a beast.
I have arbitrarily chosen, for the sakeof illustrating the present
point, to place the interpretative emphasis upon this other view
which likewise has, I believe) validity: the periods of animallike behavior represented what one might think of as a basically
healthy determination to throw off the shackles of her self-punilive superego, a superego which demanded such impossible things
of ber as the incessant recording of all that she experienced
throughout every waking moment, a superego which demanded,
in short, that she be onmipotent.
Ego Instability
It has long been known that one of the greatest sources of the
schizophrenic patient's anxiety is a confusion as to his own ego
boundaries. Repeatedly, in this volume, I have presented material
which illustrates how chaotically disrupted is his consequent experiencing of himseH vis-a-vis the outer world. Anyone who
works much with overtly schizophrenic patients sees repeatedly
242
how utterly unstable and discontinuous is their own experiencing

of their ego, including their body image, the subjective bound.
aries between themselves and the outer world either being absent
entirely or fluctuating irregularly as a result of the patients' intense involvement in processes or projecting onto the outer world
and taking into themselves persons and various nonhuman elements from the outer world.
It seems to me that the anxiety attendant upon this ego instability may constitute another driving force, another ingredient, of
the patient's desire to become nonhuman-specifically, to become
an inanimate object such as the relatively stable inanimate objeets he perceives in his environment.
I do not have clinical data to document clearly this hypothesis.
A clinical example to be presented in another regard} in Chapter
XI (on pages 321.324) contains strong implications that such a
process is occurring in that particular patient, and the interested
reader would find it worth while, I think, to read that example
in connection with the present discussion." For material more
explicitly revealing of this particular (hypothetical) dynamic
process, I shall present some passages from two fictional works
which portray it in a way which I have found stimulating and, I
believe, "clinically)' sound. The stories are from the field of
science fiction, a realm of literature which some colleagues regard
with scorn and which others, like myself, find to provide not
only entertaining "escape reading" but, oftentimes, reflections of
very interesting psychological processes. To those who may tend
to dismiss the following p~ges as worthless because of their
source, let me simply point out that they were written by human
beings, and, further, that they have appealed to other human
beings sufficiently widely so that they are now among the classics
of science fiction; to me these considerations represent psychological facts worthy of attention.
'a The paper by Elkisch and Mahler (33) J in which they describe a
schizophrenic boys identifying with machines in his environment as a means
of "ccneretislng" and thus mastering the inner impulses which threaten to
overwhelm him, is relevant to this point.
243
The first story, entitled Vault of the Beast, by A. E. van Vogt,

concerns a strange being from another planet which has invaded
a space ship. The beginning of the tale is as follows:
The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain, a thing,
slobbering sound horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet
changing shape and form with every jerky movement.
It crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the
terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings.
A gray blob of disintegrating stuffJ it crept, it cascaded, it rolled,
flowed, dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against
the abnormal need to become a stable shape.
Any shape! The hard, chilled-blue metal wall of the Earthbound freighter, the thick, rubbery floor. The floor was easy to
fight. It wasn't like the metal that pulled and pulled. It would
be easy to become metal for all eternity . . .
[Then, as a crewman approached along the corridor in which
it was lying:] Pain came to the thing on the floor. Primeval pain
that sucked through its elements like acid burning, burning. The
brown floor shuddered in every atom as Parelli strode over it.
The aching urge to pull toward him, to take his shape. The thing
fought its horrible desire, fought with anguish and shivering
dread, more consciously now that it could think with Parelli's
brain. A ripple of floor rolled after the man.
Fighting didn't help. The ripple grew into a blob that momentarily seemed to become a human head. Gray, hellish nightmare
of demoniac shape. The creature hissed metallically in terror,
then collapsed palpitating, slobbering with fear and pain and
hate as Parelli strode on rapidly-too rapidly for its creeping pace.
The thin, horrible sound died; the thing dissolved into brown
floor, and lay quiescent yet quivering in every atom from its
unquenchable, uncontrollable urge to live-live in spite of pain,
in spite of abysmal tenor and primordial longing for stable shape.
To live and fulfill the purpose of its lusting and malignant creators [158a].
My clinical work has strongly suggested to me that it is much

this kind of intensely anxious conflict, fictionally presented in the
above passages, which is suffered by the deeply regressed schizo...
244
phrenic patient, who finds himself pulled into uncontrollable

identifications with elements of his environment-both human
and nonhuman elements of it-in the attempt to find surcease
from an almost unendurable instability of his own ego boundaries.
This same general psychological process is portrayed, likewise,
in a particularly beautiful fashion by Ray Bradbury, a sciencefiction writer whose stories possess a combination of poetic beauty
and imaginativeness which has won him much acclaim even
outside the science-fiction field, and whose psychological perceptivity I have found informative to me on more than one occasion.
I refer to what will be found portrayed, in this second example)
as "this same general process" for the reason that we see, here
again, a similar fluidity of ego boundaries, a similar tendency to
identify helplessly with elements in the environment. But in this
particular example it is with people, rather than ingredients of
the nonhuman environment, that one is tending to identify. Thus
it is well to keep in mind that the following excerpt from Bradbury's story, and my subsequent discussion of it-the material,
that Is, on the next few pages-is to be considered in the nature
of background data, or tangentially relevant data) with respect
to the theme per se which I am expounding: the individual's
desire to become nonhuman--to become, specifically, an inanimate object-as a means of finding surcease from the anxiety
aroused in him by the instability of his ego boundaries.
In his book, The Martian Chronicles, an account of colonization of Mars by people from Earth, Bradbury describes the native
denizens of Mars as a race of creatures who assume whatever
form a human being in their proximity needs to perceive them
as possessing. In a chapter entitled The Martian, he describes
in detail the confusion which ensues among the colonists when a
Martian comes into their midst and is regarded variously by different persons, each of whom is quite convinced that he is someone personally known to them-in many instances, that he is a
dear relative from Earth. The denouement concerning this confusion) the discovery that it is a Martian whose presence accounts
for it, is as follows:
Psychosis lJnd Neurosis
245
Before their eyes he changed. He was Tom and James and a

man named Switchman, another named Butterfield; he was the
town mayor and the young girl Judith and the husband William
and the wife Clarisse. He was melting wax shaping to their minds.
They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading.. He screamed,
threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand.. "Tom!"
cried La Farge.. "Alice!" another. "William!" They snatched his
wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he
fell.
He lay on the stones, melted wax cooling, his face all faces,
one eye blue, the other golden, hair that was brown, red, yellow,
black, one eyebrow thick, one thin, one hand large, one small
[16a].
It is not extreme to say that many schizophrenics feel the same
agonizingly mercurial instability of ego boundaries, the same
helplessness to prevent their being molded to fit the needs of
other persons in their environment and to identify with these
other pen;oDS, as is symbolized by Bradbury's description of the
Martian. A considerable number of patients have been able to
verbalize to me their anxiety about this; one borderline schizophrenic young man, upon voluntarily hospitalizing himself, expressed to me in the admission interview his anxiety about becoming housed among deeply schizophrenic patients: "I'm
afraid I'll jump out of my own skin and into the skin of one of
the psychotic patients." Such fears are all too well founded; it
is well known to personnel who work with hospitalized schizophrenic patients that the latter are often helpless to stop themselves from identifying with patients about them as regards
grossly symptomatic behavior,"
Greenson has described) in a recent article (65), his psycho'Storch (148) reports that one schizophrenic woman "experienees every
upruah of thought, every relation to another person) as giving up of a part
of her pelSOnallty. 'Gradually] can no longer distinguish how much of m~
self is in me, and how much is already in others. I am a conglomeration, a
monstrosity, modelled anew each day.'" In a recent paper (134) I have presented comparable data. from intensive psychotherapy with a number of
patients.
246
The Nonhuman Enuironment
analytic findings in a group of patients who struggled against

identifying themselves with an important parental figure. These
patients, whose illnesses were in the form of neurosis rather than
psychosis, or in any case were far less severe than those of the hospitalized schizophrenic patients who have provided the bulk of my
own clinical data, showed qualitatively this same phenomenon of
helplessly identifying with another person. But his patients manifested, in each instance, such an identification only sporadically,
and the identification had to do only with a single other person
--in each case a parent-in the past." Schizophrenic patients, by
contrast, in my experience show this uncontrollable identification
with multiple other persons, persons in present proximity to the
patient as well as persons in past life. This is one of the great
reasons, I think, why schizophrenic patients are so unable to
tolerate prolonged physical closeness with another person, for
such closeness constitutes a very real threat to the patient's ego
boundaries, a very real threat to his individuality. I made this
point in an article some years ago (133), without elaborating
upon it to the extent that I have done here.
I shall now return, from this tangentially relevant subject to
which the past few pages have been devoted-the subject of
one's helplessly identifying with other persons-i-ss the main theme
of man's identifying with what I call the nonhuman environment,
or, to put it another way, man's desire to become nonhuman, in
order to relieve the anxiety attendant upon the instability of his
ego boundaries.
Erich Fromm., in The Sane Society, deals with this theme when
be describes man's effort to find a sense of identity through regressing to, and identifying himself with, nature:
While the infant is rooted in mother, man in his historical
infancy (which is still by far the largest part of history in terms
of time) remains rooted in nature. Though having emerged from
Jacobson's (83, 84) writings concerning the metapsychology of psycnotic

identifications are relevant to Greenson's findings. She states that in schizophrenia there is "an escape from superego conflicts by a dissolution of the
superego and by iu regressive transformation back into threatening parental
images" (83).
247
nature the natural world remains his home; here are still his
roots. He tries to find security regressing to and identifying himself with nature, the toorld 01 plants and animals [My italics].
This attempt to hold on to nature can be clearly seen in many
primitive myths and religious rituals. When man worships trees
and animals as his idols, he worships particularizations of nature;
they are the protecting, powerful forces whose worship is the worship of nature itself. In relating himself to them, the individual
finds his sense of identity and belonging, as part of nature [55a].
Loneliness
Here I have in mind a number of schizophrenic patients who
have shown an outstandingly unhuman appearance and behavior for long periods in their hospital stay, including in each case
such marked assaultiveness as to require them to be physically
secluded in their rooms, away from other patients for long periods. In these patients I have seen evidence that their hopelessness about ever finding a satisfying relatedness to other human
beings had reached such a point that they seemed to be experiencing a longing to become at one with the trees outside their
windows, trees which, quite literally, for hours at a time provided
them with a companionship which they were not getting from
other human beings. In such cases, it seems as if the loneliness
is even more unbearable than the threat of losing their human
identity.
Another factor in this is the patient's own having built up such
an intensity of rejeetingness toward all his fellow men, bis own
baving come to find all other human beings so utterly unacceptable to him, that he subjectively relates himself more to the trees,
and to other nonhuman things about him) than to the other patients or the personnel. As one such patient, while gazing out her
window, flatly and emphatically stated it, "I certainly miss
horses, and I don't like another living thing," then added as an
afterthought, "--except trees,"
In a subsequent chapter I shall present clinical material showing patients' "personalizing" their nonhuman environment-perceiving it in animistic terms-in an unconscious effort to assuage
248
feelings of loneliness. Taking that concept along with this present

one, the more comprehensive statement may be made that the
individual may, in order to find assuagement for loneliness, unconsciously strive to achieve a homogeneity as between himself
and elements of his nonhuman environment, either by perceiving
those elements animlstically, or by perceiving himself as being
nonhuman like those elements.
In a therapeutic hour with such a patient, when he or she
reveals such a feeling of intense relatedness to, for example, a
tree outside the window, this may of course represent simply a
displacement of feelings, on the patient's part, from the therapist
to the tree. But my belief is that we are, if anything, too ready to
place emphasis upon this explanation, and to underestimate the
real and great importance which the tree possesses in the life of a
lonely patient who is, quite literally, cut off from human companionship much of the time.
The following passages from a chapter entitled "Solitude,"
in Thoreau's Walden, show this same psychological proc~ at
work in the author. In this instance, the individual-Thoreauis relatively successful in warding off any awareness of loneliness;
but presumably he manages to avoid, for the most part, any intensely felt need for human companionship only at the cost of his
maintaining a somewhat animistic view of his nonhuman. envi-
ronment:
I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense
of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to
the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood
of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life . .. [But
then:] Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathyand befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the
presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we
are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest
of blood to me and hwnanest was not a person nor a villager,
that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again [t54c].
A3 an example from another field of human creativity, the

field of art, we find in Vincent van Gogh's careful painting of
249
his chair-a simple, rudely constructed straight chair resting

upon the red-tiled floor of his room-an expression of this same
phenomenon: a troubled and lonely human being's tendency to
view animistic ally, to personify, the nonhuman. Robert Goldwater, Associate Professor of Art at Queens College in New York,
makes this commentary about the painting:
What gives this picture its expressive power? Is it Van Gogh's
conscious concern with the effect of light? Perhaps in part) for he
has changed a chair of unpainted wood into yellow in order to
heighten its contrast with the red and to achieve an integrated
hannony of color. But beyond the problem of design is the utter
seriousness with which the painter regarded such familiar objects,
a respect so profound as almost to transform them into living
beings (My italics]. Like the rest of his bedroom in Aries they
become symbols of stability in Van Gogh's world of continual
crisis [63].
The Desire to Become Nonhuman

As a Function of the Striving
Toward Maturity via
"Phylogenetic Regression"
CHAPTER
In the preceding chapter, I described various unpleasant states

of feeling from each of which theindividual may seek escape in
the longing to become nonhuman. That iSJ I have thus far been
occupied mainly here with describing the longing to become nonhuman as a defense against various unconscious affects. Now we
come to a qualitatively different facet of the whole matter.
This yearning to become nonhuman can frequently be viewed
as a need, on the part of the patient, to regress phylogenetically,
to "return" symbolically to the nonhuman state out of which the
human race emerged in the long course of evolution, in order to
get a fresh start in the struggle to achieve individuation, and
subsequent emotional maturation, as a human being.
This particular theoretical point, just stated, is an outgrowth
of my basic concept of the general phenomenon of regression, a
251
concept which I shall now sketch in as a background for this

more specific point.
Regression is usually described, in psychiatric and psychoana..
lytic literature, as an expression of the individual's unconscious
striving to recapture some form of existence, some mode of inter..
personal relatedness, which he experienced at a chronologically
earlier age-a fonn of existence, a mode of relatedness to others,
which afforded him greater satisfaction and security than he is
presently experiencing.
With such a concept of regression I do not disagree, so far as
it goes. But the trouble is that the concept stops there; it does not,
to my way of thinking, go far enough. Left as it is, such a concept of regression does not do adequate justice to the human
being's ceaseless striving (whether at a conscious or an unconscious level) toward further psychological growth, toward further emotional maturation. Such a striving never really leaves a
person, no matter how profound or long-lasting the mental illness
which is hampering these strivings toward growth.
My own clinical experience with patients has gradually convinced me that regression represents the individual's striving
(generally a more or less completely unconscious striving) to
achieve the chronologically earlier relatedness, as mentioned
above, in order to achieve sufficient satisfaction, security} peace,
physical and psychological strength, and what not, so as to be
able to make a fresh attempt to overcome the particular maturational obstacle upon which he has so far come to grief. That is,
I consider that regression always possesses a restitutive facet, and
for this reason the phrase which Kris applies to certain varieties
of regression-"regression in the service of the ego" (89d )-is
applicable to every instance of regression, as is Hartmann's
phrase, "regressive adaptation" (67h).
It is obvious, of course, that regression alone does not lead to
this long-range beneficial result of advance in emotional maturity; all patients are capable of reaching a state of regression, yet
many do not emerge, subsequently, into a state of health. Very
often} the individual becomes fixed in a state of regression; unfortunately a considerable percentage of all the persons in mental
252
hospitals spend the rest of their lives in just such a state. But when
such a person can have the benefit of an enlightened psychotherapy, and ward-nursing care, wherein the potentially positive facet
of the regression is seen and worked with, there is then a reasonably good chance that his recovery can occur and that the period
of his regression can be seen, in retrospect, as a phase of the
recovery process-a phase of the emergence of what is youngest
and healthiest in the patient. I believe that a major reason why
so many patients become fixed in this phase of regression is that
the persons about them fail to discern the basically positive striving which is at work here, and the patients are chronically responded to, rather, by the persons in their environment as though
devoid of any striving to change beyond the present state of deep
regression.
And in this same connection I wish to make it equally clear
that I do not conceive of the regressed patient as being conscious
of the desire which I am postulating. His regressive behavior is
to be regarded rather, I believe, as the acting out of an uncon..
scious desire of this sort. All our clinical experience shows us}
again and again, that the patient whose behavior is most regressed, most infantile, is least able to admit into his awareness
any actual desire to behave thus. Hence, since the patient himself
is unconscious of the emotional determinants of his regression, it
is all the more important that persons about him be aware, and
help him to become aware, of the constructive aspect of all this.
I do not present this concept of regression as an original view
of mine. Certainly many practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy can be assumed to conduct their work upon the basis
of such a concept. I know of at least two persons in the field of
psychotherapy with schizophrenics, Madame Sechehaye (137)
and Gertrud Schwing (130), whose writings implicitly convey
that they see regression to have this kind of basically positive,
constructive significance. But it is certainly rare to find the concept explicitly so stated in the literature.'
1 During the final revision of my manuscript, I have come across two papers by Winnieott (165, 166), originally presented in 1954 in which he
expresses a concept of regression which bean much similarity to that which
I have given.
j
253
It has been 'inspiring to me to see one after another of my own

schizophrenic patients, over the course of difficult years in psychotherapy, gradually emerge from the encrustations of illnessgradually slough off the bizarre behavior, the warped thinking,
and other manifestations of sickness-into a phase of their appearing healthier and younger. For example) a forty-year-old
woman with paranoid schizophrenia of many years' duration, as
her illness gradually became resolved, came to appear more and
more as a healthy girl of about fifteen. A man of forty-two with
a hebephrenic illness of many years' duration, who at the beginning of psychotherapy looked, as did the woman just mentioned,
at least his chronological age, gradually came in the course of
psychotherapy to behave more and more like a healthy child of
eight, or at times even as young as two years of age.
When one sees a patient going through such a metamorphosis,
one gets no feeling whatever that the patient has now arrived at
his final destination-that he has succeeded in reaching a desired emotional age and is now determined to stay there, to cling
to this for the rest of his life. On the contrary, such a youthful
phase has all the earmarks of temporariness, of a kind of resting.
up period, a period of resetting one's sights, before resuming the
struggle to mature further. The subsequent clinical course in each
of these patients of mine (and the two mentioned are only
examples from among several) has substantiated this theoretical
concept of regression. In fact, it was in the course of my witnessing such clinical developments in my own patients, and in
various patients of other therapists who had learned, as I have,
not to fight against the patient's regressive strivings, that such a
theoretical view of regression grew up in my thinking.
Returning to the specific point made before this backgroundpainting digression, I want to restate that although regressive
strivings have as their intermediate goal some phase in the individual's own infancy or childhood, sometimes one finds that the
intermediate goal lies so early in his infancy-the regression progresses to an ego state characteristic of such early infancy, characteristic of that early phase of his infancy before he had achieved
an awareness of himself as being a human entity-that he un-
254
consciously experiences the regression as if he had actually regressed phylogenetically, as if he had sunk, that is, to a state of
existence characteristic of forms lower on the phylogenetic scale
than is man himself. In this discussion I place quotes about the
term "phylogenetic regression" not only because I am dealing
here with a hypothesis rather than with. a thoroughly documentable fact, but also because I consider the regression to be only
subjectively a phylogenetic one,"
I am more than half inclined to think that in working with any
individual patient, whether neurotic or psychotic, we may find
times when it is valid to think of his regressive strivings in such
a "phylogenetic" rather than a simply ontogenetic context.
This concept, which looks at first glance unscientifically metaphysical, as I well realize, has become formulated in my thinking
as a result of experiences with patients. I have been interested to
find, in a paper by Bertschinger and in one by Freud, references
to phylogenesis as playing a part in the composition of the human
being's unconscious. Bertschinger, in 1916, says in his paper,
"Process of Recovery in Schizophrenia,"
Perhaps the psychic content, which in mental diseases comes
up into the consciousness, lies always ready in the subconscious
[i.e.. , what we now term the unconscious] in aU men. These are
in paTt the instincts, wishes, views, common to all men, which
originate in phylogeneticall'Y older periods and in the course of
individual psychical development are ontogenetically abbreviated,
again passed through and suppressed: in part, individual wishes,
strivings) repressed by discipline into the subconscious {12; my
italics].
And Freud in his paper, "Neurosis and Psychosis," written in

1924, says,
There always remains as a common feature in the aetiology both
of the psychoneuroses and the psychoses the factor of frustration
~ For my purposes, it is unnecessary to go into the controversy, in the
science of embryology, between the 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' con..
eept, and the somewhat more recent concept of genetic parallelism. Werner
( 162v ). who adheres to the latter concept, provide, a diac:wsion of both
these theories.
255
-the lack of fulfillment of one of those eternal uncontrollable

childhood~s wishes that are so deeply rooted in OUT composition,
phylog6netically [ore-ordained as it is [52; my italics].
Now I shall present a number of clinical examples of patients'
achieving, by way of a period of "phylogenetic regression," progress in their struggle toward human individuality and maturity.
1. A colleague of mine was treating a male patient for a
chronic hebephrenic illness. The patient was himself a physician
who had completed an impressively long and high-quality training in his chosen specialty, internal medicine. He was a number
of years older than the therapist, and despite his oftentimes
grossly disturbed behavior, he retained a capacity for expressing
cutting sarcasm-s-expressing it in an intimidatingly derisive
father-figure fashion. This sarcasm proved, during the first
several months of the therapy, to be quite threatening to the
therapist. For example, on one occasion the patient brought up
the subject of football, to which the therapist replied that he
himself had not often attended football games. The patient then
sneered, with a significant look, "I'll bet you haven't ru causing
the therapist to feel defensive about his own masculinity.
When the therapist described this kind of relatedness between
himself and the patient, during a seminar meeting, we other
seminar members helped him to see that the patient was succeeding, repeatedly, in causing him to feel defensive, so that he
failed to see how very anxious and defensive the patient himself
felt. The therapist seemed reassured by our comments. Two days
later he reported that, in the first therapeutic hour following the
seminar meeting, he had been greatly moved to find the patient
coming over and "lying down at my feet like a dog," an act
which had conveyed the feeling that the patient had found a
source of security in the therapist, and could now freely show his
intense need for that security.
It would seem in retrospect that the therapist had uncon..
sciously been afraid of the intensity of the patient's dependency
needs, which he must have sensed to be lying behind the man's
sarcasm, competitiveness, and generally authoritarian approach
256
to him. Presumably the seminar meeting helped him to become

less afraid of the patient's dependency.
The point I wish to emphasize for our present purpose, however, is that the constructively regressive behavior which the patient showed in that postseminar therapeutic hour, when he
revealed his dependency feelings toward the therapist, was in a
form which went beyond even a small-child or infantile one; his
behavior was as if he were a dog. It was as though he felt the
disparity between his own strength and that of the therapist to
be so great that he could relate to the therapist, now as he moved
into a closer relatedness to the latter, only as a pet dog might
relate to his beloved master.
2. In the course of my own work with a deeply schizophrenic
young woman, it gradually dawned upon me that she felt herself
to be in a doglike position toward me, as a vastly more powerful,
more capable being than herself.. She often addressed me as if I
were a great leader among human beings, and on a few occa...
sions revealed that she thought of herself, vis-a-vis me, as a dog.
This kind of thing did not have a connotation of her feeling
derogated by me, nor of her being derisive toward me as being
a pompous ass, both of which feelings she managed to convey
on many occasions. This came, rather, at times when her feelings
toward me were of a positive sort, when she was most freely able
to reveal her intense dependency upon me. The disorder of her
emotional reactions, of her intellectual processes, and of her interpersonal relationships was so very profound) and so painfully
evident to her, that I believe she quite honestly felt that in her
relating to me she was not relating as one human being to another
human being, but rather as a dog relating to a very great human
being.
Here) again, as in the first clinical example, such an attitude
on the part of the patient emerged only after months-many
months, in this instance--of predominantly "distancing" emotional reactions on her part, reactions of loathing, sarcasm, and
other forms of hostility toward me.
3. A schizophrenic young woman with whom I worked went
through a period of about one year, following her transfer to
Psychosis and N.eurosis
257
Chestnut Lodge, of extremely withdrawn behavior; she lay curled

in bed, silent, most of the time, and when she did move about
among other persons on the ward she protested stridently if any
one touched her physically in any fashion.
Then certain individuals among the personnel, including an
experienced psychiatric nurse engaged in a research project on
the ward, gradually succeeded in helping her to become more
accepting of physical closeness. The research nurse was quite
struck with the fact that the patient "just purred, practically,"
when her back was scratched-very much as though she were
a kitten, basking in the experience.
This young woman's gradual movement toward other human
beings was manifested by various animallike mannerisms which
I shall not attempt to detail here. Animallike sounds and behavior were prominent for about the next year and a half) when
they gradually gave way to a more "fully human" way of relating
to people.
Incidentally, I cannot resist mentioning, in this context, my
experience with a hebephrenic man of forty-one who) as his
intense hostility toward me gradually diminished over the course
of three years of difficult therapy, went through a period of appearing and behaving very much like a cuddly little animal. In
some of the hours during this period, hours which were largely
devoid of any words from him, he would occasionally meow like
a contented kitten.
4. A young man developed an acute schizophrenic reaction,
was first hospitalized elsewhere for six months; and then, because
he was not doing well in his treatment there, he was transferred
to Chestnut Lodge.
The initial hospitalization had been maneuvered by his mother
and father through their telling him they were going to drive
him home from medical school so that he couId rest at home for
a time from the strain under which, he realized, he had been
laboring increasingly at school. But they drove him instead to the
hospital, revealing to him on the way, with much guilt, their
actual destination.
After three and a half years of rather consistently good work
258
in his psychotherapy, he finally brought out, to the accompaniment of more grief than he had ever before expressed during the
sessions, as well as much anxiety, a detailed recollection of this
trip to the hospital. The apex of his grief and anxiety came at
the point when he described his father's drawing up at the
hospital entrance and his own running from his parents into the
hospital, "feeling like an animal." The description of this had
all the earmarks of h~ fleeing, like an animal, from a now utterly
bankrupt relationship with his parents and, more generally, from
the now finally hopeless effort to relate to any others of the
human beings whom he knew (his interpersonal relationships in
general had been progressively deteriorating, one after another,
over the preceding several months), into the refuge of the hospital.
He did indeed succeed in utilizing the hospital environments
in such a way that he gradually grew from an initial considerably regressed (predominantly catatonic) state into a very considerable degree of emotional maturity, establishing unprecedentedly satisfactory relationships with each of his parents, working
successfully as a physician) and eventually marrying. We might
say, then, that here again was someone who, through regression
to, subjectively, a nonhuman state, achieved rebirth as a human
being, followed by a more successful growing up than he had
previously been able to accomplish.
5. Here is" a clinical example the theoretical interpretation of
which I feel most unsure. I have persistently regarded it as being
a manifestation, like the foregoing and the following examples,
of subjective regression in the phylogenetic scale. But because
the patient never emerged more than transitorily from a profoundly psychotic state during the period of my experience with
her, I have insufficient evidence to be able to assess the significance, and possible constructive results, of the regressive experience in her particular case. My belief is that there were some
constructive results from it, in terms of her acquiring, through
it, at least some rudimentary sense of separation from a remarkably symbiotic relatedness to her mother.
The patient ( already described on pages 209..210) was a
259
Psychosis and N eU10m
thirty-two-year-old woman with paranoid schizophrenia of many

years' duration, whose upbringing had apparently been such as
to convince her that she was even less acceptable, to her mother
and grandmother (each of whom was herself distinctly para
noid), than an animal.
The grandmother had long been hospitalized with an incurable
physical illness, and the patient and the mother had been living
together for many years, locked in a paranoid folie-a-deux with
their intense hostility toward one another repressed and projected
upon the outer world, a world which both in consequence agreed
to be filled with people who were bent upon murdering, raping,
robbing, and otherwise attacking each other. And the mother
projected her own tabooed hostile and sexual feelings to a large
extent, also, upon the patient; her private opinion of her daughter's basic make-up is suggested by the fact that upon her interropting the daughter's treatment at Chestnut Lodge, she placed
her in the care of a psychiatrist who had had little or no experience in work with schizophrenic patients) but had received nationwide publicity through his testifying as a professional witness at
a recent murder trial.
The daughter had never married, of course. The intensity of
the symbiotic relatedness between the two women is suggested by
their behavior following a heart attack suffered by the mother.
In the mother's words, the discovery of incurable illness in her
own mother--the patient's previously mentioned grandmotherhad "caused my heart attack; I never got over it." Every night
then, for the ensuing three years, the patient, who slept in the
basement of the home, had attached to her wrist one end of a
string) the other end of which was attached to the wrist of her
mother, sleeping on the floor above, in order that she could
respond promptly to the mother's needs not only by day but also
by night.
I worked for eight months with this patient, a most deeply
psychotic and physically assaultive woman, until her treatment
was interrupted by the mother, whose frequent inspection trips to
the hospital, involving her prying into the most minute details of
her daughter's care, through talks with the psychiatric adminisJ
260
trator, the charge nurse, and myself, had made the therapy
additionally difficult throughout.
During the eight months of therapy-much too short a time, of
course, for psychotherapy to establish a solid recovery in so deeply
and chronically schizophrenic a person-the patient did not
develop a durable sense of individuality vis-a-vis her mother,
although she was making a real beginning in that direction when
the treatment was interrupted.
The bit of material suggestive of "phylogenetic regression"
was reported to me by her mother. The mother, after a visit with
her daughter during the seventh month of the psychotherapy,
told me:
She got into the confused idea of who were relatives and who
weren't, and whether she was man, woman, or child. . . . She
said we both had been buried deep in the earth and the worms
had eaten us ... that we were different people than we used to
bet Her treatment of me was exactly the same [i.e., the same
respectful, solicitous, deferential treatment which the daughter
had always accorded to the mother]. She told me she wanted me
to know that she had never done anything to bring disgrace upon
my name.
[At another point in the interview the mother put it that.] She
said she is identical with the Elizabeth Miller [the patient's name]
who was buried in the earth, whom the wonns ate up. She said she
is the direct replica -of Elizabeth Miller.
Significantly, it was in this same visit with her mother that the
patient expressed with unprecedented clearness her possession of
some sense of individuality, some degree of psychological separateness from the mother. The mother, while ostensibly not understanding the deep significance of the communication, faithfully reported it to me as follows:
There was more symbolic talk yesterday. She said something

about the spIit..rail fence would be across a piece of land-the
road I would take and the road she would take-s-she wanted her
road to be close to mine-it couldn:tt be the same as mine [my
261
italics], but close together. I believe she meant the places we lived
should be close together.
My own experience with the patient provided substantiating

evidence that she was making real progress, sporadically, in
achieving a sense of her own individuality, in the course of her
period of psychotherapy with me.
6. As the final portion of clinical material concerning this
point, I shall present dream material from two neurotic patients.
In each instance, the patient's dream suggests that there is an
unconscious conception of the self as being a nonhuman form of
life-in the first instance, an animal; in the second instance, a
plant. In each instance, the forms of nonhuman life are beautiful forms, and the dreams are "recovery dreams," signalizing
crucial landmarks in the resolution of the neurosis.
I presume that other analysts encounter such material commonly enough in their work with neurotic patients. I present this
not as being particularly unusual data (as are, I believe, much of
the data which I have presented from schizophrenic patients},
but rather as being beautiful examples of their kind of data) and
being very much to the point here.
The first of these two patients, a woman of forty-two with a
hysterical personality structure, had been on the verge of a para...
noid psychosis when I began seeing her, after she had already
undergone approximately six yean of work with a series of three
previous analysts. Over the course of the first two years of her
work with me, the threat of psychosis gradually subsided. But she
retained an abysmally low self-esteem; she showed an intense
penis envy and} behind this, a basic despair as to her ability ever
to become a woman among women.
The analysis with me was an unusually stormy one, as had
been her work with each of the previous analysts. She expressed
a tremendous amount of hostility toward me for about three
years, and as she became gradually aware of the intensity of her
hostility, this awareness seemed, for many months, only an additional burden to her low self-esteem: she despaired of ever
becoming a person capable of receiving and giving love.
262
Then, in the thirty-eighth month of my work with her, she

reported an unprecedentedly clear-cut and convincing "recovery
dream," revealing a greater degree of self-esteem than she had
ever before shown.
She began this particular hour, as had so often happened
before, by expressing despair and suicidal feelings, saying that she
was "frightened all the time. I'm obsessed with death all the time.
I'm convinced I have heart disease and cancer of the breast and
tuberculosis . . . [etc., etc.]."
But then, later in the hour, she reported the following dream.
Not only is the content of the dream significant, but also her
emotional tone in recounting it: she spoke with tenderness,
weeping as she told it; both were unusual emotional manifestations in this woman, who had been more accustomed to voicing
sarcasm, recrimination, and rage.
I got this collie dog, a wonderful good-natured animal. It was

a female one. The man who ran the kennels was too busy to tell
me what I should feed her. I had to learn to look after this dog
myself-and why shouldn't I? [She asked this in a tone of most
unusual self-reliance.] The kennel owner said, "This is the best
dog in my kennels-it's a beautiful creature," and I thought it was,
too--gentle, lovely, nice dog. And I so frequently dream about
myself as an animal; I suppose most people do.
I heard the dream as a powerfully moving indication that her
self-esteem was growing up through alI the despair which had
burdened her for years.
associational material of the hour
strongly supported such an interpretation. The dream represented the climax of a recently mounting struggle between what
one might call her neurotic self and her healthy self. I felt that
this dream about the dog, more than anything I had heard from
her, forecast the coming triumph of her healthy self.
Subsequent events validated this impression. As regards the
particular subject under discussion, it is interesting that approximately ten months later she had a dream portraying herself in a
similarly healthy light, but now as a human being, although a
very young one as yet:
The
263
A rather chubby, very active, very pretty baby, two years old
or so, with a mind of its own, able to run around, kept frisking all
over the place. Was in a school gymnasium, running around
naked, all pink. Was very skilled at certain things, like tumbling.
I thought it was a little boy but it didn't have a penis [disappointed tone; but then she told with pleasure of how skillfully
and pleasurably it would do acrobatics]. It was a bouncy baby
and I don't know whose it was. I associate that it was related to
me or I had to take care of it; but it wasn't really mine.
In associating to the little girl in the dream, she recalled ex..

periences as a girl when she herself had felt self-confidence in
athletics, seH-confidence such as was being manifested in the
dream-child's acrobatics. Although at this stage of the analysis

her penis envy had yet to be resolved, as can be seen by the
dream, she had made much progress in terms of her unconscious conception of herself as a human being and a healthy one,
although still immature and, so to speak, "only a girl."
The second of these two patients, a twenty-nine-year-old
woman chemist with a character disorder, showed at the beginning of analysis an ingrained harsh and sarcastic approach to
other persons; an intense penis envy founded upon despair of
becoming, in her OVlIl eyes, a real woman; and a severe repression
of her tender feelings in her interpersonal relationships in general.
Although married and the mother of three young daughters,
she reacted to her own external genitalia with loathing, and was
convinced that her menstrual flow W~ pathological; she was
horrified on more than one occasion, during the early phase of
the analysis, to find what she considered to be gruesomely ab ..
normal bits of material in the menses.
In the fourteenth month of the analysis there occurred a dream
which marked a significant forward step in her becoming free
from all these symptoms:
I had the persistent feeling that I was trying to be a man, or
act like a man, and was getting very tired of it, didn't think I
could go on with it. Then I dreamed-I was thinking that-uhsuddenly I saw a rosebush, blooming with lovely red roses the
color of blood.
264
During her subsequent associations, she reported that following

her previous analytic hour (late in the afternoon), "I went home
-Norm [her husband] gloorny-I indicated to Nonn that I was
interested in having intercourse [she had rarely felt able to make
sexual overtures to him prior to her analysisJ-we had such a
nice time-Norm.'s been so happy for a couple of days-I
wouldn't feel like doing that every night, but this was just real
pleasurable . . ."
When I suggested, for association, "Roses the color of blood,"
she responded, "I just think of roses we" used to have on the
dinner table at home, when I was little; all of us liked rosesand always when I think of blood I think of menstruatingDiana [her youngest daughter] asks me sometimes, when we go
walking around the neighborhood, who makes flowers and birds
and trees--I tell her, 'Mother Nature, I guess.' "
Later in the hour her thoughts returned to "the rosebush-aU
of a sudden it started blooming, had these nice big, velvety red
roses all over it-well, the blood, the menstruating, could and
does mean that one is no longer a child, that one has to start
menstruating, get breasts-and is something one can't hide-you
can act like a man, work alongside men in a chern-lab; but, by
jeepers, you menstruate . . ."
Throughout this hour, she had appeared unusually relaxed,
with none of the considerable pressure of speech which had regularly been present earlier in her analysis. She seemed distinctly
more self-confident and friendly in her demeanor; her tone in
referring to her husband, to her daughter, and to her parental
family, was a very fond one, with none of the harshness and
sarcasm which she had so often conveyed in her reporting. And
when she now referred to menstruation she spoke of it not as
something pathological but as a beautiful expression of femininity.
When one finds, as in the cases of the two neurotic patients just
mentioned, how frequently the most significant of human growth
experiences are portrayed, in the unconscious, by such nonhuman
symbols as plants and animals, one gains a deeper appreciation
of how profound is the affinity between the human being and his
nonhuman environment,
265
I have already expressed my belief that this "phylogenetic
regression" must have to do basically with ontogeny, with the

individual's own life history. Unless we are to adhere to some
kind of Buddhistic conception that an individual human soul has
had innumerable previous incarnations, sometimes in nonhuman
forms, and on top of that some conception that the individual has
at an unconscious level a memory of having existed in life forms
lower down on the Darwinian scale, we must assume that his
unconscious conception of himself as "a plant" or "an animal"
represents a translation into literal terms of something which was
once, indeed, true, but only figuratively. This is, I think, the only
scientifically tenable view of this whole subject. Considered in
figurative terms, each human being was once an animal (or, we
could say, has functioned also like a tree, or a rock, or what not).
We say that this person is animallike in his physical grace, that
person is sturd y as an oak, the other person is rocklike in his
uncompromisingness, and so on.
When an individual reveals anxiety lest he become, say, an
animal, this is, I believe, most apt to mean that he has anxiety
lest he regress to a very early period in his postnatal life, when he
knew a kind of existence which he now reacts to, unconsciously,
as being literally that of an animal. In this connection, it is interesting to read the conjectures of Hill (78), developed during his
long experience in psychotherapy of schizophrenic patients, regarding the infancy of the person who later becomes schizophrenic. I have italicized the passages which are of particular
interest here:
Maternal ambivalence is an area in which there is contradictory
evidence. A number of the mothers of schizophrenic patients
have reported murderous intents toward their unborn children. . .
There is equal''Y reliable evidence that many of the mothers
of schizophrenics actually accepted their babies warmly and took
excellent animal care of them while these babies were small and
were not regarded as individuals having any will or wilfulness
contrary to that of the mother. . . . (78d].

On the whole, there is a suggestion that the earliest relationship of the baby to the mother was relatively good, quite satis-
266
factory to both mother and child, at least in comparison with

what followed .. [78e].
If this infantile situation were as altogether desperate as pic.
tured, these children would die. Some of them do" Those who
do not must have experienced something of animal comfort in
their infancy. Even if they did not get this mothering in their
own right as babies, they did get attention and admiration as
playthings OT as exhibits of their mother's craftsmanship [?Sf].
If Hill's beliefs about this are COITect, then we might consider

that when such an infant, later now as an adult schizophrenic)
manifests anxiety lest he become (a) an animal, or (b) an inanimate object, he may be expressing unconsciously a wish to become again (a) a baby..animal loved by his mother, or (b) a
cherished plaything of the mother or an inanimate exhibit of her
craftsmanship.
Next I shall present, still in this same connection, some excerpts

from a short story, a classic in the "horror story" area of general
literature. This story is of value here because it vividly expresses
the human being's anxiety lest he regress to a subhuman status,
and further because we can discern, in the "latent content" of the
narrative, the unconscious wuh to become "subhuman't-e-i.e., to
recapture an unconsciously longed-for infantile, or possibly fetal,
relationship to the mother.
This story is by E. F" Benson (11), and concerns the legendary
subhuman creatures, known as Abominable Snowmen, which
have long been reputed to inhabit very high mountains such as
the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps. The protagonist, early in the
story, listens to the account of a fellow mountaineer who had seen
one of these creatures on the fictional Alpine peak known as The
Horror Hom. The narrator describes how the sight of this hair..
covered beast-man, absorbed in the animal satisfaction of finishing its meal of raw meat, had frozen him with horror-had filled
him with the horrifying realization that there was an ancestral
bond between this bestial creature and himself: "When I sa",'
that creature sun itself, I looked into the abyss out of which we
have crawled" (11 a). The protagonist himself, who subsequently
267
encounters one of these beings-a female one-s-tells of the feel..

ings he experienced at this sight:
A fathomless bestiality modelled the slavering mouth and the
narrow eyes; I looked into the abyss itself and knew that out of
that abyss on the edge of which I leaned the generations of men
had climbed. What if that ledge crumbled in front of me and
pitched me headlong into its nethermost depths? [lib].
It seems to me that the above material has profound psychological meaning. We may, I think, regard the first of the two
subhuman creatures, the male one, which is giving "a purring
murmur of content" while utterly absorbed in oral pleasure, as
a personification of the viewer's own past states of similar contentment and satiety as an infant. The female creature is, I
think, a representation of the mother of one's infancy or of one's
intrauterine existence, and the viewers' anxiety lest they be
plunged into the "nethermost depths" of the "abyss," as well as
the portrayal of both those subhuman creatures as being so hor..
rifying, are unconscious defenses against the repressed longing
to regress into the animallike state of oneness with the mother
which one experienced in utero and, during the postnatal period,
at the mother's breast.
In some individuals there may be an additional factor, not
present in every one, which intensifies the unconscious desire to
regress to a nonhuman state: the experience, during childhood,
of seeing one's mother bestow upon household plants and household pets a loving care which she denied, or was unable to reveal
toward, the child himself. It has seemed to me that this is not an
uncommon experience in homes where the mother has personality
difficulties which make it impossible for her to reveal the fullness
of her love for her child, so that she displaces much of her love
to these nonhuman elements of the family environment. The
child then grows up with reason to think that if only he were
a plant or an animal, he might gain access to his mothers love.
There is one last consideration, applicable to schizophrenic
individuals and probably to neurotic individuals also, which I
268
shall mention before leaving this subject of the unconscious desire

to become nonhuman.
It appears that in the psychologically healthy human being
there is, easily accessible to awareness, a sense of relatedness between one's self and one's nonhuman environment; such a sense
of relatedness appears to be an essential ingredient of psychological well-being. In schizophrenic persons, and I believe in neurotic persons also, this sense of relatedness is grossly interfered
with. Particularly in the schizophrenic individual, one sees how
far the patient has become-with his abhorrence of anything
"animalistic" in himself, with his striving to achieve some highly
cerebral, "pure" (nonsexual, nonaggressive, and so forth) existence-removed from such a healthy sense of relatedness to the
nonhuman environment. In such persons, then, the unconscious
desire to become nonhuman seems in part to represent a healthy
striving to overcome the patient's harmfully great degree of detachment from the nonhuman environment.' Or one could put it
that the normal awareness of human relatedness to the nonhuman
environment has been repressed, and strives to emerge from the
repression.
In line with this, my experience has indicated that the more
animallike a patient is in appearance and behavior, the more
complete is the repression from his awareness of anything which
he might consider to be animallike in himself. It is erroneous, I
think, to assume that the most animalistic-looking patient is the
one who is consciously most convinced that he is an animal;
something like the opposite is probably the case. He has to deal
with animallike desires (many of which would be freely accepted
by the normal person's ego as natural expressions of one's inescapable animal needs) by projecting them onto other persons
about him, and by acting them out (in his posture) his facial
expressions, his vocalizations, his manner of eating} his manner of
dress, and so on) outside awareness.
Some forms of luicide-such as drowning, or jumping to the earth from
a great height-appear, from my experience with the analysis of suicidal Inclinations, to represent in some instances a misguided effort to overcome IUch
a psychological detachment from the nonhuman environment.
The Reacting
to Other Persons
As Being Nonhuman
CHAPTER
10
The immediately preceding three chapters (VII, VIII, IX) have

dealt primarily with distortions in the ill individual's self...concept,
resulting from his basic confusion between his self and his nonhuman environment. This chapter, and Chapters XI and XII
also, will deal with his distorted concept-distorted by reason of
this same basic conlusion-of his environment.
Psychotic patients frequently behave as though they react to
persons in their environment as being nonhuman-as though
these others were, for example, animals or inanimate objects. And
it is unfortunately not rare---aIthough, in my experience at Chestnut Lodge, it is infrequent-that members of the personnel deal
with certain patients as though these patients were not fellow
human beings but animals or inanimate objects.
In Chapter 111 I have briefly referred to Michael Balint's
formulation, Balint (6) 7, 8) states that in the Infant-mother
270
relationship (even under normal, not only pathological) circumstances), each person reacts) by turns, to the other as being an
object designed to meet one's own needs, rather than as a human
being with needs of his or her own. Keeping in mind this formulation-a sound one, in my opinion-we can conjecture, then,
that when the neurotic or psychotic individual reacts to another
person as being nonhuman, he is manifesting a phenomenon
which is well known in psychopathology: the reactivation, in
adult life, of an earlier ego state, as a neurotic or psychotic defense against some anxiety-laden repressed affect.
Such "dehumanizing,') by the neurotic or psychotic person, of
his environment presumably occurs by a process of projectionprojection onto the environment, including other human beings,
of his own repressed conception of himself (or of something in
himself) as being nonhuman.' Bleuler gives us a bit of clinical
material which seems to be an example of this process:
An intelligent [schizophrenic] lady who for many yean was
mistaken for a neurasthenic "had built a wall around herself so
closely confining that she often felt as if she actually were in a
chimney" [13].
Here an inner, psychological wall within the patient was
evidently projected by her, so that she experienced herself as
being enclosed by actual, outer walls. In two papers by psychologists, concerning Rorschach data, we find material which is more
precisely relevant to our point here, for these papers report
findings which seem to substantiate the concept that an individual may have an unconscious picture of himself as being nODi Brodey (19) J from his work with schizophrenic patients and their families,
housed on the same hospital ward, has made observations which suggest
that these parents see thems,lv,sJ in relation to the patient, as being in effect
nonhuman-even into his chronological adulthood, long after the normal
mother-infant phase of such relatedness which Balint discusses. Thus we find
an additional major reason for the patient's viewing those about him as
being nonhuman: the parents' own self-concept, in their relating to him~
encourages this, As Brodey describes it: "The parents see themselves u the
feeders, the purveYOI'l of reality) the sacrificing ones who are consumed in
the process of giving) the Ones who have no demands for themselves, only
operating for the othert-aa performers of fragmented functions but not as
persons. This image seems comparable to what has been postulated as the
infant1 image of the parent. n
P5ycho5i.s and Neurosis
271
human, and hence may project this picture upon the environment. These studies describe the patients' projection of such a
self-picture upon the relatively unstructured Rorschach cards;
but such data would seem to substantiate the notion that the
projection can be directed toward other persons in the environment as well.
One paper is by Hertzman and Pearce, and is entitled "The
Personal Meaning of the Human Figure in the Rorschach"
(75). As the title shows, the authors were primarily concerned
with human responses; such nonhuman material as we are
mainly interested in here, is a more or less incidental part of
their data.
A patient acts as if he were repulsive. He avoids all contact
with people whose esteem he values. He attributes this opinion
of himself to others in various neutral incidents and dreams of
himself as diseased in various ways. If he sees in the Rorschach
a variety of unattractive subhuman images, it is considered likely
that these represent some reflection of how he really feels about
himself. The identification is complicated by the fact that at the
beginning of analysis this image is not clear to the patient and
by the fact that many of the compulsive patterns are designed to
repudiate this feeling and keep it out of awareness [75a].
.. attitudes toward the self may be found in responses that at
first do not look as if they represent the subject, such as some
responses with animal content [75b].
Therapeutic data indicate that the failure to produce human

responses or the production of a small number which then turn
out to be uncommunicative is associated with suppression of the
self-picture or a hOITOr of the self as the person sees it [75c].
The second of these two studies is by Goldfarb, entitled "The
Animal Symbolin the Rorschach Test and an Animal Association
Test" (61). Goldfarb suggests here that animal responses in
children's records often represent parental figures or the child
himseli,
In the following clinical examples one can see that this process,
272
of relatedness to the other person as being nonhuman, serves various defensive functions-that it functions as a defense against various repressed emotions. It will be recalled that, in Chapter VIII,
the desire to become nonhuman was portrayed as functioning,
similarly~ as a defense against various repressed feelings. In that
chapter, such feelings were categorized under a number of headings; that procedure need not be repeated here, since the defensive
principle is what I am primarily trying to illustrate in both these
sections.
1. This thirty-four-year-old married man was transferred from
another hospital to Chestnut Lodge in the manic phase of a
manic-depressive illness which had begun, with an initial depressive phase, five years previously. For the first eleven months after
his admission here, his behavior was such that he had to be
housed on a disturbed ward. A conspicuous element in that behavior involved his reacting to his fellow patients as though they
were nonhuman. He put it that he was engaged in "healing"
them, On a number of occasions I witnessed this "healing"; it
involved his striding up to one or another apathetic, deeply
psychotic man, clapping him on the back and saying, in a tone
as though he were addressing a puppet, "Buck up, old man!"
or "That's it; sit up good and straight !-there) now you feel
top-notch, don't you?" The scorn, the dehumanizing quality, of
his tone was chilling to hear. The ward personnel had to seclude
him from time to time, to protect other patients from this, and
to protect him from retaliation by some of those patients who were
occasionally assaultive..
This same apparent lack of recognition, on his part, that other
persons around him were human, was evidenced not only when
he was engaged in this "healing," but at other times also.. He
showed this attitude toward me from time to time during the
psychotherapeutic sessions, and at the end of one session, when I
happened to leave his room and walk into the corridor just as a
Negro attendant was coming into the ward, the patient nodded
toward him and said to me, loudly enough for him to hear also,
"You ought to talk to him-you could learn a lot from him. U
Here his tone held such scorn as to "dehumanize" both the at-
273
tendant and myself. On another occasion he spoke, similarly

unfeelingly) of "that thing out there," whereupon the startling
surmise came to me that he was referring to Mrs. N - - - .
a middle-aged nurse who had just been assigned to the ward,
having previously worked at a nearby building called Little
Lodge. I was amazed that he might be refening thus to another
human being. My hunch was quickly confirmed when he went
on, "It came over from Little Lodge. I went out and asked it
where it had come from-from the Congo or the Himalayas or
the Lost City of Atlantis or where. . It had lots guts; when
I put my hand on its head it turned into my mother-my mother
Catherine. n His tone) when he spoke of "its" turning into his
mother Catherine, was one of only dispassionate interest.
I replied to this last by saying, "I assume you know that Mrs.
N
is not your mother) but that you find this a useful
way of telling me what your mother was like." He seemed to
accept this as a statement of what he was, indeed, doing. This
was one bit of data which helped to point the way toward his
early relationship with his mother as a source of this "dehumanizing" behavior in the patient. I shall report, shortly, further data
concerning that relationship.
There were various indications that, in his reacting to other
persons as being nonhuman, he was responding to a projection,
a projection upon these other persons of an unconscious conception of himself as being nonhuman. For instance, in one of his
sessions with me he let me know that he was impatiently awaiting
"my mate-Jupiter or Juno or a pig or a sewer rat, whatever it
is." This seemed to be not only an indirect expression of ambivalence concerning his wife and concerning myself, but also a
hint that he considered himself to be nonhuman, and hence a
fit mate for him might be either a deity or an animal. On another
occasion, he confided to me that he bad always disliked his name,
George; his brother (three years older than himself) had given
him this name, he said bitterly, after the name of a puppet which
the brother possessed. I found this story credible in the light of
what I came to learn about the boys' mother. It is interesting in
this connection that his psychiatric administrator, when asked
or
274
during a general staff conference for his evaluation of this patient, expressed his observations in the following words: "He acts
like a little puppet who has played along through life and then
suddenly realizes that the time for playing is over, that being
chronologically an adult man, a husband and father, means the
end of all this playing around."
During the first eleven months of his stay here) there was not
only this phenomenon of his reacting oftentimes to other persons
as if they were nonhuman; there were indications that he felt
more akin to creatures which were, in reality, nonhuman, than
he did to his fellow human beings. He was convinced that
the birds in nearby trees) and dogs on the hospital grounds
nearby, "talked" to him with their chirping or their barking; and
he fcit able to converse with them-he was convinced that they
responded to things he called out to them. There was also a feeling on his part, beyond this, of being much of the time at one
with-"en rapport with'~--the whole of his environment, including all the nonhuman environment, In short, this man seemed
quite confusedly unaware of the qualitative differences distinguishing, in his environment, inanimate objects from human beings, and
animals from human beings; and similarly unaware of the distinction between himself as a human being on the one hand, and
his nonhuman environment on the other hand.
As I learned more about his past relationship with his mother,
I saw how many ingredients of that relationship had been such
as to give rise to just such confusion.
In the first place, there was convincing evidence from a variety
of sources that the mother, who had died when the patient was
sixteen, had been latently psychotic throughout the patient's
upbringing. She would speak of various persons as being Joan
of Arc and, the patient said, "Even a horse we had-Mother
used to exclaim about what beautiful, soft, understanding eyes
he had, that he must be St. Francis of Assisi, Many people would
be afraid they'd be put into a mental hospital if they said this or
that; but Mother would go right ahead and say what she felt
like saying, and didn't seem to care." Though hampered by congenital heart disease, and a foreign-born person who had great
275
difficulty in adapting to the language and customs of this country,

she was the dominant figure in the family, exhorting the easygoing
father, a clothing retailer, to greater efforts, and setting very
high standards for her two sons---especially the patient-to fulfill. The mother read a great many books-written in her native
language--eoncerning metaphysics, was interested for a long time
in some mathematical conception of the universe, and used to
speak at times of "being in tune with the Infinite." The patient,
in telling me this, said that he had not understood what his mother
meant by this; but "I now know what she meant," saying that he
himself experiences a feeling which he believes to be the kind that
his mother had, except at times when disturbing emotions come
up to interfere with that experience.
My work with this man, although prematurely terminated by
his wife's taking him out of our care, directly back to the marital
home, shortly after the subsidence of the manic episode, provided
a number of clues as to the determinants of his "healing" of other
patients, which had been so chilling a process to witness and to
hear.
First, there were various hints that his highly preoccupied
mother had been equally inappropriate in her efforts to exhort
the father and the two sons toward the achievement of the irnpos..
sible goals which she set for all three of them. It was as if this
"healing" behavior represented an identification on the patient's
part with his mother, who had been so incapable of genuine 'person-to-person rapport. I surmise that it represented, also, the
patient's acting out of repressed scorn concerning the psychotherapeutic technique of his previous therapists and of myself.
Secondly, there were apparently a number of determinants, in
this regard, flowing from the following series of events: The
mother became psychotic when the patient was fifteen. For a
week the patient and his brother cared for the mother at home,
while the father did little to cope with the situation. The patient
told me of his fear, during that period, when he would awake at
night and his mother would be standing over the bed. She became,
as her symptoms rapidly progressed, a raving maniac, would
talk about being Circe and turning men into swine, would threaten
276
to kill the two SODS j and repeatedly made onslaughts upon

them with dangerous kitchen implements. The mother had to be
placed in a state hospital, where she remained for what proved to
be the last year of her life. She finally died while deeply and very
disturbedly psychotic; the death was attributed to stress upon her
diseased heart by insulin-coma treatment, which the sons had persuaded their father to authorize.
The patient's wife, whom he had known since childhood, and
who gave me many details about the mother's illness, reported
that, during the last three or four weeks of her life, she had been
"in restraints, quite psychotic, on a very disturbed ward .. at
times wouldn't even know George . . . George would have to see
her in restraints, in a bed covered with urine and bowel movement." When I asked her what effect all this had had upon
George, she replied, "Very depressing, even to the point where
George got a great kick out of visiting his mother, and feeling
that he himself had great influence over the other patients." I
asked her whether he had seemed to feel that he had such an influence over his mother. "Not particularly his mother," she replied, "but the other patients-he would go around consoling
them."
In connection with the wife's account, it is interesting that
during my initial interview with the patient he told me, "When
I came in here and saw the patients lying on the floor [two or
three patients, at that time, were accustomed to sitting on the
floor], I was so happy!" He went on, laughing with ostensible
gayety, to say that he was going to heal them all, telling me that
he had healed all the patients on the ward of the hospital from
which he had just come. But then, during the remainder of the
hour, he twice spoke of his inability to cure his mother, putting
it once that "I couldn't heal my own mother, who was a madwoman before she died." The patient made it abundantly clear
that he felt extremely guilty about the mother's psychotic illness
and death, and his own illness seemed in various respects to be
patterned after that from which his mother had suffered. Thus it
would seem that another determinant of his "healing" behavior
lay in his guilt-laden helplessness to cure his own mother, with a
277
consequent need to atone for this by trying to cure all subsequent

psychotic patients whom he encountered. Moreover, the utterly
ineffectual nature of his efforts to cure them revealed, I think,
how desperately helpless he felt in the face of his own illness,
which was, as I have said, so similar in various regards to the
terminal illness of his mother.
Still another determinant of that particular "healing" behavior
emerged late in my work with this man. His wife had described
the mother, to me, as having been an extremely cold person, and
had expressed her conviction that her husband and his brother,
despite much ritualistic manifestations of solicitude toward their
mother, had always hated her. The patient, likewise, until late in
my experience with him, referred to his mother always as having
been an utterly cold, unloving individual whom, for example, he
had never seen to bestow a kiss upon the father. But as the therapy
proceeded) I saw hints that behind all the outward coldness in
this mother-son relationship there had been real affection and
compassion. But it was quite clear that such tenderness had to
be repressed in their relationship, and it seemed that the facade
behind which it remained repressed was a facade of treating one
another in a cold fashion, as if each regarded the other as more
an inanimate object than a cherished human being. So, then, it
appeared that a similarly repressed compassion lay at the basis
of some of this man's treating his fellow patients, in the process
of "healing" them, as if they were puppets; his upbringing had
been such as to require him to repress the feelings of genuine
compassion which, I came to believe, this situation fostered in
him.
One final determinant was suggested to me by the material
which I have reproduced here, and by my experiences with other
psychotic patients whose cases were similar, in some relevant aspects, to that of this man. This man had evidently been much
afraid of his always eccentric, unpredictable mother, who finally
became openly and violently psychotic and repeatedly threatened
-and even, as I have said, actually tried-to kill him.. He
showed, on more than one occasion during his stay here, a similarly intense fear of his psychotic, unpredictable fellow patients.
278
I believe that his treatment of them as puppets, during his "healing" of them, was part of an effort to think of them as utterly
controllable inanimate objects (puppets) rather than perceiving
them for what they were: human beings who, like his mother,
were unpredictable and even, in some instances, dangerously uncontrollable by him. His projection of his own repressed rage
upon these supposed puppets was undoubtedly an important factor in all this; for some months after his admission here he was
given to unpredictable outbursts of rage, and probably the most
important incident in the whole course of his psychotherapy occurred when, having just torn all his bed clothing to pieces dur..
ing an outburst of murderous rage, he "came ton and, although
at first shocked and unbelieving that he had done this, was able
then to realize that he did indeed have such rage in him, that
the person who had just demolished the bed clothing was him-
self.
2. In this second example we find, again, the defensive function of one's reacting to another person as being nonhuman. Here
we find the patient herself being treated thus by her fellow patients, and her own treating other persons in a comparable
fashion.
A schizophrenic young woman frequently showed, for several
months following her admission to a disturbed ward here, extraordinarily intense grief. I saw this during my psychotherapeutic
hours with her, and at other times, also, when I would happen
to enter the ward for some purpose other than to have an hour
with her. To see her in this grief was a shaking experience. She
was completely given over to it, completely overwhelmed by it to
an extent which, I believe, one rarely if ever sees in a normal
adult. She was contorted with wracking sobs, and tears poured
out in streams. As nearly as I can describe it, she gave one the
feeling that here was a very small, utterly bereft child who was
completely submerged in inarticulate grief.
The point I want to make here is that whereas it was shaking
to me to see and hear her like this, for the other patients on the
ward} who were exposed to this so much more frequently than I,
PS'YChosis and N .eurosis
279
and who were having a hard struggle with their own buried grief,
this was distinctly too much to bear. They could not endure her
proximity, and the tone in which they would order her to get
away from them, or to stop doing this, was as if they were addressing an inanimate object. It was a kind of scorn more intense
than one would reserve for any fellow human being or even for
any animal; it was precisely the tone in which the first patient;
described above, addressed the "it" from Little Lodge. In this
particular instance, I felt that the patients who addressed this
woman in such a fashion did so primarily out of anxiety in the
face of their own repressed grief; it was as if they had to derogate
to the greatest possible degree this woman who was the personification of overwhelming grief, in order to maintain their own
similar grief under repression.
Not surprisingly, this patient herself showed) for many months,
an inability to distinguish between human elements and inani...
mate elements in her environment. This inability was evident in,
for example, her way of relating herself to a doll which she possessed (or several weeks. Upon more than one occasion, during my
psychotherapeutic sessions with her, she was holding this doll at
her bared breast and weeping in anguish because she could not
get it to nurse. This had no connotation of play-acting; she left
no doubt in my mind that she felt the doll to be a real baby. This
went on not only during, but also between, the times of her
sessions with me) as is seen in the following nurses' report sheet
from that period of her treatment:
Became depressed and was crying in her room. When I went
in to talk to her, she asked me out. Later Mr. Jones [an aide]
went in and she told him that she was crying because her baby
wouldn't nurse.
Interestingly, when she became able, very slowly, to relate

herself a bit more closely to other patients, this sometimes took
the form of her treating them as if they were dolls. For example,
here is an excerpt from a nurses' report sheet, approximately
twenty months later on in therapy than the one just quoted:
280
The Nonhuman Environm8nt
Ate sandwiches and drank juice constantly all evening. Went into
Grace Randall's room. Played with Grace's body some and
jumped from bed to dresser, etc. After 11:00 P.M. there was
some noise in her room. I went back and watched. She was using
Clara [her roommate] like a baby doll, moving her aU over the
bed and undressing her and playing some with her breasts.
3. For several months, a schizophrenic woman came to address the nurses and attendants on the ward more and more as
though they were inanimate objects devoid of any sensitivity or
self-interest, objects whose sole reason for existing was to meet
whatever need she was experiencing at the moment. She eventually made known her conviction that if she herself were required
so much as to ask for something, that fact itself meant that the
nurses and attendants were unsatisfactory: their duty was not
only to meet her needs but to anticipate what her needs would
be, without her having to make a request. This situation grew more
and more intolerable on the ward. The great tendency among the
ward personnel was, naturally enough, to react to the flat impersonality, the cutting imperiousness, of her demands as being infuriatingly derogating-to feel protest at being treated as inanimate objects, and to experience retaliatory anger, without perceiving the covert anxiety and profound feelings of helplessness
which were compelling the patient to address them in this fashion.
The following account by a nurse who expressed her feelings
about this, during a recorded ward-personnel conference, is a
good statement of the seething resentment which this situation
typically engendered in personnel:
As far as she's concerned, are we supposed to jump at her

every wish? I'm new. I don't know. I asked about it; but the
impression she gave me is-the first time I was on the floor [i.e.,
the ward], she said .. "You do this!" WellJ I'm rather rebellious to
that and I didn't care to. I came out in the office and I said,
"What would happen if I didn't?') And just to keep peace, they
said, "Well, you'd better do it." So I did. But I don't like to be
pushed around like that, and I-they say, "Do as you feel." Well,
I didn't feel like letting her push me around; but if that's what
281
you're doing-I mean, if you're going to jump at her very wish,

why- . . . uyou get my glassest" And I just didn't feel like getting them. I felt like saying to her, "If you ask me right, I'll get
them for you." But I didn't know the floor and I didn't know
what to expect; so I went and got the glasses.
The eventually successful management of this difficult situation is vividly described in the following informal comments made
by Miss Betty Cline, the nurse in charge of the patient's ward,
during a general hospital-staff conference. I have italicized the
most crucial of the points which Miss Cline made:
From the standpoint of nursing, Clara has presented two problems. One was her demandingness. [The other problem need not
be described here.] For awhile, I think, there would be four demands a minute in this loud, screeching voice: "Nursel-e-smoke!"
"Nurse[-light[U until people were just frantic. She would smoke
a cigarette and then throw it on the floor, use a Kleenex and
throw it on the floor, eat a candy bar and throw the paper on the
floor, so that she was just sitting in a heap of litter. We would
suggest that she use a waste basket and she would say, "Well,
you're my maid. Clean it up. That's what you're paid for." And
the nurses were very, very unhappy with Clara. There would be
battles with her: "We won't get you cigarettes until you ask for
them properly. Say, 'Please'!" "I won't be treated like a maid!
I won't do things when she asks me that way[" And the problem
increased considerably.
We had several floor meetings-at least two that I know of.
We finally got around to saying that maybe this was her need to be
recognized as a person, and it was the onlyway she knew how. So we
would try to meet all of her demands and even go a step farther
and maybe even guess at what some of them might be and give
them to her before she asks.. Several were a little reluctant but
agreed to go along with this.
Everyone started to get her cigarettes for her [i.e., without the
patient's having to ask for them to be brought]. We got her a
waste basket so she could have it right by her chair, and that
solved that problem a great deal.. Within a very short time her
demands died out-not entirely, but to a very great degree. Some
282
days she would be so quiet, we began to worry if she was still with
us.
Just recently we had two people come on the ward who could
not see this. There was a great deal of feeling about meeting these
demands. They went through the same battIe that we had all
gone through, not too long before.. I know that the next two days
Clara was practically in a panic. She was just screaming in a
panicky sort of way, over and over as though her life depended
upon getting that particular thing. I think this was pretty good
evidence of what [i.e., what intense anxiety-anxiety of a life-or.
death intensity] was behind it.
I recall that Miss Gwen E. Tudor (now Mrs. Gwen Tudor

Will) and Dr. Morris S. Schwartz, who were engaged in a so...
ciological research study on the ward at that particular time,
were, along with Miss Cline, helpful in promoting this beneficial
change in the ward personnel's responses to the patient's demandingness. It seems to me that the successful ward management of
this woman's desperately urgent demandingness fonns a nice
documentation of Michael Balint's views about "primary love,"
quoted on page 34.
Interestingly, it was only after this problem had become largely
resolved, on the ward, that the patient was able to make clear,
during her psychotherapeutic sessions with me, her conviction
that it was unreasonable for her to be required to express her
needs verbally-her conviction that other persons should detect
these needs and provide the necessary supplies without her
having to make a request. The ward personnel had to find their
way to a therapeutic group response, here, without benefit of
that knowledge. Also of interest is the fact that, about two years
later in the psychotherapy, the patient made clear that, in terms
of the demand which her own superego made upon her, in order
for her to maintain any vestige of her status as a human being
she had to be able, among other things, to achieve fulfillment for
her needs, from people around her, without having to ask or
demand, over and over, for any particular need to be met. Thus
from this new vantage point, one could look back upon that so
troubled ward situation of more than two years previously, and
283
see that the patient had treated the nurses and attendants as
though they were not human beings--as though they were, instead, inanimate objects-because she had felt her own status as
a human being to be at stake.
It struck me quite forcibly, as I came to see more of the role
which her superego was playing in this) that a superego demand
can require gratification with just as urgent an intensity, with
just as much of a live-or-die kind of anxiety energizing that demand, as one sees in the case of a Physiological need such as the
infant's oral hunger or, to use Balint's analogy, an adult person's
need for air to breathe. The specific superego demand to which
I refer, in the case of this patient, is the evident demand that,
in order for her to qualify as human, she must have no unsatis...
fied needs.
I should make explicit the fact that in this woman's "dehumanizing" treatment of the ward personnel she had defeated
her own apparent purpose: she developed in those about her
the impression that it was she, not the person whom she was thus
addressing, who was nonhuman. Her demanding behavior had
become so stereotyped, and her strident utterances had become so
chillingly devoid of any overtones of human feeling, that she be...
came, until the situation was eventually successfully dealt with in
the way which I have described, only more and more firmly entrenched in the social role of a nonperson, Her psychiatric administrator frankly said, during a staff conference in that troubled
period of time, that his relationship with her had "no feeling in it
at all," that he had been reaching no more real feeling contact with
her '(than if she were a clothing store dummy."
4. The following material is from my work with a schizophrenic woman previously described (pages 183-186, 233f.) as
being convinced that, in her ongoing existence, she was metamorphosed time and again, by powers outside herself, into various nonhuman forms (various animals, a rock, a tree, and so on) .
As I said, she often manifested intense anxiety in the face of the,
to her, imminent threat that this would happen again.. I mentioned a number of apparent determinants of this particular delusional experience.
284
Another area of this same general delusion was her conviction

that other persons, too} were changed without their knowledge
into various nonhuman forms. Gradually the psychotherapy
yielded} over the course of approximately one year, much evidence that heretofore-repressed desires to tum other people into
nonhuman fOIl1l8 (animals, insects, and so on) had much to do
with her own feeling so threatened by this supposed external
danger. The following samples of these data show, in particular,
her reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, as a defense
against her own fond feelings toward those persons; and her
desires, gradually emerging from repression, to turn other persons into animals, as an expression of her vindictiveness and envy
toward them.
Upon one occasion when I went into the living room on the
ward, for a psychotherapeutic hour with her, I found her en..
gaged in a lively, and unmistakably friendly, conversation with
another woman patient, sitting near her. The other woman
quickly excused herself so that the patient could have the therapeutic session. A few moments later, while talking volubly as she
generally did with me, my patient made} to my amazement, some
verbal reference to the other woman-with whom she had been
sharing an unmistakably friendly togetherness so shortly beforeas "that thing." Not only this verbal phrase} but also her tone
in referring to the other woman} was as utterly impersonal as
though the other patient were an inanimate object. This occurrence fit in with other evidence that she had to deny any feelings
of fondness, however obvious these feelings might at times be
to other persons. Another manifestation of this denial was her
adamant refusal to sleep in a dormitory with several other women
patients; she endured this sleeping arrangement for two or three
nights, but thereafter could stand it no longer. The therapy revealed that she was not yet prepared to face the welter of repressed conflictual feelings, among which intense fondness was a
most prominent ingredient, toward other women. She dealt with
this by perceiving the other women patients as being subhuman,
and for that reason she could not endure their proximity during
the night She asserted with chilling scorn, loudly enough for all
285
these others to hear, "I won't spend another night in that dormitory with those cattle !"
The emergence from repression of her vindictive and envious
desires to turn other persons into animals was, as I said, a gradual process. One of the earliest occasions when she expressed
such desires was an hour in which, while raging about "the
Jews," she said in a tentative fashion) "It's got so I almost think
they all ought to be turned into hammerhead sharks and dropped
into the ocean."
Then, in an hour nine days later, she was evidently seeing me,
convince dly, as being one of the Jews whom she held responsible
for all the outrages which she experienced as happening to her
currently; for instance, she was sure that during the previous
night something had been stuck into her vagina in order to make
a man of her. Her tirading veered over after a time to another
target, a patient who lived in an adjoining room, and in the
course of her raging more and more about that woman, the following came out: "I hope to God I never get to the point-"
she began in a somewhat shocked tone, "where IJd ever be delighted to--' , and then her tone became very clearly one of sadistic delight~CCtake the biggest Jew I could find and turn it
into a horse and then ride it and kick it to death l'~ She ended
on a note of undisguised vengeful triumph, looking at me as she
said this. She left no doubt in my mind that she harbored such
feelings toward me, as well as toward the neighboring patient.
These vindictive feelings, eventually traced to her childhood experience with her mother, who from all reports had indeed
greatly abused the patient as a child, both verbally and physically)
had never before emerged so nakedly in the therapy.
For many months it was quite obvious to any observer that
this woman devoted much of her energy to debunking, deflating,
and in general making a mockery of established authority, in
whatever form such authority presented itself-the Government,
the legal profession, the medical profession, psychiatry, newspapers) telecasts and radio broadcasts) and so on.
But in the therapeutic sessions it became clear to me that she
was not aware of the fact that her utterances had any such mo-
286
tive behind them: from her own point of view, she evidently felt
that she was very much an underdog, seriously protesting against
various intolerable abuses which were being perpetrated by all
these vastly powerful agencies..
The prime target of her ridicule was the Baptist church, which
actually had been of tremendous importance in her emotional
life during her upbringing. It was evident to me that she was
still deeply attached to the church, and that her studiedly sacrilegious mockery of it concealed profound feelings of cherishing it)
and cherishing her past experiences with it. In this regard it
was particularly clear that behind all her mocking, sneering
jousts at established authority lay a desperate longing to find
some authority strong enough to weather her attacks and prove
able, therefore, to provide her with the strength to which she
felt a desperate need to ally herself.
An important development in her gradual-and, I felt, under
the circumstances quite healthy-rapprochement with her religion came when, after many weeks of tentative hints in that direction) she finally went and told her troubles to a local Baptist
minister. This was the first time in years she had invested that
much hope in a representative of the church. She described this
visit in great detail to me in the following session.
In essence, she had much reason to feel-although, I gathered,
she did not consciously feel so-that she had made a monkey of
the minister, so to speak. She had barraged him with so much of
her delusional concepts about religion, in her usual forceful, challenging manner, that he had evidently been very disconcerted and
quite at a loss for arguments to disprove her views-these views
being, of course) sweepingly sacrilegious toward all the most
sacred tenets of the church. But-and this is the particular point
which I want to bring out here-s-she evidently did not place such
a figurative connotation upon her interaction with him as I have
done here. She did not say that she had made a monkey of him;
instead, she told me in genuine puzzlement, "His ears looked
strange-they looked like a monkey's.. "
Behind all her describing of what to me was her figuratively
making a monkey of the minister, and what to her was her find ..
287
ing that the minister literally had ears like those of a monkey,
were hints of painful disillusionment and disappointment that he
had not proved strong enough to make her feel at one with the
church again, as she had felt during her childhood.
I have mentioned the importance, in this woman's psychopathology, of repressed envy . As the therapy proceeded, it became clear
that delusional thinking would supervene at times when it would
be normal for her to experience, in the light of what she had just
been saying, feelings of envy. Thus, time and again when she
would begin to speak of various persons who, in reality, were in po ..
sitions which might naturally elicit envy from any one-s-persons
who were highly placed in Government, or who were wealthy, or
who enjoyed great popularity as motion picture or television stars
-this woman would, instead of experiencing any envy toward
them, manage to experience a variety of pity for them, by delu..
sionally perceiving them as living thus without their really being
conscious, and hence without being able to enjoy the positions
they occupied. Another part, she was sure, of what happened to
them while unconscious was that they were turned into various
animals by the vague powers which supposedly held them captive.
She had great cause, by reason of her past experience with
seeing her two brothers to be favored, time and again, over herself) to feel especially envious toward men.. It seemed to me that
repressed envy toward men was at work in the following delusional experience, which took place in the course of her coming
out of a movie theater.
She let me know, in her therapeutic session the following
morning, that she had gone, during the previous evening, to see
a movie about jet pilots. Evidently this movie, which of course
lionized the glamorous jet pilots, had tended to activate her envious feelings. But she expressed no envy during the hour, and
apparently had consciously experienced none during the movie.
What she communicated to me, instead, was this: she demanded
in a very anxious, awed tone, "Why, those pilots with those masks
--how did they know that was oxygen they were breathing?
How did they know it wasn't some kind of gas that turned them
288
into scarabs--those bugs I saw on the sidewalk when I came out

of the movie last night?"
In the course of the subsequent discussion, I asked her,
"Would you say that the idea of a person's being changed from
a jet pilot into a bug would imply a decrease in status, in prestige?" She replied emphatically, "I certainly would l" adding,
"Who would want to be a bug?-you couldn't [hear, see, and
so forth-c-or words to that effect] . . ."
Somewhat later, I suggested how natural it would be that she
might feel some envy toward the jet pilots. She immediately
snapped back, as if insulted, that she was not a child. I inquired
if she considered it unthinkable that an adult person would feel
envy, and she corroborated that she did believe this} without
question.
It required literally years of intensive psychotherapy before she
could begin to acknowledge any feeling of envy. Interestingly,
only a few days before the exchange which I have just described,
she had been demanding, in an intensely threatened way, that I
explain to her "why I have to go on living this way," saying that
her existence was one of "living in fear and trembling for fear
you're [referring to herself] going to be turned into a sheep or a
cow or a goat or [etc.] .. ~' The over-all course of the psychotherapy provided much data which suggested that, as long as she
was unable to become aware of her repressed envious desires to,
for example, humble the glamorous jet pilots by turning them
into lowly bugs, she had to project these repressed desires, and
consequently lived in fear and trembling that she herself would
be turned into one or another infrahuman form of life by supposedlyexternal malevolent powers.
The Reacting to Elements

of the Nonhuman Environment
As Being Human
CHAPTER
I I
Here we come to a kind of clinical data which is, as it were,

the reverse of the kind presented in the last chapter: rather than
examples of patients' reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, we now have examples of patients' reacting to nonhuman
things as being human.
This particular subject, only another facet of the broader
topic of distortions in perception of the environment, can be
introduced by the following three brief examples, in which we
find patients on the verge of reacting to a nonhuman object
as if it were a human being.
One schizophrenic young woman, whose severe confusion
abated only very slowly in her work with me, had been in inten...
sive psychotherapy for about fifteen months when an incident occurred which caused me to realize, for the first time, that her
confusion was so profound that she was vulnerable even to con..
290
fusing inanimate objects with persons. She said, anxiously, while

draping a pajama top over the head of her bed, "I hope the bed
won't change into David." Later on in the therapy) while she
was still quite confused and was continuing to lead a very isolated existence, another incident with, I believe, a similar significance took place. She was standing a few feet away from me,
while I was sitting in a chair. Nearby was an empty chair which
I had brought in for her, as usual. She said to me goaclingly and
derisively, gesturing toward the empty chair, "''''hat does it say?"
The feeling-tone of her question, which-as has been so often
the case throughout this volume-was the particularly revealing
factor, and which defies accurate reproduction in words here,
conveyed to me the realization that, in her day-after-day loneliness and in her chronic and quite frankly expressed dissatisfaction with me for not talking more during the therapeutic sessions, she very probably yearned often to have a chair, or this
or that other inanimate object in her environment, converse with
her. And, I realized, it was entirely possible that she sometimes
experienced this as actually happening.
My feeling, which accompanied each of the two discoveries
just mentioned, was of a sudden, amazed recognition of a large
realm of experience of which I had been entirely unaware. This
feeling was precisely like that of a fellow therapist who had the
following experience with a deeply confused schizophrenic man.
This man, like my patient, had already been in psychotherapy
(or a long time-for about two years, in this case--when the incident took place. He said in the therapist's presence, in a tone as
if puzzled and emphasizing something to himself, "Now that set
of drawers," gesturing toward a set of drawers in his room,
"isn't a person. Or that," he said, pointing to his bed, "isn't a
person. Could be one doing a back bend," he added thoughtfully, in reference to the bed.
When the therapist told of his hearing these comments
from this mao, he said, "I realized that I'd been operating on a
different wave length from his." He had known for a long time
that the patient was very confused, but had not realized how
deeply the confusion extended. One might conjecture that, in the
291
case of each of these two patients, the patient's confusion earlier

in the therapy had been even greater than it now was, and that
it was only now, when they had become somewhat less confused,
that the patients were able to verbalize these things to the thera-
pist.'
These three clinical examples have been given, as I said, by
way of introduction. Now, in presenting the remaining bulk of

the clinical material} I shall use three different headings, under
which the data can be categorized, however loosely: ( 1) the
experiencing of basically interpersonal emotions indirectly, via the
nonhuman environment; (2) relatedness to the nonhuman environment in lieu of satisfactory relatedness to other human beings; and (3) projection upon, or failure of ego differentiation
from, the nonhuman environment. It might be said that these
three categories represent an increasing order of severity, as regards impairment of ego function or immaturity of ego function.
The Experiencing of Basically Interpersonal Emotions

Indirectly, Via the Nonhuman Envi"onment
1. A thirty-four-year-old woman with latent schizophrenia, an
aloof, outwardly cold individual, was quite unable, at the beginning of her psychotherapy, to express fond feelings for anyone, and for several months she continued to maintain vigorous
defenses against the open expression of fondness. But then, following an automobile trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains
with a man friend} she revealed to the therapist a hithertoconcealed side of herself. To be sure, the therapist heard little
or nothing of any undisguised fondness, on the part of the patient, toward the man; she said very little about him. But her
description of the mountain scenery was poetically, enthrallingly
beautiful-filled with the tender feeling which she was not yet
able to express directly about her man friend, her therapist, her
parents, or any other human being. As regards this woman's
upbringing, it is interesting that her mother, although customarily a tyrant who was utterly blocked from expressing tenderness
J
I am indebted to Dr. Robert W. Gibson for this thought.
292
and who reared the girl much as a Marine drill instructor deals
with a recruit, revealed a different side of herself in one particular
kind of situation: when she would go walking in the forest with
her daughter, as she did not infrequently, the mother would
speak with unaccustomedly deep and tender feeling of the trees
and other elements of Nature. It was only in that indirect way)
evidently, that she could express her love for her daughter.
2. I bad a similar experience with a schizophrenic young man
who, unlike the patient just mentioned, was-and had been for
several years-hospitalized. He led a bleakly isolated existence,
and during my several months' experience with him as his ad..
rninistrative psychiatrist I found him to be an aloof, rigid person
who gave little hint of an inner richness of feeling with which
one could empathize.
But then later on, while his therapist was on vacation, I was
asked to see this young man as an interim therapist for three
weeks. This proved a memorable experience for me; for the first
timt; I felt I was coming to know him. I remember particularly
his telling of the many places where he and his parents had lived
when he was a boy. His father, now a very high-ranking army
officer, had been away nearly alI the time, and the boy's need
for his father poignantly emerged in his groping effort to establish continuity, more in his own memory than in the mind of
myself, his listener, as he tried to recall where he lived when he
was five years old, and where they moved after that, and so on.
He kept getting the many diHerent-and widely scattered-places
and the many different dates mixed uPJ and I began to grow
bored with listening to this history which he was volunteering,
until I realized how important was this effort of his to establish
a sorely needed sense of continuity with his own past.
A second development which I remember particularly welland the one to which I have been leading up, with the foregoing
comments-was the description given to me by this young man,
who throughout his upbringing had been so deprived of adequate
fathering, concerning a trip which he had taken, by car, through
various European countries. While he had been still in boyhood,
his schizophrenic illness had come to interfere more and more
293
with his relations with people, until all efforts toward the establishment of normal school life were finally given up, and he was
left largely at home with his mother and his maternal grand.
mother, His efforts to make friends with other boys, at a long
series of boys' schools, were finally bankrupt, and he continued
to see relatively little of his father" But then, one summer, his
parents sent him on a leisurely automobile trip throughout Europe, with a paid attendant in the form of a man in his early
thirties, who did the driving and who served as a parentparticularly, as a father-to the patient, then sixteen years of
age.
From the patient's description, it was as if he had entered, in
this trip, a new and wonderful world; certainly I was seeing a
new and wonderful world in his personality as he talked. I have
never heard another so fascinating account of a journey. He
spoke with intensely keen appreciation, and with most impressively detailed knowledge, of the various kinds of forests they had
seen, of cities, bodies of water, mountains, climatic changes-in
short, of all sorts of elements of what I have been calling, here)
the nonhuman environment. Of the father person who had been
with him all during this wonderful trip, he said practically nothing; the man scarcely had a name, and the car might almost have
been driven by some kind of automatic piloting device, for all I
heard from the patient about this companion of his. It seemed
that it had been almost exclusively in terms of the nonhuman
environment, through which he had passed during the trip, that
the patient had been able to experience the sense of wonder,
the keenly live curiosity, and the richly satisfying fulfillment of
his need to relate himself to something outside himself, all of
which animated his description. But all these basically pertained,
too, I felt sure, to his relationship--no doubt outwardly disinterested and impersonal on his own part-toward the father figure
who accompanied him. It has occurred to me, belatedly) that
they must all have pertained to me, also, as a for-the-moment
satisfying father figure to him in the immediate situation.
3. This material comes from my work with a forty-year-old
schizophrenic man with whom I spent approximately two years
294
in almost totally silent sessions. During these many months he

dressed untidily and rarely made any sounds except for grunts,
belches, and the frequent passing of flatus. As these months
wore on I found-initially, to my great dismay-that I could
not help reacting to him as being more an offensive animal than
a human being, much as did, evidently, others who dealt with
him.
But after about four months, during which such negative feelings on my part had predominated, I found myself occasionally
experiencing an hour with him as being, however verbally un ..
productive, deeply enjoyable and enriching to me. Then such
hours became more and more frequent, and would predominate
for weeks at a time. We both sat gazing out of the window much
of the time, and on several occasions I found myself, while lookjog at a very tall and luxuriant tree which towered nearby, to be
feeling an unusually keen appreciation of its beauty, an appreciation poetic in quality and foreign to my usual nature. I saw the
tree as being infinitely fascinating; its foliage formed, I realized,
a tapestry of endless variety, but nonetheless the tree formed a
wonderful wholeness of light and shadow, form and color-a
wholeness far more alive than I had ever realized a tree could
possess. After having been immersed in this experience for some
time, I began to wonder if it was saying something about my relationship with the patien~, I sensed that my experience was pooh..
ably a reflection of the patient's own feelings---a reflection of
his own poetic feeling for Nature; he had made two or three
remarks, over the months, which revealed such a capacity in him,
and I left it at that.
But several months later, upon looking over my notes concerning that hour, it seemed to me that my experience had possessed
an additional meaning: it had been, I now felt, my way of
vicariously appreciating the beauty of the patient himself, Even
now, while I had advanced considerably into the recognition of
my positive feelings for this man, this interpretation was startling
to me. The patient, although still as silent as ever in the psychotherapeutic sessions, had improved considerably in his grooming
P~chosu
Gnd
~eu10su
295
and his demeanor; but one would hardly think of him as beau-
tiful.
This later interpretation of my experience found, I believe,
some verification in a comment the head nurse of the ward made
to me eighteen months later still. The patient, still silent in the
psychotherapy, had progressed a considerable distance in tenus
of becoming a more likable human being. But he still managed to
behave and act enough like a pig so that it came as quite a surprise to the head nurse when, upon seeing him come out of his
room one morning, she found herself quite carried away with
delight and exclaimed, "Joe, you look beautijul!" which he was
evidently equally pleased to hear.
I feel that neither she nor I had responded simply to some
superficial beauty of his appearance, but rather to the beauty of
him as a whole personality. To restate the point I have been
making here: I had at first been unable to experience this appreciation directly, as concerning the patient himself; I had only
found myself feeling an inordinately keen appreciation of the
loveliness of the tree outside my window.'
In Chapter XIII will be found a description of additional aspects of my work with this man.
4. A schizophrenic woman expressed, toward an object in her
nonhuman environment, feelings which clearly seemed "meant
for" me) in the course of a session which I shall have occasion
to describe at greater length. in Chapter XIII. In essence, upon
my responding sympathetically to her expression of grief, she
began alternately (1) to weep with more open grief, hugging
her pillow closely to her, with her head buried in it; and (2) to
I As I have detailed in a recent paper (135). it has been my many-timesrepeated experience) both in my own therapy with schizophrenic patients
and in my supervisory work with colleagues who are treating such patients,
that this kind of incident is one of the typical earmarks of a genuine turning
point in the transference evolution, from a previous transference of a predominantly negative variety to one of, now, a genuinely positive variety. The
events subsequent to such an occurrence confirm, as I have tried to mention briefly in the above case, that the occurrenee marked not a tapping of
profound anxiety) but a tapping of~ rather, profound and long..repressed
lovingness in the patient.
296
say to me, in a tone of intense loathing, "God, you're freakish!

---slliny ~-dopey !" I distinctly felt that she was so afraid of
closeness-closeness to which her grief repeatedly exposed herthat she had to try to defend herself against it by loathing me;
but her repeatedly hugging her pillow told me that, unconsciously
but nonetheless intensely, she longed to hug me and pour out
her grief to me as she was actually doing with the pillow."
5. A woman with paranoid schizophrenia, who had ventilated
intense hostility toward me over the course of many months of
psychotherapy, came to express unprecedented fondness toward
me in the indirect fashion which I have been illustrating here,
namely, via expressing the feeling consciously and ostensibly toward elements in the nonhuman environment-toward, in this
instance, a nesting mother bird and its young.
She had begun the hour in a characteristic way, bellowing a
lot of paranoid material about "their" trying to make a man out
of her, and "their" raping her; much of this raging was directed
toward me, as had often happened. She went on, still in a not
unusual vein, to rant that she knew she had again been made
pregnant against her will (which, she had long been convinced,
happened over and over again), because she could "feel life"
in her abdomen.. She most vigorously disclaimed my suggestion
that maybe in a way she wished very much that she were preg..
nant..
But in the latter half of the hour she beckoned to me to come
over to look out the window and see where some birds had a
nest behind a window ledge. As I came over and stood close to
her, looking with her at the birds in their nest, she laughed
warmly at the foolishness of a bird that would build her nest in
such a place, commenting that ths mother bird generally has to
shove her young birds out of the nest, to get them to flying, and
The recent volume by Freeman, Cameron, and McGhie contains a few
examples, reminiscent of this one) of schizophrenic patients' displacement of
interperaonally aroused emotionl onto inanimate objects. For example:
It one female patient made manifest sexual overtures to one of the therapists. She repeatedly invited him to come upstairs with her, finally turning
away and crossing the room slowly to the comer where the vase was standing.
She stroked it gently, leaned her cheek against it, and killed it several
times" (45a).
PJ'Ychosis and Neurosis
297
pointing out how foolish, therefore, was this mother bird's choice
of a nesting site--behind a ledge, where it would be very difficult to shove the young birds off and get them to flying.
This communication was, of course, saying many things about
her relationship with me. In her feeling-tone while she said these
things, there were hints that she was relating to me as her husband, as her mother, and as her child. The point I want to make
here can be put in general terms: she was manifesting toward
me, via her talk about the birds and their nest, a depth of fondness, of warm familial feeling, which she had not been able to
show before. The maternal feeling-the desire to have a babywhich had been so vigorously and delusionally denied earlier in
the hour, was now, in this indirect fashion, clearly revealed.
6. A thirty-three-year-old man with a mixed psychoneurosis
had already come, after only ten weeks of analysis, close to being
able to express much fond feeling toward me as a parent figure.
But at this point, on the eve of his going away on a vacation, he
could not yet express this directly to me. Instead, before leaving
the room he paused, looked down at the couch, and said tenderly,
"Good-bye, couch." Then he added, to me, very touchingly,
"Take good care of the couch while I'm gone," It was as if he
could not quite, as yet, say fondly, "Good..bye, Dr. Searles. Take
good care of yourself while I'm gone."
7. A twenty-one-year-old man with borderline schizophrenia
of a catatonic type almost never, during the first several months
of our work together, looked at me, and then only fleetingly.
Moreover, during this time, such verbalizations as he was able to
make were almost exclusively highly critical ones, concerning myself as well as other persons. But then, after seven months of
therapy, he glanced at the chair in which I was sitting and said,
"That chair always looks funny to me because it doesn't go with
the rest of the room." The striking significance of the occurrence
was that, despite the critical content of his remark, both his facial
expression-as he gazed so near to me-and his affective tone in
speaking, were filled with radiant warmth. Many months of
therapeutic work remained before he could express directly to
me such warmth as he had here bestowed upon my chair.
298
The Nonhuman Envi7'onment
8. A fellow therapist, reporting on the status of his work with

a forty-two-year-old ambulatory schizophrenic man, whom he
had been seeing in intensive psychotherapy for approximately
four years at this point, said that
For the first two and a half years the man presented himself to
me in such a way that I thought very often that he was dealing
with me. . . . But as time has gone on, the secrets that I've
begun to hear about, in terms of attachment to me, are not memories of what I say or what I might SQ,'Y~ but rather they're such
things as the sketch of the building where my office is located, a
pen-and-ink sketch which he made one time and he carried it
around until it is now practically wrinkled into oblivion and he
has to make another sketch of the building. We talked about the
business of moving [i.e., the therapist's moving his office to another location in the same city] and he presents that move as if
he were leaving me, as if we weren't going together. . . . But
what really comes to his mind is in terms of the couch, in terms
of the chair, in terms of the desk and my chair, and those are the
things he can't leave, and he wants to come in and sort of break
the office up on the last day so that he doesn't have to go on with
the memory of the articles of furniture.
That is, this man was experiencing his ambivalent feelingshis fond and dependent feelings, his murderous feelings, and his
grief-not directly) as having to do with the therapist himself,
but indirectly) in terms of various inanimate objects related to the
therapist-the sketch of his office building, and the furniture of
his office.
9. For almost three and a half years after beginning analysis
with me, a twenty-five-year-old woman with a mixed psycho..
neurosis had continued to defend herself against the recognition
of her need for affection, by the maintenance of unusually intense
hostility toward me and toward persons in her extra-analytic life.
The emergence of her repressed positive feelings first took place
with regard to various nonhuman elements of her environmentin particular, the works of Nature. Then an hour occurred in
which she made statements that memorably reflected the exten..
299
sion of such feelings to include human beings) also. "Last night

I felt I'd die if I didn't get out to the country. . . . I suppose
if I do hunger so for music, and for the trees, and the ocean, I
suppose it's true of some human beings," she said thoughtfully.
Then she added hesitantly but with sincerity, "I did call you
'Sweet One' once in a [recent] letter." These comments contained
a depth of positive feeling which was most unusual for her to
convey.
Relatedness to the Nonhumas: Environment in Lieu of

Satisfactory Relatedness to Other Human Beings
Having given a number of examples of persons' experiencing
indirectly, via the nonhuman environment, feelings which have
basic reference to another human being, I shall now give some
examples of persons' relating to that environment in lieu of a
satisfactory relatedness to other human beings. There is, of course,
much overlapping of these two phenomena in actual life situations; throughout this book, in fact, I am trying to separate out,
for purposes of presentation, phenomena which in actuality
merge imperceptibly into one another) and occur in varying degrees concomitantly with one another.
Melanie Klein, in reviewing the history of her development of
the psychoanalytic play technique, comments upon what one
might call the substitute value of nonhuman objects, a value
which has enabled such objects to form a central part of the
medium of psychoanalysis with children:
Play analysis had shown that symbolism enabled the child to
transfer not only interests, but also phantasies, anxieties, and guilt
objects other than people. Thus a great deal of relief is ex..

perienced in play and this is one of the factors which make it so
essential for the child (88a].
to
In the following clinical examples we find, similarly, the individual's having, or seeking to have, a relatedness with some
animal, or some nonhuman object, a relatedness which he lacks
in his experience with other persons.
300
1. A thirty-nine-year-old schizophrenic man's first overt expression of grief, during his psychotherapy, came in response to the
death of a dog which had been a pet on his ward. As he later
told his therapist, he had found himself unable to show grief
while the head nurse was telling him of the dog's death; but now,
during his therapeutic hour, he wept. He went on to say that as
a boy he had had a dog, and that the dog had died, and that
when this had happened, he had felt in his mother's presence as
he bad felt in the presence of the head nurse. As a boy he had
gone, feeling badly inside about his dog's death, to his mother
with some idea of her comforting him. But for some reason or
other, he remembered, he had not been able to cry while with
his mother and, still feeling badly, he had gone out into the stable
and had put his head on the neck of his horse and had cried, with
the fantasy that the horse was Mother. There had been a feeling
of warmth and softness with the horse, he said, and actually the
horse, a mare, had just foaled a short time before, and he (who,
incidentally, had no siblings) used to play with the foal.
In this instance, then, the boy had been able to find, in his
relationship with the mare, something which he had been either
unable to obtain or unable to ask for in his relationship with his
mother: release of his feelings of grief, and maternal comforting.
2. A forty-year-old schizophrenic man had been hospitalized
constantly for eleven years thus far, living an extremely lonely
existence and never having had, so far as anyone knew, a close
friend at any time in his life. His first use of the word "friend"
came in the seventeenth month of his psychotherapy when, in the
process of talking in detail about the idea of having a car (making clear that he himself had owned one, although as usual disclaiming so) he said, with much feeling, "That's your best
friend." This man, whose positive feelings had heretofore been
maintained under the most vigorous denial, was finally able to
reveal here, in reference to his car, a feeling of caring very deeply.
I believe that his or her automobile has been many a schizophrenic
person's best friend; but I had never heard one of my patients
express this so simply and so movingly.
3. A forty-one-year-old schizophrenic woman, who had been
301
leading a life of severe emotional (although not physically seeluded) isolation on a disturbed ward for years, was looking
closely) during an hour with her therapist, at a painting by Utrillo
on the wall of the living room, where the interview was taking
place. She asked, "What do you think of the people?" He replied,
"Well, they look rather indistinct, don't they?" She commented,
"They look like dolls," Then, running her finger over them, she
said, "I wish I could make them come to life," The therapist felt,
both from her words and her tone, that she was conveying how
lonely she felt, and commented, "I suppose it is pretty lonely
around here. n As if in answer to this--he felt it to be a corroboration--she slumped down on her chair, face down, head buried.
4. A thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman had slowly improved, in the course of her stay in the hospital, sufficiently to be
free to go, as she wished, into the nearby village, unaccompanied
by an attendant. But she was still leading an intensely lonely life
-just how lonely I did not realize, until an hour during which she
began speaking about the mannequins in the store windows. She
asked me, hesitatingly, if I had ever noticed how real the hair
looks on them, and so forth, and as she went on speaking) slowly
and hesitantly, I realized how poignantly she wished that these
humanlike figures in the store windom, at which she gazed
during her walks to the village, would come to life and assuage
her loneliness. For the first time it came to me that she probably
often fantasied that the mannequins-s-she mentioned, in talking,
both adult ones and child ones-were real people, her friends and
her family. I had long known that this woman, who was a widow
with no children, and who felt largely cut off from her parental
family, suffered much from loneliness; but, as I say, I had not
realized how deeply she suffered from it, or-perhaps more accurately-to what lengths she went to avoid experiencing the full
intensity of it.
5. A thirty-six-year-old woman, who had been hospitalized
briefly for catatonic schizophrenia had now improved sufficiently,
after long psychotherapy, to be holding a job as a stock clerk in
a department store. But her interpersonal relationships were still
deeply troubled, and it is of interest, here, that one of her psy-
302
The Nonhuman Environmtnl
chological defenses, erected in her struggle to make her job

situation endurable, was that of personifying the shelves of mer..
chandise with which she worked. For example, in one of her
hours with me she said, "I take a lot of satisfaction in knowing
that those shelves have never been in such good condition in
their lives." On another occasion, when she had felt-as she
usually did-unappreciated by the man who was head of her
department, during a conversation with him she had retorted,
"At least the shelves appreciate me!"
6.. A fellow therapist, upon my mentioning the title of this book
and telling him a few words about it} feelingly spoke of his past
experiences when, at times when he was feeling thoroughly helpless in his relationships with other people, he would experience
great relief at finding that he could at least deal with the material
world-that he could, at least, pull a chair toward him and it
would move .
7. A forty-three-year-old schizophrenic man was now living as
an outpatient; but a year previously he had been involved in very
assaultive behavior which had been going on for months. During
that disturbed period he had been secluded most of each day, he
had urinated not infrequently on the floor of his room, and the
attendants were so afraid of him that at mealtimes they would
shove in his tray on the floor. It had been even worse than this at
another hospital, from which he had been transferred to Chestnut
Lodge several months before; at the previous hospital} he had
been so greatly feared, because of his assaultive ness, that when he
was taken to the bathroom he was routinely escorted by six male
attendants.
During one hour in this disturbed phase, of a year ago, his
therapist noticed that the patient was gazing about rapidly, and
asked him, "What do the voices say?" The patient replied, "I'm
not hearing voices-I'm looking at my two pet flies, Lum and
Abner." The therapist looked closely in the direction of the pa..
tient's gaze and saw that there were, indeed, two flies flying
around high on the window screen. He said, "Gosh, it sure must
get lonely up here," The patient replied, with much feeling,
303
"Yeah, it sure does." The therapist asked him, then, if he had

had any pets, but received no answer.
The therapist heard nothing further about this incident until
now, a year later, when the patient was finally able to tell him
about the voices he used to hear, back during his disturbed period
of a year and more ago. He confided that they had been women's
voices which had kept telling him to hang himself, to tear out his
eyes, to bash in his skull by ramming it into the door. He pointed
out that all these things which the voices had said were condemnatory and hopeless-sounding. The first hopeful sign, he went on,
was when the voices told him to tell those two flies, Lum and
Abner, to fly to a factory in his home town in California and to
light on a certain one of the machines there. That, the voices had
said, was his only chance of hope. "That may sound odd," he
said, "But up until then I didn't have any feeling of hope, and I did
feel that this was my chance." He confided, further, that he had
waited until he was alone and then told the flies this, because
if anyone had seen him they would have thought he was insane.
This desperate man had thus been able to invest in the flies a
hope which he did not' yet dare to place in his therapist or in any
other human being.
8. On page 279 I described an incident which constitutes another example of relatedness to a nonhuman object as a substitute for an (as yet) unattainable relatedness, of this variety,
toward another human being = this incident involved a schizophrenic woman's holding a doll at her bared breast and weeping
in anguish because she could not persuade it to nurse. She related
not only to her doll as though it were a human being, but also
related similarly to her own stools, as shown by the following
excerpts from nurses' report sheets, written on two different days:
At 10 P.M. she went into the large bathroom and defecated on
the tile floor-two big hunks. She was saying when checked,
"This is twins and this one is a boy; I see his penis," Patient
didn't want me to flush them down "john" for fear they might
drown.
3M
Patient was found playing with a small hunk of feces and

named it after Edwards [a male attendant] as her little baby
boy. Showed tenderness toward it and expressed great deal of
sentiment.
This woman's treating her doll as a real, human baby is like

the behavior of a schizophrenic patient described by Bleuler, in
his sectionon autism:

A patient who was still fairly well-mannered and capable of work,
made herself a rag-doll which she considered to be the child of
her imaginary lover. When this "lover" of hers made a trip to
Berlin, she wanted to send "the child" after him, as a precautionary measure. But she first went to the police, to ask whether it
would be considered as illegal to send "the child" as luggage
instead of on a passenger ticket [13a].
Anna Freud refers to similar phenomena. In the symposium on

"Infantile Neurosis," she states:
Dr. Bychowski describes a rhythmic, autoerotic play activity
which some of his patients had carried on with their feces, creating out of their own body a pseudo object with which they could
enter into some sort of pseudo object relationship. I want to
confirm Dr. Bychowski's remarks by referring to a case history
of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. The boy had a series of traumatic experiences at the end of his second year. There was a
complete upheaval in the external conditions of his life; there
was a sudden short separation from the mother due to illness on
her part; and finally, there was a period of mourning and depression on the part of the mother, caused by the loss of her relatives.
The boy reacted to the accumulated strain by soiling, and investigation proved that this was more then a regression in toilet habits.
He called the stool out of his body quite deliberately, to have
company at a time when he felt abandoned by his mother and,
in reaction to her mood, withdrew his own feelings from her
[45c].
9. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-nine years of age,
305
loudly asserted during an hour with me, "1 spent my entire youth
under a piano with a dog, because I'd rather be with a dog than
with people, who lied to me and slapped my face and told me 1
was evil because they were!" This statement was made in a spirit
of condemnation toward me as well as toward her parental
family and was, obviously, an exaggeration. But it contained far
more than a kernel of truth; she produced abundant data, during
relatively calm and collaborative sessions as well as during more
disturbed ones, over the course of years of psychotherapy, which
convinced me that during the years of her childhood her dog had
been, indeed, her closest and most trusted companion. Feeling
oftentimes intensely threatened in all her relationships with other
people, and unable to trust her own intuition as to whether this
or that person in her presence were a friend or an enemy, she
grew accustomed to relying upon the dog's ability to detect
whether the other person were friendly or hostile toward her.
10. A twenty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman, one among
that relatively small percentage of patients in my experience
whose appearance and behavior, for many months after the beginning of their psychotherapy, were striking "nonhuman," began, after about eighteen months of intensive work with me, to
reveal how intense were her feelings of rejection toward all her
fellow human beings. In the course of one hour she frankly
expressed bitter resentment concerning her mother, her father,
myself, and some girlhood friend. In the midst of saying these
things she began weeping bitterly and, gazing through the win..
dow at the tree-dotted hospital grounds, said emphatically, "I
certainly miss horses-and I don't like another living thing;"
then added as an afterthought, u--except trees." 4
11. A thirty-nine-year-old spinster had led a lonely life prior
to her hospitalization and now, in psychotherapy because of paranoid schizophrenia, for a long time had kept herself largely aloof
from me and from other members of the hospital personnel, as
well as from her fellow patients, showing intense anxiety in the
lace of any developing close relatedness with anyone of us. Her
On page 247 I quoted, in another cenectlon, this statement of hers,
306
adult life had been a very "sheltered" one; her activities had been
confined, for the most part, to keeping house for her elderly
father and mother. After many months of psychotherapy, she
came into my office one day and told me, with unprecedentedly
deep feeling in her voice, that she had just received a jar of blackberries, sent by a woman who long had lived in the house next
door to her parents' house-berries from bushes near the kitchen
window of the patient's home. She went on, with tears in her
voice, to describe the bushes as being "just covered" with blackberries each year. She spoke of the bushes with as much feeling
as though she were speaking of very dear friends, much as the
man described above (in example 2) had spoken of his car, More
by her tone and by what was left unsaid than by what her relatively few words made explicit, I realized that, to this lonely
woman who had spent much time working in the kitchen, the
berry bushes had come to possess something of the order of personal meaning with which, ordinarily, only human friends are
invested.
This last example illustrates the impossibility of categorizing
this clinical material into really sharply defined groups, in terms
of psychodynamic mechanisms involved, as I am endeavoring to
do. I do not doubt that the berry bushes were often reacted to,
by this lonely woman, as dear personal friends in their own rightJ
when there was no human friend at hand to assuage her loneli..
ness, But who is to say that much of the feeling she expressed to
me, consciously with reference to the bushes, was not unconsciously directed toward the neighbor woman-and, very possibly, toward myself also? Certainly the neighbor must have
possessed a sensitive appreciation of the patient's feelings, to have
sent her so thoughtful a gift; and certainly I must have come to
stand in much of a friend-relatedness to the patient, for her to
reveal these feelings to me.
When one considers all these clinical examples presently being
given-including those in the immediately following section, reported as illustrations of patients' projection upon, or failure of
ego differentiation from, the nonhuman environment--one can
307
well surmise) I think, that in most instances all three of these

psychodynamic processes are simultaneously involved, with one
or another of them merely predominating.
Projection Upon, or Failure of Ego Differentiation From, the
N onhuman Environment
When .one uses the term "projection," one usually assumes, I
believe, that this is a process which has another person as its
target. The fact that we human beings tend to project not only
onto other human beings, but upon elements of our nonhuman
environment also) is a circumstance which tends to go by unnoticed. In this book, however, I have already included a number
of clinical examples (particularly in Chapter VI) of patients'
projecting onto their nonhuman environment, and other investigators before me have presented material of this sort. At this
juncture I shall present a few relevant excerpts from the literature-without attempting to report an exhaustive review of all
the literature about this subject-and shall give a number of
additional clinical examples from my own experience.
In this presentation I shall not try to draw any distinction
between ( a) projection upon the nonhuman environment, and
(b) failure of ego differentiation from the nonhuman environment. If there is a distinction to be made here, I fail to see it;
any process of projection automatically implies, by the same
token, a failure of ego differentiation from one's surroundings,
to my way of thinking" Of course, it might be said that failure of
ego differentiation is a more primitive process, to be found in
pure culture only in infancy, and that projection implies that ego
differentiation has been accomplished in the past-that the subjective self has been psychologically detached from the environ..
ment, and that now in the process of projection. some parts of
the subjective self are being reattributed to the environment from
which they had been initially detached. At any rate, such a distinction, if actually present, can be disregarded in reading the
following material
308
LrrERATUIlE
These excerpts from the literature, like the clinical examples

following them, portray various degrees of impairment of ego
differentiation, ranging all the way from a total inability to
demarcate anything of the self from the environment, to the projection of certain specific parts of the self onto the environment.
Nunberg's previously mentioned paper, "On the Catatonic
Attack," first published in 1920, containing his formulation of the
psychodynamic meaning of successive symptoms experienced by
his male catatonic patient over the course of development of the
illness, includes the following comments:
We observe still another change here; up to this point the patient
had distinguished between the ego and the outside world. In
taking exercises or selected foods he pursued the goal of changing
himself and of influencing the world indirectly, insofar as he
hoped by these actions to gain consideration and recognition for
himself. After the "end of the world," however, the patient in a
certain sense no longer distinguished between "inside' and "out..
side"; the outside world coincided with the ego; it was directly
affected by changes in the ego, and vice versa. To speak in
Tausk's words" the bound4'~ of the ego was resolved [l09b].
Fenichel, in The Psychoanalytic Theory 01 Neurosis, published

in 1945, makes a number of comments with reference to patients'
projecting upon what I call the nonhuman environment, He says
in discussing anxiety hysteria that persons who are afraid of
trains, boats, and airplanes project upon the vehicle the excitement which it has precipitated, at an unconscious level, in them,
and consequently they experience a need to escape from the
vehicle-a need which is in actuality a need to escape from their
own excitement. And he says in these instances the train, for
example, represents one's own body, or at least its sensations,
which one tries to get rid of by projection. Similarly with a phobic person in a narrow street, Fenichel says: he introjects the
street's narrowness, and thus feels frightened, and in some in-
Prychosis and Neurosis
309
stances, as a result of projection, even behaves as if the street

itself were afraid; thus we see how incomplete are the ego boundaries which subjectively demarcate him from the street. Fenichel
quotes Sachs's (121) concept that "consciousness of nature" consists not in becoming aware of the real physical and geographical
elements in nature, but in becoming aware of feelings within
ourselves, which we believe are connected with those physical or
geographical elements. 5 And later, in his chapter on schizophrenia, Fenichel comments that the projection of feared excitements
onto nature or onto particular environmental situations, which
he described in connection with anxiety hysteria, occurs in a more
obvious manner in schizophrenia.
Werner (162), using Storch's (148) 1924 monograph, now
out of print, as one of his reference sources, implies that a developing dedifferentiation between the self and the nonhuman environment .is one of the earmarks of the onset of schizophrenia, a
concept to which I was led independently by my own clinical
experience. Werner comments,
A genuine daemonism can arise on the basis of such ego- and
anthropomorphism [as characterizes primitive thinking] as soon
as the emotion of intense anxiety begins to formulate the sinister
elements of any situation [162w].
[In schizophrenia] The milieu invades the ego and, on the other
hand, the inner experience spreads outward into the world of
things. The milieu becomes daemonic and the ego susceptible to
daemonism [162x].
The first stage in the schizophrenic decline is often characterized
by a growing '(queerness" in everything. Things come to have a
hitherto unheard-of "deeper meaning"; they become sinister and
alive with mystery, and any harmless object may be invested with
signs and portents [162y].
Savage, in his paper, published in 1955 concerning psychoses

-Incidentally, I differ, of course, with Sachs's evident view that we react
to nature solsly in a projective manner. As I indicated at the outlet of thi.
book, one of my basic theoretical tenets is that the nonhuman environment
can be found to be meaningful to us in its"f-the more richly BO, in proportion 31 Our reactions to it become free of IUch diltorting ingredients as those
ariBing from projection.
310
induced in normal subjects by LSD-25, describes the subject's

typical experience as follows:
His concept of spatial relations is impaired. He loses the ability
to integrate objects in space. The stability of the outer world is
lost. Corners lose their rectangularity; solid objects move; lines
and planes bend. "The walls flap in the breeze like tapestries--they run like melted wax," "The floor flows like a river" [126e].
It would seem that such perceptions of the nonhuman environment as Savage describes here are a result of the subject's loss
of ego differentiation, allowing for projection upon the nonhuman environment of an instability which in reality characterizes
the patient's psychological state; he mistakenly experiences the
instability as an outer one. I have reported here (pages 150-151)
similar material from schizophrenic patients, and will give further
instances of this phenomenon in the brief clinical examples soon
to be presented.
Burnham, in a paper in 1955 concerning communication with
schizophrenic patients, mentions that
He [i.e., the schizophrenic patient] also is unaware of inconsistencies such as attributing animate qualities to inanimate objects,
as in these statements ~ "The pillow propelled itself away from
me." Or, 'The violin felt the same way I did ..' Such examples
also reflect the blurring of the boundaries between the realm of
his ego and that of the outer world .[21].
Heiman, in his paper previously mentioned ( pages 15..17),
presents excellent examples of (presumably neurotic) patients'
projecting upon (as well as identifying with) a specific element
in the nonhuman environment: household pets, In the case of
one of his female patients, for instance,
. . . the identification of the patient with the dog was so complete that almost imperceptibly she changed from talking about
the dog to talking about herself. Her own libidinal wishes which
she cannot master or accept are displaced on to the dog. She
311
wonders, for instance, whether she should place the dog in an

obedience class. In this session the patient herself howls and
whines and is demanding, the same way that she describes her
dog [73].
He also quotes a nice example from a paper by Dunbar, in
which Dunbar reports her patient as saying,
C'I simply could not live without cats in the house. . . . I guess
it's lucky I have a cat, or I would be doing all these things to my
child. Even worse things than I do now. Perhaps that's why I
am afraid not to have a cat around. Yesterday, as I was sitting
alone in the house I heard a noise, a live footstep like a eat's. I
wondered if it was my son getting out of bed) stealing downstairs.
I became more and more afraid and said, under my breath,
'Don't come in, don't come in.' I felt that if he did I would give
a yell, and jump at his throat" [29].
Here, with Dunbar's patient, it appears that not only was the
cat being used as a target of the patient's aggression in place of
her child; but also her feline savagery was being projected upon
the cat.
Heiman suggests, in his theoretical formulations, that the dog
(the kind of household pet with which most of his clinical material is concerned) becomes a true protector of the psychic
balance in man, by serving as a ready carrier for instinctual
forces which are too intense for our own capacities to contain
unaided.
The paper by Elklsch and Mahler (33) about the seven-yearold boy, who confused his own impulses with machines in his
environment, contains some vivid examples of what I am terming
projection onto the nonhuman environment. Of the wall telephone in the therapist's office, for example, he once commented
to her, "It was not so loud today, because it knew we were
waiting for it to buzz," and on another occasion he said of it,
"It will come down from the wall and take a bite out of you."
His equally intense anxiety about elevator shafts, manholes, and
toilets involved the fantasy that they would swallow him up.
312
The little girl described by Furman (56) showed, between the

ages of about three and six years, this phenomenon-namely,
projection onto the nonhuman world-in an equally striking
way:
. . . she once picked up the scissors, then retreated with them to
the other end of the room, crying in terror, "You [addressing the
scissors] are going to hurt me!" Another time she grabbed a toy
man aggressively and screamed out, "The man is going to break
me all up."
. . Carol could not cut out paper because she feared it would
hurt her in revenge. . . .. She treated toys and make-believe as
live reality and therefore was practically unable to play; e.g., she
wished very badly for a doll's house in the therapy room) but
when it finally arrived she became so jealous of the doll's having
a house to itself that she only wanted to snatch the house away
from the doll and destroy it, since she could not live in it herself.
CLINICAL MATERIAL
In the examples given below one sees, as with those above

from the literature, instances of patients' projecting of undiffer.
entiated feelings of inner chaos--confusion, craziness, messiness,
bewildering change-as well as instances of patients' projecting
of more specific, more clearly differentiated feelings such as scorn
and sexual desire.

1. A twenty-one-year-old schizophrenic woman, deeply confused in her thinking and disorganized in her behavior, for many
months was shielded from becoming aware of the severity of her
illness by projection, not only upon other persons but also upon
her nonhuman environment, of the disorder which actually characterized her own thinking and behavior.
For example, she came into my office for one therapeutic session with, typically, her clothing very disheveled and dirty and
partially undone, her hair very messy, and her shoes broken
down at the heels and stuffed with many bunched-up silk stockings. She brought with her a glass of ice cubes, some small bottles
of perfume, a number of magazines, and a purse overflowing
313
with various miscellaneous items. She then proceeded, as usual,

to spend the bulk of the hour in rubbing her forehead, limbs, and
genitals with ice; arranging the magazines on the seat of her chair
before finally sitting down; sniffing at intervals from the bottles of
perfume; and wiping various parts of her body with Kleenex.
Also characteristically, when the session was over, her chair and
the area about it were left in a messy, littered state. But during
this particular hour she had managed to verbalize the following
new and significant statements: "This place [the sanitarium] is
getting very unconventional. . . . This place is a mess . . The
second floor [where she roomed] is a mess." That is, she was
apparendy projecting her own messiness and unconventionality
not only upon other persons (as her words at other times often
indicated) but also upon the place-tltt sanitarium in general,
and the hospital ward where she lived.
Likewise as regards her confusion, although she did manage
to show, during the same month as that in which the above
session occurred, some awareness of her confusion, it was still
necessary for her to project this to some degree upon the environment. She said that, in reading, "I look straight at 'Ralph' and
see 'Randy,' n and said of the wadded-up stockings in her shoes,
"They are just like glasses. For a while I thought they uiere
glasses." Then she summed it up with, "I feel confused in this
place," as if it were the place, not she, wherein the confusion
arose.
She had long been distressed whenever one of the maids used
a mop in her proximity, and during this same month one of the
daily nurses' reports contained the following item:
... The maid went down the hall with a mop. Edna said,
"Don't use that mop now. Pick it up," The maid didn't sayanything. Edna put both hands to the sides of her head and hollered,
"This place is so craz'Y!"
Eleven months later, she was still projecting onto the environment, including the nonhuman environment, much of her own
psychopathology. During one of her hours she said in exaspera-
314
non, "This place acts like a nitwit I"~ which actually was a precise
description of some of the pathological aspects of her own
behavior-a silly-sounding laugh and a simpering, empty-headed
type of behavior toward people whom she passed in the hospital
corridors,
It gradually became apparent that her projecting so diffusely
upon the environment as a whole, including the "place," was
perpetuated partly because of her fear of me, to whom she re ..
acted as being a frighteningly powerful father figure. It required
about six more months of work before she could focus the projection of the above..described qualities onto me, her therapist, and
tlet me know quite directly that she considered me to be a nitwit.
Interestingly, along with this development carne her de-repression
of the feeling that her father, for a long time enshrined in her
estimation as an omniscient person incapable of error, was actually quite a nincompoop} both as regards the things he said
and the way he behaved. This last development facilitated the
resolution of some of her long-standing, self.. detrimental unconscious identifications with her father---silly flirtatiousness, the
uttering of remarks which other persons found meaningless, and
various other eccentricities.
2. In my work with a paranoid schizophrenic woman, thirtyone years of age, it quickly became apparent to me that she, like
the patient just described, was unconsciously avoiding an awareness of her own psychological instability by the process of projection of this instability-projection of it upon not only other
persons, but also upon her nonhwnan environment. But it was a
long time before she herself came to realize this.
For more than three years after beginning intensive psychotherapy with me she maintained, as far as I could tell, an utterly
unvarying, starkly simple conception of herself, as being a sincere,
well-intentioned person who wanted to be left alone to lead a
quiet Iife--a person completely devoid of any feelings whatsoever,
whether of friendliness, tenderness, dependency, sexual desire, an ..
ger, murderousness, envy, jealousy, scorn, competitiveness, nostalgia, grief or whatever. She seemed genuinely to maintain the
conviction that her mood never changed, that her opinions of vari-
315
ous other persons never changed, and that, when it came to her
intellectual experiences, she had learned literally nothing new since
the age of eight. The repression of her feelings seemed also to date
from about that age. As she often put it, she was "completely grown
up" by the age of eight; thereafter, she indicated, she had never
experienced the humiliating business of having any feelings about
any thing-a business characteristic, she was sure, only of children.
This woman, as one might surmise, was actually as changeable,
to the observer, as her conception of herself was changeless. She
manifested in great intensity all the various emotions which she
so steadfastly warded out of her awareness. From one hour to the
next her demeanor varied so greatly that she seemed scarcely the
same person one had seen during the previous hour; and oftentimes she was so mercurial from one moment to the next that
in the very midst of a tirade of murderous intensity she would,
in the same breath, ask one, in an unmistakably friendly way,
for a light for her cigarette.
As I mentioned, I had begun early to find evidence that she
unconsciously defended herself against the recognition of her
own psychological instability, through projecting this instability
upon not only other persons, but upon her nonhuman environment
as well. That is, she indicated that she not only experienced the
other person in her presence (including myself, in the therapeutic
session) as being replaced, repeatedly, by different persons; she also
experienced the hospital buildings, the contours of the landscape,
and the locations of the trees as changing more or less constantly.
She could only conclude that all of her surroundings were a
giant movie set which was changed continuously. This included
even the neighboring village, and the adjacent city of Washington; when she went into the village or the city) she was sure, each
time, that this was a different community from any that she had
ever visited before. She was certain that there were thousands of
Chestnut Lodges, thousands of Rockvilles, thousands of Wash..
ingtons. Changes in these physical surroundings, as well as
changes in the appearance of other persons, would occur right
before her eyes. She had had a similar perception of her environment, including the nonhuman environment, for years before my
316
first interview with her. She once confided to me that even before the age of eight, "I used to feel as though I were walking on
quicksand,"
It is of incidental interest that this woman evidently found it
more tolerable to experience even her own body as changing
continuously, than to feel that her personality was in any state of
flux. She frequently experienced her body as varying markedly
in size, as falling to pieces, as changing in skin color from white
to black or yellow; but she clung desperately to the conviction
that her personality traits were as durably fixed as steel.
The psychotherapy provided abundant evidence that the
"they" who, she was convinced, possessed the vast powers to replace one Waslrington with another, to replace one hospital
landscape with another, to replace the other person in her pres ..
ence with another similar but unidentical person, to alter mark..
edIy her own physical self-and, I should add, to shift her
about all over the world, so that she found herself now in India,
now in Alaska, and so forth-was in actuality her own superego.
Her superego possessed, in fact, such power over her as to warp
her perception of outer reality to this extent, in order to enforce
its dictates.
On pages 150-151 I gave brief descriptions of this same phenomenon (projection, upon the nonhuman environment, of
inner psychological change) from my work with two other patients. I should like to interject here a related point which my
clinical experience has confirmed many times over: patients
experience even beneficial psychotherapeutic change as threatening; they try, therefore, to avoid the recognition of it; and a
frequent unconscious defense against its recognition consists in
projection of the change upon their environment. In keeping with
this unconscious striving to project the change comes, then, an
urge to change therapists or to change hospitals. If the patient
is successful in his endeavor to get a new therapist or to obtain
transfer to a different hospital, this does indeed stave off his
recognition of the psychological change which has taken place in
himself, for this change is not nearly so clearly highlighted either
in his own view or in the view of the therapist (or, if he goes to
Psychosis and Neuf'osU
317
another hospital, the new doctors and nurses who deal with him)
as it would be if he continued in the same external environment.
3. A forty-year-old schizophrenic man, deeply confused for
many years before beginning psychotherapy with me, and for
a number of years after we had started our work together, evidently first became aware of his confusion as a function not of
himself but of his nonhuman environment He was saying relatively little to me during his hours at that time, and his first
known statement concerning confusion was quoted in a nurses'
report: "Every now and then outbursts of cursing, about what
a God damned mixed-up place this is:"
It was not until three months later that he made-this time, to
another nurse-his first known verbal acknowledgment of the
fact of his confusion: "Said to me, 'You know, I can't tell if I'm
coming or going-it's awful: "
4. A thirty-four-year-old schizophrenic woman, in the course
of her psychotherapy with me, spent a number of months in protesting about the "craziness" of the hospital-of not only other
persons about her, personnel as well as patients, but also of such
inanimate things as the furniture and other objects of interior
decoration-before becoming able to recognize her own "craziness':' (she used this term in each instance). Specifically, she used
to complain of jumbled discoordination, disharmony, in both her
human environment and her nonhuman environment, before
coming to describe her own experiencing of discoordinate
thoughts and feelings which shifted rapidly and often coexisted
simultaneously in her awareness. For several months she showed
an urgent need to keep her material belongings in order; it was
as if she strove to keep her own inner confusion under control by
preventing these inanimate possessions from becoming "mixed
up." She eventually came to express all the bewilderment about
her own inner experiences which she had previously voiced in
relation to her environment.
At another point, when she was in a period of preparing, with
the cooperation of the hospital personnel, to move to outpatient
status, she projected onto the nonhuman environment the precariousness, the fragility, which, at an unconscious level, she
318
sensed to be true of her own psychological adjustment. She commented, critically and protestingly, about some water stains on
my ceiling, saying that it would do no good simply to paint over
the ceiling if the water-pipe leak} the basic cause of the stains,
were not fixed. She had not yet reached the point, apparently,
where she could consciously recognize anxiety concerning the
fact that her own basic emotional difficulties had not yet been
resolved, and anxiety, therefore, at moving out of the hospital.
Later in this same hour she described a crack, extending from
floor to ceiling, on the living-room wall of the house into which
she was making preparations to move; she commented, in an
anxiously joking fashion, that she guessed she'd have to hold the
building up. Many times, throughout her stay in the hospital} she
had manifested great concern lest the building fall to pieces; she
had listened anxiously for any creaks which might presage such
a disaster-not yet able, evidently, to be aware of her anxiety lest
she herself suffer a more complete breakdown in personality
functioning. d
5. A thirty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman, required by her
family to move to outpatient living quarters before there bad
been sufficient resolution of her illness to make this a clinically
sound move, was helped by one of our social workers to locate
an apartment in the neighboring community. The social worker's
report, midway along in the house hunting, contained a striking
example of projection, or readiness for projection, upon the non This material, about this womants equating of herself with the building.
is reminiscent of some of the data presented by Erikson (34) in his article
in 1937 entitled, "Configurations in Play-Clinical Notes." He mentions that
(lin piay a house-fonn .. may represent tbe body as a whole," and that
the particular kind of house constructed by a child in play therapy Uaften
reveals the child's specific conception of and feeling for his own body and
certain other bodies.'}
He describes the extraordinary house constructed, in a play-therapy kind
of experiment, by a schizophrenic young man who complained of having no
feeling in the front of his body. This house had only a screen rather than a
solid front; the solid part of the house was confined to a projection at the
back, corresponding with the builder's experiencing his own feelings as being
localized to his spine and rectum. Further, in tbe outline of the house-form
could be recognized the posture-e-Le., with protruding buttocks-of the
young man.
319
human environment. Specifically, here, the patient showed a

tendency toward projection of her own scorn onto the nonhuman
environment:
During the latter part of November and early in December, Mrs.
Haynes and I have gone looking for apartments four different
times. " . . With one exception she handled herself well on these
visits with apartment-house managers. . . . One day when she
seemed quite disturbed was when a manager named Mr. Smith
took us through an apartment building. . . . I'm not sure what
happened to upset her but it was possibly because Mr. Smith
talked more to me than to Mrs. Haynes, and I wasn't able to
redirect his attention. Also, the building was minimally attractive
on the outside but was very nice looking on the inside.
We hadn't much more than gotten in the front door when
Mrs. Haynes decided that she wasn't going to look around. She
refused to go into the back part of the building to see the vacant
apartments there, or up to any of the upper floors, and insisted
on examining the building's exterior at great length, saying that
it was a beautiful building with one breath and in the next
breath running it down, so that it was really quite a disagreeable
situation.
When we got back into my office, I asked what in the world
had happened and she asked me if I had heard Mr. Smith say,
"Imbecilic." When I denied this) she wondered if the walls of the
building had said it or had I said it. However, after we talked a
little while, she decided that nobody had said it.
This woman did finally become settled in an apartment and,

as her psychotherapy progressed, became able to tell her therapist
of the hallucinations she had experienced while in the depth of
her psychosis, in the hospital. These hallucinations had included
her finding that the floor itself talked to her.
It appears that in the particular situation detailed above, about
the apartment hunting, the patient sensed that she was doing
badly in a setting where it was important that she demonstrate
capability, that her already great self-criticism became heightened as a result, and that she projected onto the environment her
own scornful attitude toward herself. It is further probable that,
320
because this was a situation where she herself was, as it were, on

trial, any scorn which arose in her toward the manager, toward
the social worker, and toward the building itself, had to be repressed, and was therefore also projected onto the environment.
My over-all acquaintance with her psychodynamics, gained
over a period of several years of serving as a consultant to the
therapist in this case) supports such formulations.
6. A fellow therapist, in a staff presentation of his several years
of work with a twenty-four-year-old woman who had been severely ill with schizophrenia since childhood, included in his description of the course of the psychotherapy some commentswhich
provide another example of projection upon the nonhuman
environment:
About the spring of 1949 she began presenting another kind of
problem.. That was the problem with the logs, . . . She seemed to
be getting closer, ever more into awareness of this feeling of being
dependent on people and being hurt by people, her wanting to
be an independent person; and in this setting came the problem
of the logs. What would happen is that she would be walking in
the woods-as she often did-and she would see a log, and if
she couldn't move it she would be stuck. She would have to get
a pole and work at the log, whether it weighed a pound or a
hundred tons, until she could in some degree be satisfied that
she had budged it. This meant to her that she was superior} and
that she would not be degraded by this log.
Well, after working on this for about four months-s-and this
was almost the only theme during that time-there finally came
to her, one day, the thought (after it had been suggested to her
about three months previously) that maybe the logs were in
some way a misplaced feeling, the feeling of any kind about
other people--a warm feeling, maybe-and somehow that she
was terribly frightened by these feelings and so had to destroy
them, that perhaps in some way her superiority, her strength, was
demonstrated in the way she controlled the logs.
From the therapist'S description, given above, it appears that

what the patient was projecting onto the logs was, specifically,
the paralyzing inertia which her emotional conflicts tended to
Psychosis and Neurons
321
impose upon her. That is, it appears that she tended to become
psychologically immobilized by her conflicts between desires
for dependence and desires fOT independence, her wann feelings
toward people mingled with conflicting desires to avoid being
hurt by people, and, no doubt, various other emotional conflicts.
By demonstrating to herself, then, that she could move the logs,
she was unconsciously reassuring herself, apparently, that she
could achieve some measure of success in her struggle against
the paralyzing emotional conflicts within her.
7. A twenty-five-year-old schizophrenic woman began, about
nine months after her admission to Chestnut Lodge, to behave
during her psychotherapeutic hours in a fashion which showed
unmistakably that she was involved in hallucinations that her
father was raping her. She verbalized her experience of this
frankly and in detail, and showed a most intense anguish and
anxiety about this-while conveying subtle hints, of course, that
the very distressing experience had voluptuousness in it, too.
Then, after two weeks of this, although she continued to express distress, as she had before, about tingling sensations all over
her body, she no longer described it that her father was ravishing
her. Instead, now, she expressed the conviction that the tingling
was due to the fact that something was being done to her by
metal in her environment. She went on to explain that this phenomenon had begun at the time of her becoming married, five
years ago. She and her husband, upon being married, had in
stalled a mirror in their dark dining room, she said, and she had
found that upon gazing into the mirror she became a part of it.
She said that her image had become trapped by the metal in the
back of the mirror.
She went on, in subsequent therapeutic hours, to speak repeatedly of mirrors as being dangerous things; one becomes entranced
with one's image in the mirror, she said, and she termed this
process self-mesmerization. As she developed this theme in the
therapeutic sessions, she came to the conclusion that the beginning of her downfall (ostensibly referring to her nervous breakdown) had been her getting trapped in the metal of the mirror.
She then telephoned, from the hospital, to her husband in her
322
home city in New England, telling him to get rid of that mirror,
which he agreed to do.
In her hours with the therapist immediately following the telephone call, she described a feeling of her thoughts being suspended, a feeling that they were suspended all the way from the
hospital to her home city, and described a tearing feeling in her
head, which she related to the fact that the mirror was being
removed from her home in that city; she could feel their moving
the mirror, she said. In one of these hours she put it that, "When
you look into a mirror you enter a trancelike state," to which her
therapist made some remark about Alice in Wonderland. The
patient agreed, saying, "You enter another world.."
She made clear to her therapist that not only was she feeling
that her image was in the metal, but also she was feeling that
there was something in her which attracted metal. That is, she
felt that metal attracted her image, and that something within
herself attracted metal.. In keeping with this impression, she repeatedly pleaded) at this time, to be moved into a different room
in the hospital, saying that the metal furniture in her roomher bed, her dressers, her window screen, all of which were,
indeed, made of metal-was causing her to feel extremely uncomfortable. This discomfort was comprised of generalized tingling sensations; these she described in much the same terms as
those she had used in describing the physical sensations she
experienced while being ravished by the father-hallucination.
With this she expressed the conviction that all these feelings
came from outside her self-that they were all due to an outside
"influence"; she never spoke of the sensations as arising from
emotions within herself. She -repeatedly expressed the conviction
that these sensations were due to the influence of metal-metal
outside herself or, as she sometimes said, metal within her; but
she could not yet realize, evidently, that the sensations had to do
with emotions within her.
She had long been pleading to her therapist to be allowed to
go home, and she continued to make this plea) protesting that for
her to stay on here and become "adjusted to Chestnut Lodge"
323
would have no relevance, no usefulness, to her later "adjusting

to home,"
In pondering over such clinical material as this, one realizes
that when such a patient-a patient, that is, who feels so thoroughly at one with her environment, including the nonhuman
environment-speaks of the difficulties of becoming adjusted to
first one place (the hospital) and then another (her horne), she
is using the term "adjusted" to mean something deeper than we
usually mean when we use that term, To her, evidently, an environment-including not only human beings but also inanimate
objects-became an integral part of herself, growingly, no doubt,
as time went on. Hence, apparently, some of her anxiety about
staying longer in the hospital: she was faced with the prospect
that the hospital would become literally more and more a part
of her; so that then, when she came to leave it (all along here
assuming no further psychological maturation were to take
place), she would be literally leaving behind a large part of
herself. And, further} in returning to her home she would then
have not simply to get adjusted to a new environment in our
sense of the term, but would have to form a new self, as different
from her seIf-in-Chestnut...Lodge as the environment of her home
was different from her environment here in the hospital.
This woman showed, incidentally, an inability to distinguish
between herself and other persons, as well as this inability to distinguish between herself and her nonhuman environment. The
former inability is always seen, in my experience, in patients who
show this latter, much less well-recognized inability. This woman
showed, for example, a conviction that her eldest son was within
one of her own feet; she could feel, she said, the child's foot
within her own foot, during a transient period when her feet and
ankles were edematous.
She had been on a disturbed ward of the hospital throughout
these events described above; her anxiety was severe throughout
this time, and her therapist was left in no doubt as to the validity
of the experiences which she was manifesting. It was his own
impression that she had been having these experiences for a
324
relatively long time-these experiences of being raped by the

hallucinatory father, and influenced by metal-and that she was
able to verbalize these experiences only during these relatively
brief periods in the therapy.
It would seem that it is specifically sexual feelings, laden with
aggression and anxiety) which are being projected in the form of,
first, the hallucinatory father-rapist, and then in the form of the
magnetically influencing metal. The fact that this symptom
began upon the patient's becoming married) faced now with the
sexual conflicts which marriage presented) provides a bit of
further evidence for this formulation, The patient is still in therapy and the data from the therapy which I have presented are
very recent; there is not yet enough evidence at hand to demonstrate conclusively what had set into operation this defensive
process of her becoming subjectively at one with the nonhuman
environment.
Transference Distortions, and

Miscellaneous 0 ther Distortions,
in the Individual's Conception
oj His Environment
CHAPTER
12
The preceding two chapters have been devoted to the general

subject of disturbances in the psychotic or neurotic individual's
conception of his environment. In them I have dealt with two
types of such disturbances or distortions: his reacting to other persons as being nonhuman, and his reacting to elements of the nonhuman environment as being human.
In this present chapter I shall conclude the discussion of this
general subject with brief descriptions of two remaining types of
disturbance in the psychiatrically ill individual's conception of his
environment: (1) transference distortions in his relatednessto the
nonhuman environment) and (2) miscellaneoiu distortions, difficult to define briefly, in his relatedness to it.
326
Transjerence Distortions
For many years it has been recognized that a human being's
relatedness to an element in the nonhuman environment can be
distorted by his unconsciously carrying over past feelings and
attitudes from some person to, now, the nonhuman creature, or
thing, in his presence. Incidentally, the older writers seemed to
assume that the transference is referable only to the father or
mother.
For example, Freud in 1917 wrote,
. . . A child can see no difference between his own nature and
that of animals; he is not astonished at animals thinking and
talking in fairy-tales; he will transfer to a dog or II horse an emotion of [ear which refers to his human father [49; my italics].
And Brill in 1943 referred to the dog as "the highest type of a

transference animal" (17) By this, Brill meant that the dog is,
more frequently than any other animal, the target for man's transt
ference feelings.
Heiman sums up the long-established psychoanalytic conception of animal phobias, and of perversions with animals, in the
following words:
In the phobia, as well as in the perversion with animals, the
animal is identified with either the mother or the father figure,
or with aspects or attributes of these figures [73].
And Fenichel in 1945 pointed out that
Nature may " . represent another person, and feelings connected with it may have originated in feelings toward that person.
A mountain, for example, may represent the father's penis, the
endless ocean or desert may represent the mother's womb [40f].
This long-recognized variety of transference phenomena was

strikingly manifested by a paranoid schizophrenic woman, thirtyone years of age, whom I saw in intensive psychotherapy for
several years. Here, as so often happens, we find that a phenom-
Pj'YCh05is and Neurosis
327
enon which is experienced only unconsciously by the neurotic

person is experienced consciously and quite literally by the schizophrenic person: this woman expressed the conviction that certain animals literally were certain persons she had known.
I first became aware of this particular delusion of hers in a
session immediately following one during which we had discussed
horseback riding, an activity in which she had been keenly interested for many years. When I came into her room for this subsequent session she was evidently in a state of more than usually
severe anxiety; she was looking very tense and threatened, and
was complaining of numerous physical symptoms, as she usually
did at times of increased anxiety. Very early in the session she
loudly reprimanded me for not being "honest" with her in the
last hour, when she had been talking about horseback riding.
"They've known how to tum people into horses and animals for
centuries," she asserted, implying that I knew this and had failed
to tell her so during the previous session.
She went on to express remorse about having done horseback
riding, and indicated that she had vowed never to ride horseback
again. She explained that she now realized that when she had been
doing what she had thought, during her upbringing, to be horseback riding, the horse may actually have "been her grandfather:
"just like that beagle running around the grounds may be Melvin
Tompkins," she added by way of illustration. The beagle was one
which was frequenting the hospital grounds currently; Melvin
Tompkins was a fellow patient who had left the hospital some
months before and whom-from various indications she gave,
which I shall not go into here---she evidently unconsciously
missed.
She had said these things in a tone which carried genuine
conviction, and her underlying anxiety was unmistakably intense.
In other words, I felt sure that she was not fooling, and I likewise
felt sure that she was not fooling when, several months laterafter many verbalizations from her of this delusion in the interim
~the nurses' reports on two successive days contained the following items:
328
Back in before dark. Watched TV.. Was very amusing with her
wit. Would make funny remarks about everything on TV. For
example, this man was talking about his brother and was pointing toward a tree.. Mrs. Crowley [this patient] said laughingly,
"Does he think that's his brother?"
Asked if the bug on the porch was her brother--was convinced
that it was.
Many times during my long experience with her I saw her

manifesting various psychotic defenses against feelings of missing
her brother, who had been very important to her during her upbringing. And her confusion, which she usually tried to conceal
from others by expressing her confused thoughts in witty terms,
was so profound that I personally have no doubt whatever that
she was susceptible, many times, to thinking that a tree or a bug
was, indeed, her unconsciously yearned-for brother..
So much for this phenomenon of transference of feelings from
other persons to elements of the nonhuman environment. Now I
come to a phenomenon which, although of probably at least
equal importance, has not been reported previously in the literature, to the best of my knowledge: namely, the transference of
feelings from an earlier nonhuman environment to a later nonhuman environment. My clinical experience, as well as my personal experience, suggests that to the extent to which an individual is unable to respond to other human beings in his adult life
on their own terms, free from transference distortions in his re..
Iatedness to these other persons, he is to that extent unable also to
respond to his current nonhuman environment in its own right.
In this latter respect also, his past shrouds him from experiencing
in valid terms the world in which he finds himself at present.
I expect that some readers will object to this hypothesis with
something like the following argument: "In one's childhood, such
nonhuman environmental features as were deeply meaningful to
one possessed this significance only by reason of a transference of
one's feelings to them from significant persons (mother, father,
and so on) in one's life. It is inaccurate, therefore, to speak of
transference of feelings from an early-life nonhuman environment
329
to a later-life nonhuman environment" It is basically a matter,

here too, of transference from early-life persons to the present
nonhwnan environment."
In answer} I can only reply that to me a beautiful work of art,
for example-whose beauty I could not appreciate, to be sure) if
my appreciation of the beauty of my mother, my father, my sister,
and other persons in my childhood, had undergone a lasting repression early in my life-possesses beauty in its own right, and
thereby possesses psychological significance in its own right. And
by this same token do the hills and forests, the lakes and rivers,
the village streets and the familiar buildings and the myriad other
nonhuman inhabitants of my childhood possess psychological significance for me, a significance inextricably interwoven with my
childhood interpersonal relationships, but a significance nonetheless real in itself. It would be absurd to deny that OUf childhood
appreciation of the nonhuman things about us is rooted, in the
final analysis, in interpersonal relationships including our relationship with our mother from whose body we emerged at birth.
But on the other hand it would be equally absurd to consider that
a lofty, luxuriantly foliaged tree is comprised only of roots.. It is
as wrong, I think, to deny that the nonhuman environment possesses psychological significance for us in its own right as it is to
deny that the tree} in the analogy) possesses foliage, branches, and
a trunk,
I am engaging in this relatively lengthy digression because this
matter lies at the very heart of what this whole book is about.
This book is an endeavor, that is, to make the point that the nonhuman environment possesses great psychological significance in
its own right. One sees relatively little clear-cut evidence for this
point anywhere in this whole section dealing with psychosis and
neurosis, for this reason: to the extent that one is psychiatrically
ill, one cannot relate to the nonhuman environment in its own
right. So we find, in all this section, little if any clinical data which
portray what I think of as genuine reality relatedness to the nonhuman environment.
It seems to me that the highest order of maturity is essential to
the achievement of a reality relatedness with that which is most
330
unlike oneself. That is, a developing child finds it easier to fonn

a relatively close relationship with another child of his or her own
sex than with a child of the opposite sex; very many persons who
are chronologically adult have not in fact matured sufficiently to
form a reality-based, close relationship with a person of the opposite sex. It is as though the differences-from-oneself comprised, or
connoted, by the other's membership in a sex different from one's
own, cannot be fully acknowledged without a loss of the sense of
basic human kinship. And, similarly, for an adult to develop a
close reality relatedness with a person whose age, or cultural background) or skin color is markedly different from his own-to develop a relatedness in which there is a full experiencing of both
difference as well as kinship--requires a higher degree of matur..
ity than the development of a comparably close relatedness with a
person who in this regard is a member of one's own group. Lastly,
and most pertinent here, it calls for a still higher degree of maturity, I believe, to achieve a reality relatedness with something
which differs even more vastly from oneself-something which is
not human; one tends instead, as do the persons, patients and
otherwise, from whom the clinical data of this section come, to
deny its psychological significance altogether, or to personify it, or
what not-anything to avoid the recognition of its possessing ex..
treme difference from, and yet in various respects basic kinship
with, oneself.
Now I shall mention some of the clinical and personal experiences which seem to me to be examples of this particular phenomenon at present under discussion: the transference of feelings from
early-life nonhuman environment to adult-life nonhuman environment.
A twenty-two-year-old woman had been working for several
years as a nurses' aide in a children's hospital when she developed
a schizophrenic illness, and now, in a state of very severe personality disorganization, she was in therapy with me. After many
months of difficult work we had reached a point where we were
now able to have-although still infrequently-meaningful verbal
exchanges for as long as a few moments at a time. During one
session, while sitting on her bed and leafing through a Life mag-
331
azine, she called my attention to one page of small pictures, each

of which had a considerable area of white space around it. She
asked, in a tone of anxiety which had a peculiar, weird quality in
it, "Do those look pasted on, to you?" I replied, "No. They do to
you, Susan?" She said, "Yes," in a worried, puzzled way. I commented, "I guess you've seen a lot of such pictures-pasted-on
pictures-s-In your work in the children's hospital," She agreed.
It is my distinct impression, supported by my long experience
in the over-all work with her, that here was another instance of
her doing something which I saw her doing on hundreds of other
occasions: misperceiving her present environment as being the
environment which had actually surrounded her at an earlier
time in her life, in an unconscious effort to avoid the feelings of
loss, of grief and separation anxiety, fostered by her being separated now, in actuality, from that earlier environment-separated by years of time and hundreds of miles of space.' For many
months, during our work together} she gave innumerable evidences of believing that she was in her home city, living in the
home which was familiar to her, or at the country club which she
had frequented, and so on.
I regard the above clinical incident as involving her transference of feelings about an early nonhuman environmental element
---pasted-on pictures which she had seen not only during her
work in the children's hospital but also, probably, during her own
days as a pupil in nursery school-onto the pictures in the Life
magazine. Most of this woman's behavior traits, during that
period of the therapy, were those of a child of certainly no more
than nursery-school age. I have mentioned this same patient
earlier (page 150): when I would go for walks on the hospital
grounds with her, she let me know, with manifestations of great
insecurity} that she perceived the buildings and landscape which
we passed as constantly changing. I am inclined to think that
here, too, transference phenomena were involved-that the land..
scape and the buildings kept assuming forms which she had
known in the past.
11n thi. context lee Arlow's interpretation of ilji va phenomena .. a
defense (48).
332
A twenty-one-year-old woman had been hospitalized for most

of the time since the age of fourteen) because of a hebephrenic illness, when the following incident occurred. Long years of difficult
work on her part and mine had already taken place and she was
just becoming able to start facing the grief and the nostalgia
which had been buried within her for many years. One of the
relevant circumstances, here, is that she had not visited her home
city (Boston}, for which-as was now becoming increasingly evident---she possessed much positive feeling, for seven years.
At this time she was still living in a locked building, where she
had been living for a number of years; but she had recently begun
to show some interest in moving to an unlocked building, called
Little Lodge.
Early in the particular session which I wish to describe, she
spontaneously brought up the question of moving to the unlocked
building, by saying, "I'd prefer to live at Little Lodge, except for
eating," and went on to explain that she would have to walk over
from Little Lodge (which has no dining room of its own) to the
dining room (in the basement of the main building, on an upper
floor of which she was presently living) three times a day. That,
plus "coming to my hours" (in my office in the main building),
would be "too much. I'd use up all my food energy-my food
wouldn't do me any good, and I'd lose a lot of weight." She also
phrased it that all this walking would "tire me out too much."
"Of course." she ruminated aloud, "I could have my hours at
Little Lodge." I said nothing as yet, but privately felt thoroughly
accomodating about going to Little Lodge for the hours, as I had
often done with other patients. A bit later she said, "If I had a
car and a chauffeur I could have him drive me over [to the main
building for her hours]. That would be all right."
When she had made the first of the above comments, my initial
reaction was to consider it amazing, preposterous, that she should
regard SO short a walk (about 175 feet from Little Lodge to my
office) as too much for her. But I held my tongue, thinking that
for he" perhaps it was indeed a staggering job to do that amount
of walking. 1 thought that it might be a matter of her feeling,
while outside on the hospital grounds, so strongly tempted to ron
333
away that it cost her a tremendous expenditure of energy to resist

that temptation. One or two years previously she had revealed
that she was feeling strong urges to run away..
But what she went on to say, as the hour progressed, was quite
unexpected and very memorable. She began voicing memories
of her walking in Boston, walking in various locales-the Common, Beacon Hill, and so on. I had heard very little from her
before, in all our long work together, of memories of her life there.
As she talked now, one sensed that these memories were viviclIy
detailed.
The most poignant moment of all came near the end of the
hour when, after having talked for some time in the above vein,
she laughed in an embarrassed way and said, "Oh I-I know
what was so funny = I thought Boston was right around here!
Isn't that funny?" The "right around here" had the connotation
of "right outside the window" (i..e., on the hospital grounds). The
emotional tone of her words, unconcealed by her embarrassed
laughter, was one of tremendous nostalgia. I replied, deeply
moved, "I guess you must miss Boston an awful lot, Doris," She
expressed, then, a wholehearted verbal agreement which was, as
yet, unusual for her: "Yeah," she agreed ruefully, "I guess I
must miss Boston an awfullot.. u
She had made clear, I felt} why a walk of negligible length
(by ordinary standards) on the hospital grounds tired her 80
greatly: such. a walk tended to bring home to her these vivid
memories, laden with nostalgia and grief, about Boston-memories which it required great energy for her to maintain under
repression.
Before turning to a few comments about transference distortions of the nonhuman environment as seen in neurotic persons,
let me say one more 1VOrd about these distortions as manifested by
psychotic patients; this will consist simply in a rephrasing of the
point which 1 have been illustrating with the foregoing clinical
examples. Misidentification of other persons, detennined often at
least in part by the phenomenon of transference, has long been
known to be a common symptom in psychosis. My experience
indicates that misidentification of the nonhuman enuironmeiu,
334
on the same psychodynamic basis, is an equally common symptom.

Among neurotic patients, one evidence of the existence of the
phenomenon of transference of feelings about an early nonhuman
environment to a later one is the not-infrequent reporting of
dreams in which, for example, a house changes from one's childhood home to the home one lives in now in adult life; one finds
similar shifts as regards landscapes, and so on.
As examples of neurotic transference phenomena of this va . .
riety, I shall present briefly three personal experiences. The first
of these occurred relatively late in my psychoanalysis, and the
remaining two occurred after the analysis was over. Each of these
experiences was associatively related, in my thoughts and feelings,
to my very deep attachment to the Catskill village where I grew
up and to the surrounding mountains and lakes where I spent
countless hours in hiking and swimming. It was partially through
these three experiences which I shall describe that I realized, in
fact, how very deep and absorbing was this attachment. Over the
preceding years I had already worked through a great deal of
grief and other separation feelings in reference to the persons of
my childhood-my parents, my sister, and so on.
The first of these experiences took place while I was standing
for a moment, alone, on a street comer in Washington-one
where I had been many dozens of times before, since it was near
a building where I had worked for years. I was feeling unhurried,
un anxious, at peace. Suddenly, while I was looking up the street,
I felt that I was really seeing it for the first time and, more than
that, that I was for the first time experiencing the world about
me (not simply the street itself) in immediate terms, I felt astonished, then, with the realization of how very deeply, and quite
unwiltingl,,~ I had been immersed in my past, all along. I felt that
heretofore, when I had been in this particular place, for example,
I had not really been seeing these streets, but had been moving
about as if the streets of my beloved home village were about me.
Now, seeing these streets with new eyes, I found my surroundings
to be wonderfully interesting and beautiful-beautiful not in any
335
especially artistic way, but beautiful simply because of their being

so vividly, immediately real to me for the fimt time.
The aspect of this experience which impressed itself particularly
deeply upon me was the revelation of the extent to which my
everyday experience, until then, had been drained, quite without
my knowledge, of much of its potential immediacy and beauty
and reality, through the working of this transference phenomenon, I had come to see, now, how much I had unconsciously
been missing, all along, in my moment-to-moment experience..
The experience involved precisely the same feeling-the feeling
of scales' having fallen from one's eyes-which I have had upon
the sudden resolution of a transference feeling toward another
person.
A second experience of this sort occurred perhaps two years
later, quite a number of months following the completion of my
fonnal analysis. While driving alone, I was turning from the main
highway into the housing development where I had been living,
with my wife and children, for some years now. Suddenly the
thought came to me, "What am I doing keTeJ~I belong back in
Hancock." The housing development looked drab to me; I compared it, in my mind, to the natural beauty of the thinly populated area about my home village. This realization, unlike the one
described above, was not an exhilarating one, not a pleasant one.
But I immediately felt it to be a valuable discovery: it brought to
me the sobering realization of how relatively little libido I was
really investing into tlds housing development and into, by the
same token, my whole adult life. I felt that I had been treating
my adult life as if it were an unwanted child, rather than giving
it the wholehearted love and interest which it wanted and needed.
This momentary discovery, like the above-described first one, had
lasting effects in terms of my coming to feel, in my day-to-day
life, an increased sense of living satisfyingly in the present.
Several months later, still another such discovery occurred,
which showed me that there was a still deeper level of relinquishment of the past that I had yet accomplished, and, by the same
token, a deeper experience of living in the present than I had
336
been able to enjoy so far. I was working, with fellow members of

our Parent-Teachers' Association, on the school grounds near my
home, planting trees. The school is on a knoll and commands a
view of the surrounding gently rolling Maryland countryside. Until now I had scarcely given these hills a second glance; if there
were any aspect in which this geographical area were contemptibly inferior to that about my childhood home, I had felt, it was
in regard to the relative size and beauty of their respective hills.
One might say that the concept "hills" had been carrying, to me)
only the connotation of a memoTy of the Catskills rather than any
connotation of a perception in the present, of the Maryland hills.
So, while working now on the school grounds, I neither glanced
at the surrounding countryside, nor gave it a thought. Then, to
my surprise, I heard a man saying, with the accent of one from
the deep South, "This sure is pretty country." I looked up and
saw a fellow worker standing and gazing appreciatively at the
gently rolling hills which led away to the horizon. I experienced
a momentarily scornful reaction, "That poor cluck hasn't ever
seen really beautiful country"; then I began looking at this view
myself with, for the first time, real interest and growing appreciation.
Since then I have had other experiences of a similar sortexperiences of transference resolution and heightened appreciation of the nonhuman environment in which I have been living
for several years. For instance, with each succeeding spring I find
it more difficult to ignore the quite simple and quite unmistakable fact that spring in Maryland is much more full-blooming,
opulent, and varied in its beauty than is spring in the Catskills.
But it is unnecessary to detail such experiences any further.
During the several months which have followed my writing the
above personal reminiscences in a preliminary draft of this book,
the conviction has grown upon me that what I had described, in
each of these instances, was not really a transference process, but
only a process of my preoccupation with beloved scenes and relationships in my past. It finally dawned on me, after a number of
these months had transpired, that transference had indeed been
337
at work in each of these personal experiences, but that the above

account had failed to point out where the transference actually
lay.
I realized, now, in the face of considerable inner resistance, that
this transference was of a negative sort, a combination of negative
feeling-attitudes-clisinterest, disappointment, boredom, a sense
of emptiness and drabness) and so on-which had been present
in me all along with respect to those scenes of my childhood,
scenes which I had preferred, as it were, to remember with affects
solely of fondness, nostalgia, and grief. I now realized, with as I
say appreciable reluctance, that my long-accustomed reaction to
the streets of Washington as being relatively unalive and unbeautiful would, in fact, have been much more appropriate as a mem..
ory of the main street of my home village, during a certain, very
prolonged, period of my growing up-namely, during the financial depression, when this street was, much of the time, almost as
drab, deserted, and lifeless as that of a deserted village, and when
all..e mbracing anxiety shrouded my father's store and our homean anxiety which I would like to delete from my memories of
boyhood. And even the hills-an inner voice says, "No, no) not
the hills!"-must at times have seemed flat and tame, in contrast to such mountains as the Rockies and the Alps, mountains
which one saw in moving pictures; they must have seemed
especially so to one bursting with the energy of youth, and with
only an economically depressed small town in which to express
that energy.
So here, then) lies the transference which my original account
had failed to point out. And this revised view coincides with what
we know, after all, of transference: transference consists, in essence, in the carrying over of preconscious or unconscious emotions, referable to persons and things in our past, into a conscious
experiencing of persons and things in the present. It is not those
feeling-components which in childhood were readily accessible to
awareness which go into the formation of transference experiences in adult life.
338
Miscellaneous Distortions
There are various additional kinds of distortion in individuals'
perceiving the nonhuman environment, kinds which are not adequately covered in the categorical descriptions of various specific
types of distortions presented so far in this chapter and in the
preceding two chapters, I do not know how to define these additional types of distortion; but they can be described, in toto, as
resulting from the individual's relating to the nonhuman environment not as being what it really is, but rather as if it were a limitlessly plastic modeling clay which he unconsciously molds and
remolds to serve the momentary needs of his intrapersonal and
interpersonal existence. This description covers, as one can see,
each of the so-far-described types of distorted relatedness to the
nonhuman environment; but it covers, I think, more than those
alone. I hope that the two clinical examples which I shall give,
from my work with schizophrenic patients (and I do not mean
to imply that these additional distortions are manifested only by
psychotic patients), will suffice to bring out what I have in mind
here. These examples will have to serve, that is, in lieu of a definition.
The first patient, a thirty-seven-year-old woman with a deeply
disorganizing schizophrenic illness, manifested, for many months
after my beginning therapy with her, a grossly disturbed perception (as nearly as one could tell; one can never know with certainty what such a deeply schizophrenic person is perceiving) of
her nonhuman environment.
One of the most prominent respects in which she apparently
misperceived her environment was her peopling it-the walls,
floor, and ceiling of her room, her closets,the quiet landscape outside, and so on-with hallucinatory figures. During one session
in the first few weeks of the therapy, for example, she looked apprehensively at the closed closet door of the room in which we
were sitting and asked, "Dr. Searles, what do you see there?" I
replied, "A closet door, with a knob and with panels," She said,
anxiously, "I used to see a lot of figures coming through that
door. They would come through the door and shock me." From
339
the many experiences I had with finding her describing anxietyladen present experiences as if they had taken place in the past,
I have little doubt that at the moment when we were discussing
this, she was perceiving this door as pouring forth many halluci-
natory figures.
Similarly, on many subsequent occasions she was talking to
hallucinatory figures whom she located, variously, as being "in
the floor," "in the ceiling," "on the 000/) and so on. On one
occasion she said, "My father is down there," looking at the floor
in such a way as to give me the peculiar conviction that she meant
"down there in the floor" rather than in, more mundanely) a
lower floor of the building. On another occasion she nodded
toward the radiator and said in a tone of feeling reassured, protected, "That is Daddy's place," again saying this in such a fashion as to make me feel sure that she meant not on the radiator,
but in the radiator itself. On one occasion, she revealed her conviction that there was some "she" high up in the wall, "reporting." During one period of my work with her, for several weeks
she darted about, from one wall projection to another, seeking
shelter from bullets which, she indicated, she was sure were
being fired at her-fired from, among other places, the quiet
landscape outside.
As the months passed and her anxiety slowly lessened somewhat, it appeared that she no longer perceived her environment
as being, unrelievedly, in such a chaotic disorder. Such perceptions became now, apparently, more and more sporadic andwhat I wish particularly to emphasize-increasingly relatable to
events which were taking place in the therapeutic relationship.
More and more clearly now, I could see that it was at times of
heightened tension in her relationship with me that she behaved
as though she perceived the walls or floor as moving unsteadily, or
perceived the room to be crowded wth hallucinatory figures, or
saw the actually quiet landscape outside the window as flowing
rapidly past, such that she felt herself to be on a train.
Now I had occasion to see, too, how almost incredibly greatly
was her perception of the nonhuman environment distorted, at
times, in the service of her communicating something to me. I
340
shall give only one brief example of this, from many such experiences with her. During one particular session Miss Edwards, as
I shall call her here, looked at me and addressed me as "Robert
Edwards." This was a name I had not heard before. Hundreds
of times before this, she had misidentified me as being a wide
variety of other persons, and I had grown increasingly anxious,
impatient, and disgusted with her so rarely perceiving me in my
own identity. I retorted this time with impatience and scorn,
"Well, since you call me Robert Edwards, who the hell is Robert
Edwards?-is he your father's brother?"
Thereupon she commanded, loudly, "Don't go any farther on
that track!" looking back over her shoulder (we had been ap..
proximately facing one another) in an uneasy, upset, threatened
fashion. What I wish to stress here is that she did this in such a
fashion as to leave no doubt in my mind that she was literally
hallucinating a train-a train, apparently) rushing at her from
behind-and her words had been barked out as if she were giving
a loud command to the train's engineer. I was astonished at what
she had conveyed to me, here, and would not have believed this
possible had I not seen) innumerable times) how extraordinarily
indirect were most of her communications to me, and how in..
tensely constrained she was, for a long time) about expressing any
direct criticism toward me.
There were many occasions when, during the hours with me,
she was unmistakably experiencing the landscape outside as being
a chaotic welter of colliding automobiles, clanging trains, and
crashing airplanes. It was a memorable time when, many months
later on, as we were sitting in chairs placed close together and
side by side) facing toward the windows on the other side of the
room, I started to say something and she stopped me with a quiet
but finn command) "Be quiet and let's watch the scenery,"
whereupon we lapsed back into the quiet, relaxed feeling of to...
gethemess which we had been enjoying. I felt here, for the first
time in all my work with her, that now at last we were both seeing
the same quiet scenery through the windows.
The second patient, a thirty-one-year-old woman with para
noid schizophrenia whom I have already described briefly in
341
another regard (pages 314-316), showed innumerable distortions

in her relatedness to her nonhuman environment. After eighteen
months of work with me, she confided to me that even as a child,
when she would become intolerably frustrated with people around
her because they would never listen to her ideas, ~'I used to go
off by myself and imagine a great deal. I'd imagine I was in the
Himalayas. When I'd get uncomfortable I'd get a book and read,
to relieve that feeling." I asked, "That is, you'd sometimes imagine so vividly that you weren't sure it wasn't real?" She nodded,
"Sometimes I'd imagine so much that I was in a jungle and wild
animals were eating me up, that I'd break out into a cold sweat."
Many of her distorted perceptions and distorted interpretations
of the nonhuman environment now, in adult life, had to do with
her reacting to this environment as expressive of communications
to her from more or less vaguely conceptualized other persons~ or
groups of people (communications from the Baptist church, from
her eldest brother) from various fellow patients, from myself, and
so on). Contrariwise, she was tremendously concerned, in her
necessary daily-life manipulations of the nonhuman environment,
lest she unwittingly communicate, in the process of dealing with
various mundane things, some unintended message to these per..
sons or groups of people, some message the meaning of which she
herself did not know, but a message which would be clear to
"them" and which would be acted upon by "them" with disastrous results to herself or to other persons. A few examples may
suffice to show something of the welter of her distortions in this
regard.
She gave many indications, during her hours, that as she moved
about through the nonhuman environment, those elements which
fit in with her complex delusional system were highlighted in her
perception of the world about her and were, of course, interpreted
as having a special significance. In one hour, for instance, she
informed me, "Whenever you see a red brick building, It's part of
British investment. Whenever you see a Schlag or a Yale lock,
it's part of the chain system." Contrariwise, those elements of the
nonhuman environment which did not fit into her delusional
system were, apparently, overlooked by her; upon innumerable
342
occasions, during our work together) she showed massive blind

spots in her perception of the world about her.
During one session she described to me, in unusual detail, a
shopping trip from which she had just returned. She had set out
to purchase a tennis racket and some face powder, and her description of the shopping trip brought home to me how almost
awesomely complicated a task this had been for her, by reason
of her reacting to these elements of the nonhuman environment,
for example, as being so saturated with obscure communicational
potentialities.
As she described it to me, the salesman in the sporting goods
store had said, significantly, "You say you want a racketi" When
I asked her, at this point, if his question had caused her to pretty
much assume that he was referring to a "racket" in the sense of
peoples' exploitation of other people, she agreed. She went on to
describe the salesman's commenting, again with special significance to her, while she was looking at the decorative strings at
the top and bottom of the heads of the rackets, "They don't make
colored strings any more-they are all black.." Again I wondered
to her, on the basis of my knowledge of her delusional system,
whether she had taken his use of the word "strings" to refer to
strings placed on people by other people; again, she agreed.
But the really appalling thing, to me, was that she had felt it
necessary to choose, among the many rackets which she inspected
in the store, one which would be least apt to convey some special
significance to the "runners of the radar," some significance
which she did not intend to convey and which was obscure to her.
Thus, she passed over rackets with signatures on the handles,
rackets with decorative items on them. She finally selected one
with a black sheath over the handle, and even after having made
this purchase she decided to take the sheath off) lest it convey
some unintended sign to the controlling powers. After some inquiry as to what she had in mind here, she revealed that she was
afraid that these powers might draw the unintended inference
that, for example) she wanted some one to be killed or that she
wanted to be killed herself. She went on to describe her having
343
purchased, later during the shopping trip, a horseshoe-shaped

box of face powder which she had wanted to have; she had felt
uneasy in making this purchase, and still felt uneasy about it, for
fear "they" would infer from her buying this article that she was
volunteering to be run as a horse at Havre de Grace-s-which,
she vigorously asserted to me now, she had no wish to do.
During another session shortly after she had returned from a
visit to Washington, she told me of having seen three mosques
and a cathedral. She described the arrangement of these in some
detail, saying with pointed emphasis that the cathedral had a
road running all the way around it, and so on. She looked significantly at me as she described all this, as if assuming that I saw
the same significance in it which she was finding there. She then
asked, in a tone full of puzzled protest, ~'Why do they go to all
that trouble to get an idea across, when they could do it so much
more easily in wOYds."'-in actuality a description of her own
way of communicating.
She evidently assumed that "they" had gone to all the trouble
of erecting these buildings, and arranging them in some special
fashion) simply in order to get across to her~r perhaps to people
in general; this was left unclear--some idea. What the idea was,
I do not know; I got the impression that it was quite obscure in
her own mind. The vague implication was that the idea had to
do with the Mohanrmedans' being dominant over the Christians.
As was usual with her, she left this largely unsaid-touched upon,
as it were, mainly by significant looks and by special emphasis
upon certain words. The material from this session formed only
one among many examples, in my over-all work with this woman,
of her perceiving the nonhuman environment at large as being
there solely in the form of a communication from "them."
I saw many instances in which this woman's geographic orien..
tation in her environment was grossly disturbed in the service of
her unconsciously keeping various feelings out of her awareness.
One such instance occurred in an hour which took place during a
phase of de-repression of much nostalgia and grief. The subject
of Philadelphia-her home city, which she had mentioned only
344
about three times in almost two years of therapy thus far-came

up, and she referred to it as though it were overseas. I asserted
that it was only about 140 miles away) and that there was no
ocean between it and us. But she said, with conviction, tel know
it is on the other side of the ocean." Significantly, as she.was talk..
ing about this, she had to wipe tears from her eyes; her weeping
had been a very recent development in the therapy. I then said,
gently, eel don't doubt that an ocean of tears, so to speak, stands
between you and your memories of Philadelphia." This she derided completely} as making no sense at all; with rare exceptions
she was still, in the therapy, utterly resistant to my efforts to help
her see these so-literal experiences of hers in metaphorical terms.
But three months before, when she had spoken of the ocean, in
another connection, as being a dangerous, threatening place, and
I had then inquired, "I wonder what you think of in connection
with the ocean?" she had stated immediately and vehemently,
"A vale of tears !"
I remarked earlier (page 316) upon this woman's experiences
of being shifted about all over the world. In one hour, only
two days following that in which she had spoken of Philadelphia's
being overseas, she described a recent experience of having been
"moved" (her usual term for this particular experiencej-e-described it now, for the first time, in such a way as to corroborate
quite clearly my long-growing impression that her experiences of
feeling moved geographically actually had to do with being
moved emotionally, at an unconscious level. She told me, protestingly, referring to a male aide who was working on the ward,
"Braddock moved me last night." She had seldom, if ever, before
described this type of experience in such personal terms. I immediately felt that this 'meant she had been moved emotionally,
and surmised that the unconscious affect had been one of sympathy. So I asked her whether this might be a way of saying that
she had felt emotionally moved by him. She immediately and
vigorously rejected this suggestion, and complained, significantly
to me, that I was always trying to make out that she was affected
"erotically." This latter comment was particularly revealing, for
345
it had not occurred to me that her initial statement, "Braddock

moved me last night," might be a way of conveying the fact that
she had felt sexually aroused, erotically moved, by him."
Now, in summary, when one looks back upon the various kinds
of distortions which have been described in this chapter and in
the preceding six chapters (i.e., beginning with Chapter VI),
one can see in how many different ways, and to what a tragically
great degree, neurosis and psychosis can impoverish a human
being's relatedness to his nonhuman environment. If I have belabored various points unduly much, I have done so with the
thought in mind that this area, as with the whole general subject
of this book, has been so largely neglected, to date, in psychiatric
and psychoanalytic literature. It needs to be generally recognized
that neurosis and psychosis exact a grievous toll not only with
regard to the afflicted person's interpersonal and intrapersonal
relationships, but also with regard to his relationship with his nonhuman environment. Just how important a part of psychologically healthy human living this environment can provide, when
the human being is not largely cut off from it by all these pathological processes of projection and introjection, transference and
so on, I attempted to illustrate in Part Two.
I shall conclude this chapter with another lengthy quotation
from Alberto Moravia's novel, Two Adolescents. Here the author
is describing the final triumphant emergence of Luca from his
illness-the same Luca who had had earlier feelings of being
'This material ties in with Tauakts (153) paper on the ,cinfluencing
machine' in schi20plueniaJ in which he gives examples of adult Ichizophrenic
patients' attributing to a delusionaUy fantasied influencing machine) outside
themselves. sexual impulses which are unacceptable to the ego. It is relevant.
also) to the yormg child's experience of aUenation from his Own body by
reason of unasaimilably in tense physical pain or erotic arousal; Elkisch and
Mahler (33). for example. found that one reason for their leven-year-old
patients identification with machines consisted in his having .dered recurrent and severe paint at the age of six monthsJ from an inguinal hernia, such
that he evidently became aliedated from this body from which emanated
pain that he was 10 helpless to controlJ and experienced his body .. being
equivalent to a machine in the outside world. See also Edith JacoblOn's
description of a patient with chronic pyelitis, who as a child would, in unci
pation of bladder inigations, scold and puniah her bladder by telling it to
"stand in the comer," and recall the bladder after it stopped hurtins (84b).
346
treated by his parents as an inanimate object, of being relegated

by them to a world of hostile inanimate objects. Luca has been
encouraged, now, to come out of his emotional isolation and to
tum toward life. He has been helped in this by a kindly, loving
nurse, and has just become aware of awakening sexual desire
toward her. The progressive resolution of his interpersonal difficulties enables him not only to experience himself as a human
being among human beings, but also to feel an additional, likewise wonderful, sense of significant and intimate relatedness to
the homely, familiar, nonhuman things about him-the furniture of his room, and so on. Then in the following deeply meaningful and beautiful passage, we see evidence that Luca most
fully experiences himself as a human being only after undergoing
the "phylogenetic regression" which I have discussed; he experiences his aliveness first with the sensation that he is a proliferating tree, which goes on, then, to change into a man.
. . . he had a curious dream . . . in which he thought he was a

tree. Shaped like a tree-black, leafless, rain-soaked, numb with
cold-he was standing on the top of a bare, frost-bound hill,
stretching out his arms which were branches and his open fingers
which were twigs. An immense landscape extended all round, with
hills and woods and rivers and fields, and the whole of this landscape was streaked with snow and darkened by winter mists. The
sky, heavy with black" unmoving clouds, was mirrored in the
flooded fields, and over all there was a profound silence, as of a
dead, timeless world. But far away the sun was rising on the horizon. At first it was only a cold, red globe; then, as it rose gradually into the sky, putting the clouds to flight, it became more and
more clear and radiant, and he could feel its heat even through
the ice-cold bark. Beneath the rays of the sun a vast movement took place over the whole landscape, as though the woods,
and every single tree in them, had shaken off their winter stillness,
as though the rivers were swollen with flood-water, the fields fermenting with life, the hills softened and filled with nourishment,
like a woman's breasts. AU of a sudden a harsh sound- exultant,
prolonged, amorous, like the call of a hunting horn- filled the
air, breaking that cold silence. And to him it seemed that, starting
from his roots deep-sunk in the earth, a wave of joyous hunger
Psychosis and N eurosls
347
spread upward through his trunk; and this, overflowing the casing
of bark, burst out through his branches in a thousand green and
shining buds. These buds, in their tum, swiftly opened, became
leaves) tendrils, boughs. And he felt himself growing) multiplying)
pullulating endlessly, in an irresistible, fabulous rush of abundance,
in every direction and from every part. All at once he was no
longer a tree, but a man, standing upright with his arms raised
toward the sun. And, with this sensation of rush and thrusting in
his limbs, he awoke [106b].
Detailed Data from the

Patient- Therapist Relationship
CHAPTER
13
It is the patient-therapist relationship which is, naturally, of greatest interest to me and, in the belief that this relationship may be
of especial interest to many of the readers of this book, I shall
present, in this chapter which concludes Part Three, a more detailed sample of the rich data which this relationship provides
with regard to the whole subject of the nonhuman environment
in man's psychological life. These data will concern but a few of
the various facets of the subject which have already been discussed in a less detailed way; as I say, my effort here is to give
but a sample of the wealth of clinical material which is to be
found in the patient-therapist relationship. The data will be presented under three headings: (a) the therapist's relating to the
patient as being nonhuman; (b) the patient's relating to the
therapist as being nonhuman; and (c) the therapist's anxiety in
349
this regard (that is, his feeling his own sense of humanness to be
threatened) in either of the two foregoing types of situation) .
The Therapist's Relating to the Patient As Being Nonhuman

The therapist may find himself doing this---reacting to the
patient as though the latter were, for example, a mindless robot
or a strange, frightening animal-for reasons of his own, so to
speak; relating to another person in such a fashion may be among
his own characteristic defenses against intense anxiety. But certainly a powerful factor which inclines any therapist toward functioning in this manner, unbeknownst to himself, is the patient's
transference. That is, such patients as those I have described are
so uncertain of their own humanness, so deeply convinced
that they are something other than human, that they persistently
behave so in the relationship with the therapist. It is, then, almost
inevitable that the therapist will find himself, at times, experiencing them accordingly..
I have examples of this from my own experience with only two
patients; it is probably difficult for any therapist to collect many
examples of his own behaving toward his patients in such a fash..
ion. Such views of one's own therapeutic behavior do not fit very
well with any pictures one may like to maintain about oneself as
an ideal therapist.
1. One of these two patients I was aware of treating, on a numher of occasions, as if she were an unruly animal, rather than a
person with a mind of her own" For example, on one occasion,
after she had darted from the room several times, I became furious at her, dragged her into the room and slammed the door and
told her, "For Christ's sake, stop running out l" On another occasion, when I was out walking on the hospital grounds with her,
and she kept rapidly walking off on various tangents) despite my
asking her to stay nearby, I finally became, again, thoroughly
angry and disgusted with her and told her flatly, "Look here,
Pauline-God damn it, if you're going to go on walks with me,
you've got to mind better!" very much as if I were talking to a
dog. About such incidents I must say that, although one tends to
feel a bit apologetic about them, I think they actually had much
350
therapeutic usefulness at the time. This patient showed, for years,

a tremendous need for guidance, a great inability to assume responsibility for her own life; this was shown by her chronically
hallucinating various persons in the floor, in the ceiling, and
about the room who were giving orders to her, and was shown
also by her behaving-not only toward myself but toward the
other personnel members-in such an uncoordinated, unruly,
helpless way as to ensure her being given a great deal of guidance.
2. With the other patient, also a schizophrenic woman, an incident occurred which suddenly brought home to me the great
degree to which I had come to fit into her father transference to
me. Her father had treated her, throughout her upbringing,
pretty much as being a mindless puppet) and this incident made
me realize that I had been doing likewise toward her for months:
We were returning from my office in an outlying building to the
main building where she was housed. We came to a small mud
puddle. I stepped around it; but she stopped at its edge, and
stood still, I said, impatiently and in a flat tone as if talking to

something without a human brain, "Walk around it, Florence."
She did so, dutifully; but when I had heard myself saying this-ewhen I heard the scorn, the utter lack of respect for her, in my
tone-I realized that I had come to feel toward her} and to treat
her, in a way which coincided precisely with the way her father
used to say to her (as she had once told me), "Come along,
Florence," as if he were talking to a dog.
This second patient, like the fonner one, showed many indications of feeling a need for some one or something else to
assume complete responsibility for her existence. For about two
years she evidenced a delusion that there was a "Watcher-Ma
chine" which incessantly supervised her behavior, and she made
quite clear to me that she felt this machine to be a lifesaving
protection to her, rather than a form of unwanted constraint. For
more than four years she maintained an intense fixation upon an
internist on the hospital staff, and openly regarded him as an
omniscient, omnipotent, protecting father. Nonetheless, I hold no
brief that my way of addressing her at the mud puddle was of
therapeutic value. It was in exactly the same manner as that in
Psycho~
and }{eufons
351
which she was very often addressed, throughout the day, by many
other patients and personnel members, including the particular
nurse who wast for a long time, in charge of the patient's ward: a
destructively scornful, dehumanizing manner. Five years later I
was very much interested to hear, in April, 1955, a talk at Chestnut Lodge by Dr. Erving Goffman, a sociologist at the National
Institute of Mental Health, in which he described some patients'
being treated, by the staffs of psychiatric hospital wards, as "non..
persons," His sociological data in this regard corroborated the
impressions I had gained from my own experience, particularly
with this second patient, and from my informal observations of
the manner in which certain other patients have been treated on
the closed wards of Chestnut Lodge, from time to time. This kind
of thing we attempt to keep to a minimum; but it is not an easy
task.
The Patient's Relating to the Therapist As Being Nonhuman

Here) for, I think, obvious reasons, it is easier for me to supply
clinical examples.
1. To make the central point of this first example, I must lead
up to it by presenting some pertinent background data. I worked
for some years with a deeply disorganized schizophrenic woman,
in her late thirties, who throughout her upbringing had been extraordinarily closely attached to her father. He was her idol
throughout her childhood, her adolescence, and her young womanhood until the psychotic illness overwhehned her- at the age
of twenty-nine. She and he went hiking together, played golf and
tennis together, went swimming and horseback riding together.
She repeatedly and openly compared her boy friends unfavorably
with her father, to his undisguised pride. He expressed to her, not
tong before the onset of her illness, the hope that she would never
marry.
For many months after my beginning psychotherapy with her,
her transference followed a pattern, predominantly referable to
her relationship with her father, of her simultaneously inviting
and beseeching me to be everything to her-to meet her every
need and to guide her every move-and, on the other hand, try..
352
ing desperately to defend herself against what she evidently felt

to be the life-endangering, incorporative nature of such a relationship. By her manifest helplessness to think clearly or to express
herself verbally in any but a highly fragmentary way, and by her
persistent efforts to injure herself, she placed great pressure upon
me to step in and complete sentences for her, and to guard her
against various self-injurious acts. But by various other aspects
of her behavior-peopling the room with, usually, a whole crowd
of hallucinatory figures; and verbalized comments indicating that
I was invading her privacy, that she resented my intruding presence-s-she showed her anxiety and antagonism toward any close
relationship with me.
Her reacting to me as being nonhuman occurred at a time
when I probably had moved in. too close to her, figuratively
speaking, as in the opinions of my colleagues I tended to do. She
said apprehensively, in clear reference to me, "There's a weird
doctor around here that doesn't make sense to me. He's metal~
he's [looking about uneasily at the walls of the room] everything."
I asked, "Wooden?" thinking of the wood on the walls. She
nodded agreement and added, "He's everywhere." I asked, "He's
all 800 guys?" in reference to her having indicated earlier in the
hour that she felt there were "800 guys" present. Again she nodded. When she still volunteered nothing further, I asked, "He
doesn't give you much room, eh?" Once again, she agreed con..
vincingly.
As this woman's ego developed and her ability to express her
feelings improved and I gave her increasing room to do so, she
was able to make a number of significant communications to me
in a series of hours nine months after the above incident. In one
hour- she warned me, "If we got together, we might kill one
another," In another session she made clear beyond doubt that
she was experiencing in relation to me the repressed feelings
of being constricted, hemmed in, which had been developed
throughout the yean of her ostensibly idolizing her father, who
had actually placed tremendous, enslaving, almost incessant dependency demands upon her. For a full half hour she was pacing
Psycho~
and lVeU10JU
353
frantically about the room, at random, stamping her foot, weeping intermittently, and rapidly hurling phrases at me in a tone of
intolerable frustration. All but a few of the things she said were
incoherent and fragmentary; it seemed that she could seldom
find words to express her outpouring of feeling. But she made
clear to me that what she was telling me was to get off her neck,
to get out of her hair, to give her room to breathe.. Out of the
bulk of unrecallably fragmentary phrases that tumbled forth,
there emerged the following complete statements:
All I see is General Motors and National Carbide [businesses
with which her father was connected]! Don't you think I can see?
.. If I could just get to Hawaii for a few minutes! (She had told
me in a previous hour that her father had refused to allow her to
visit Hawaii] ... Don't you think I know any people besides 'YOu?
. 1 don't know what you want [when I asked, she confirmed my
impression that this meant that she felt I looked to her to make
my own desires known to me; she agreed further that she felt helpless to do this; that was about all the commenting which I was
able to do) since the pressure of words from her was so great]
.
Let's call it quits . . . What do you think IJm trying to do?
.
In an hour a week later, after she had made a few fragmentary
remarks and had appeared helpless to complete them, I said

something in an effort to round out what she had started to say,
to help her along with it. She thereupon expressed the same sort
of intense exasperation with me, but this time more simply and
directly: "I feel hemmed in, constantly! . . . I can't stand
having words taken out of my mouth!"
The incident which I wish to highlight here, however, is that
of nine months before, which I have described. At that earlier
time, her ego had been, evidently, too weak to enable her to objectify me as an individual who was taking words out of her
mouth, not giving her room enough in the relationship to regain
her own communicative abilities. Instead, then, she had felt, evidently, so completely hemmed in by my constricting personality
that she had experienced the totality of her environment, includ-
354
ing what we would think of as the nonhuman environment (the

waUs of her room) and so forth) , as expressive of my all..pervasive
personality.
The factor which I find difficult or impossible to convey in
words, in reporting this, is the eerie sensation I felt upon her
saying, "There's a weird doctor around here that doesn't make
sense to me-s-he's metal, he's [looking about at the walls] everything." It is this kind of emotional response within oneself which
convinces one, more than mere words can do, that the patient is
making no mere figurative communication, but reporting a literal
experience-of, in this case, reacting to the therapist as being the
walls) and so forth, of the room. In 1951 I reported a number of
clinical examples of incorporative processes within the transference-countertransference relationship (132). But at that time I
had never received so clear a communication from a patient in so
profoundly regressed an ego state as this woman seems to have
been. I think this incident illuminates something of how a child,
for example, involved in a relationship with an "overprotective"
parent, may experience his entire environmental world as being
an expression of the parent's personality. Much has already been
said in the literature of how grievously this interferes with the
child's developing relationship with other persons. But in my
opinion, another great personality-warping aspect of such a relationship lies in the child's consequent lack of opportunity to relate
himself to his nonhuman environment.
Scott, in a stimulating paper entitled "Narcissism, the Body)
the Body Image and the Body Scheme" (131), included several
examples of dreams, from neurotic individuals) which showed
what he termed "symbols of identification with the world or cosmos, and symbols of infinity," and he commented that "In analyzing the transference aspects of such dreams we may see how the
analyst .represents a great deal-not just a person or a part of a
person but often the whole world-whether good or bad."
2. A thirty-seven...year-old schizophrenic woman frequently
treated me, during her psychotherapeutic sessions for many
months, in a scornful fashion which seemingly had, as at least
one of its unconscious motives, the concealment of her depend-
355
ency feelings toward me. This at times involved her behaving

toward me as if I were a dog.
For example, when at least once during each hour she would
leave my office to make a trip to the bathroom (at a period
during her hospital stay when she represented an escape risk),
she would behave in such a fashion that I was put very much
into the position of a sheep dog, herding a stray sheep between
the bathroom and my office. This analogy struck not only me
but various of my colleagues who observed us in transit.
Another example occurred during an hour when she was
lying on the couch, and asked me courteously, "May I have
some Kleenex, please?" Usually there is Kleenex near the couch
in my office; in this instance there was none. So I went across
the hall to another office, obtained some, and brought it to her.
She used it to wipe her axillae slowly, while gazing at the
ceiling, and then held the Kleenex out to the side toward me,
where I was sitting in my chair, and meanwhile she said, "Here
-kk-kk-kk!H as one would call to a dog which one wanted
to come to one, without even looking toward me-just continuing to gaze at the ceiling.
I said, half in amusement and half in irritation, something
to the effect that I wouldn't take it, that I wasn't a dog; I felt
this to be typical of the scorn she had shown toward me for many
months. She then dropped the Kleenex upon the floor in a
grande-dame manner, and never picked it up thereafter.
But then something happened which, I felt, revealed the
infantile dependency which lay behind her overtly treating me,
scornfully, like a dog. After I had given her, at her successive
requests, several cigarettes and the ash tray, she started holding
the ash tray up under her chin and under the cigarette in her
mouth, in a way which reminded me of a baby whose mother
is holding a plate under his chin while feeding him, so that
the food will not spill. I got the distinct feeling that this was a
way of her asking me to hold the ash tray there for her, which
I did not do.
I realize that her holding it in that manner may also have
represented an unconscious protest to me that I had been
356
treating her like a baby. There was much evidence for such an
interpretation of the incident. But there was also abundant
evidence for the formulation that her treating me like a
dog was an unconscious defense against her repressed dependency
feelings toward me. I regarded similarly her frequent addressing
of me, for many months, as if I were an inanimate object, requesting or demanding things from me-to close the window,
to turn off the air conditioner, to hand her the ash tray, and so
on-in the infuriatingly fiat, utterly impersonal tone with which
some persons address a servant, as if the servant were a sub..
human automaton rather than a fellow human being. She
frequently addressed other members of the personnel in such a
tone; she addressed her mother over the telephone in this same
tone; and she herself was subjected, in the hospital, to being
addressed in very much that tone by various members of the
ward personnel, frequently, for long periods when her behavior
was being chronically grotesque and unmanageable.
It is, of course, difficult if not impossible to demonstrate here,
beyond doubt, that the patient not only treated me (and others)
as if I were a dog, but literally experienced me as being equivalent to a dog. I am convinced that this latter was the case;
but the most significant evidence for this lay, in this instance as
in others, in the feeling-tone of her communications, a feelingtone which cannot be reproduced adequately here, in writing. I
can only say that when, for example, much later on in the
therapy when the transference origins of her behavior began to
be more clearly revealed, in describing her mother's behavior in
various situations she expressed it that "She looked like something mechanical and animal," saying this in a tone which
conveyed a quite literal} rather than merely a figurative, impact
-strongly indicating that, in these certain situations which she
was now describing, she had literally experienced the mother as
being something other than human.
3. A paranoid schizophrenic woman, twenty-five years of age
-the individual who was described as showing extraordinarily
intense scorn toward other persons (pages 206-209)-behaved in
many of her therapeutic sessions with me as though she were
357
dealing with a subhuman entity. Toward therapy with me she

maintained a tremendous resistance which diminished only
slightly and sporadically in the course of the fifteen months of my
work with her. She had had four years of work with two previous
therapists and had presented throughout that time, as she did
with me, a massive denial of her need for treatment. Behind this
denial were} of course, intense dependency needs, and it appeared
that her reacting to me and to other persons as being, in effect,
subhuman, represented, more than anything else, an unconscious
defense against these dependency needs. Her "dehumanizing"
(my term) of other persons appeared at various times, too, as a
defense against anxiety, grief, humiliation, and various other
emotions.
The few comments of hers which I shall quote, from among
her innumerable "dehumanizing" communications, convey no
more than a hint of her very real capacity to make me feel
(closeted with her as I was throughout one hour after another
of tremendous resistance, for many months) myself to be, in
actuality, something distinctly less than human. These verbalizations from her, quoted below, do not represent the highest in...
tensity of her treating me as nonhuman. Rather they represent
moments at which her doing this was at a lower ebb than usual,
moments of relative liveliness between us. The more usual,
and for me more burdensome, "interaction" was our sitting,
silently and woodenly, at opposite comers of my small office,
being} in the phrase of a previously mentioned patient, "like
furniture."
Each of us was nearly Immobile most of the time during the
hours, for perhaps a year, and (following the rapid subsidence
of the acute phase of her psychosis, within a few weeks after her
hospitalization) she spoke seldom, while I felt unable to talk but
little, myself} feeling hemmed in by her flat rejection of practically
anything I attempted to get across to her. This was early in my
experience with psychotic patients; but I am sure that such an
intense and almost unwavering scorn as she directed toward me
would be a formidable problem for any therapist.
In the twenty-fifth hour, during the acute phase, still, of her
358
psychosis, after we had sat down in my office, neither of us said

anything for several seconds. She then demanded, curtly, "Tell
me, are you in good faith about my being here?" I asked, "You
mean, do I want you to be able to get out of here?" "Yes," she
said. I replied, "Yes, I do; but it isn't feasible right away." She
stated, flatly, "That's absurd, of course. This is very obnoxious.
It's a dull place. Everybody is dun here. Y ou're dull," she added,
looking straight into my eyes, as she did much of the time.
"Those glasses you have on-you ought to get new ones. Dr.
Prescott [one of the previous therapists] wore glasses, too," she
said in a bored, impatient tone. Later in the hour she commented, "Maybe even you can understand that for me, as
Queen Marie of Romania, it's very boring to sit and listen to you
talk about the childhood of SybyUe Marsh [her name]. . . . I
feel all right. I felt all right when I came here. I felt all right
when I was here before."
During an hour two weeks later while she was showing, as
usual, a great deal of scorn toward and impatience with me, she
said at one point, with a sneer, "You look monotonous," staring
at me fixedly.
In the third month of our work together, she referred to her
administrative psychiatrist as "that young fool, Sawyer," and
went on in a furious, extremely sarcastic tone, "It would be
very condescending of me to ask him for privileges of any sort.
It is infuriating to me that I don't have them in the first place.')
Later in this hour, after I had brought up some suggestion which
I had made on several previous occasions, she observed, as a
reply, "You've brought that up several times, haven't you? I can
see you're quite interested in it," in a tone of haughty, detached
curiosity, as though she had just discovered some infinitely petty
interest of an earthworm.
In another hour, during the eleventh month of our work
(and I use the term "work" advisedly), while the liveliness of
our interaction was, overtly at least, approximately equivalent to
that which two statues in a room might have, I asked whether
she had had some anticipation as to how I might respond to
something she had brought up, a few moments before, and
359
concerning which we had exchanged a few words. She replied,

flatly, "I don't care anything about the way you respond. I care
about how I respond.. Y 01'1 feelings don't mean anything more
to me than if you were one of the lines on that wallpaper there."
4. A thirty-six-year-old woman with borderline schizophrenia
of a catatonic type showed, during many of her hours with me,
a prominent transference to me from a horse which had been
her closest friend for many years during her upbringing. In
fact, it was in the fonn of such a transference that her fond
feelings toward me began emerging, after more than two years
of intensive psychotherapy. Once, for example, after some comment from me, she expressed a mixture of annoyance and of
sheepishness, confiding that she felt I had no right to my own
opinions. When I encouraged her freely associating to this, she
thought immediately of her horse, and made clear that she had
a feeling that I should be to her as her horse had been, over the
years. Similarly, one of her fondest communications to me carne
when, late in the therapy, she confided, "Lots of times I used
to wish you were a big old horse. . . ," and then stopped, shyly.
I encouraged her to continue. She said, ". . . because then I
could pat you on the neck and give you a lump of sugar,"
smiling shyly and very fondly.
5. I worked for some years with a schizophrenic man who,
forty years old at the time of my undertaking therapy with him,
had been hospitalized continually for ten years, and had already
had more than three years of intensive psychotherapy. This is
the same man who was described, in another connection, on
pages 300 and 317.

The first year and a half of our work took place in a
multiple-therapy setting; another therapist and I were working
with both this man and another schizophrenic male patient
present. Thereafter, I continued seeing him on an individual
basis. Throughout the eighteen months of multiple therapy, and
for almost one year of my individual therapy with him, his ego
development appeared to be profoundly rudimentary-unusually
so even when compared with that of other schizophrenic patients.
It was almost two and a half years after my first experience with
360
him that he began referring to himself as having any self, any

existence as an individual who possessed an ego of his own.
Previously, he had shown a consistent denial that any of the
thoughts or feelings which he expressed-and these were very
few, indeed-came from him, or had any reference to him. That
is, he would occasionally verbalize what were, in essence, reminiscences about his own life, for example. but never couched in
such terms; he spoke always as though someone might go to this
or that place and might do such and such, but would quickly
disclaim any idea, suggested by the other therapist or by myself,
that he had been to these places or done these things, or that
he might have any wishes in such directions.
He projected, massively, practically all psychological ex..
periences which transpired within him-projected them in the
form of auditory and visual hallucinations, and projected them,
often, upon other persons, including myself in the individual
therapeutic sessions.
The greater part of each session he spent, however, in silent
apathy; with him I spent a longer time-approximately two
years-of almost totally silent sessions than I have ever spent with
any other patient. I learned, in the course of many arduous
months, that placing any sort of pressure upon him, beyond the
inescapable demand presented by my physical presence in the
room with him, only made things more difficult for him. I
realized, eventually, that the only manner in which I could
participate usefully with him was by serving, for several months,
as in effect an inanimate object-silent and rarely in motionupon which he could project his own thoughts and feelings
without interference. As I became more and more able to accept.
at a feeling level, this status vis-a-vis him, he throve-despite
the fact that practically nothing was said by either of us
throughout the hours.
There were a number of memorable evidences that, just as
he was for a long time unaware of the ego boundaries delineating
himself from other persons, he was unaware, too, of any
boundaries between himself and his nonhuman environment,
and unaware of the fact that other persons about him were
361
distinct, in their humanness, from the inanimate objects about

him.
During the period of multiple therapy, in one session he gazed
at the other therapist and myself and began talking, "They take
the upper halves of the bodies of two men and attach them to
the lower halves of the bodies of two women . . .," convincing
both the other therapist and myself, independently, that this was
how he was perceiving us-not really as human beings but as
the strange kind of, as it were, manufactured combinations which
he had described. This fit in with his own manner of walking,
which was a grotesque, disharmonious combination of exaggeratedly feminine hip-swinging and mincing gait, plus a carriage
of his arms, chest, and shoulders which caused one of my
colleagues, seeing him for the first time emerging from my office,
to take me aside and ask in astonishment, "What was that?"
I replied, in some amusement, "What did it look like?" He
replied, "It looked like somebody trying to walk like a gorilla."
During another hour in the multiple-therapy phase of his
treatment, when his fellow patient was convulsed and literally
howling in grief, tears streaming down his face, a profoundly
tragic figure, this man sat looking at him, burst into delighted
giggling and cackled, "They got it goin' good, ain't they?" I
could hardly believe my ears; it was unmistakably clear that he
was perceiving this fellow patient as some kind of nickelodeon,
or animated contraption, or some similar entertainment device
being run for his own amusement.
After I had started seeing him on an individual basis, for
many months he spent the so-nearly-silent hours either in sitting
apathetically in his chair, belching or passing flatus sporadically;
or in leaning toward me and fascinatedly watching my face, as
if he were viewing something in the nature of a motion picture,
giving occasional grunts which were expressive, variously, of
interest, delight, astonishment, awe, shocked discovery, and so
on. When I would, at infrequent intervals, start to say something
in inquiry of what he was experiencing, he would snap at me,
"Don't be so self-conscious!" or, at times, would say in a
reassuring tone, "Don't be self-conscious, Dearie."
362
On one such occasion, as he was gazing at me in this fashion,

he broke into a description of a dilapidated Cape Cod house,
with the roof sunken in (it is more than possible that I was
sitting in a slumped posture in the chair)--old, worn out,
abandoned, useless. I realized, in amazement, that this was how
he was perceiving me. And, although I am quite aware that the
reader ~ay scoff at me, here, as having a feverishly wild
imagination, I do not mean that he so regarded me figuratively,
but literally. It seems that he was projecting upon me a conception of himself, a conception which we might think of as
being a figurative one (a view of himself as being like an old,
abandoned, useless house). but which in his own unconscious
was, evidently) literal and concrete: he was manifesting an unconscious attitude toward himself as being, literally, a dilapidated old house.
Such a formulation is substantiated by, for instance, the
following incident which occurred between himself and an aide.
He had begun to say something to the aide) and had suddenly
stopped in mid-sentence (as he often did during his hours with
me). The aide urged him to continue. He replied, "That's all
that comes out, Georgie,'> as if his voice were something which
he experienced as being apart from himself, and uncontrollable
by himself, coming not from within his body but from an inanimate instrument or something of that sort. The following
brief nurse's report, of which I have italicized a portion, suggests the same kind of feeling of alienation, in the patient, with
regard to his own body:
When invited to O.T. activity, said it was "too much trouble
to drag this old thing (indicating himself) ouer there." Then
cursed about so much "hot air" around here and to just get the
hell out and leave him alone.
The state of this man's ego was evidently, for years, comparable
with that reported by Savage as being transitorily present in
subjects with LSD~25 psychosis. The following passages from
Savage's previously mentioned published article ( 126) are
strongly reminiscent to me of manifestations which I have
PS'jchosis and Neurosis
363
observed in this patient, and in a number of other schizophrenic

patients whose illnesses were of a somewhat comparable depth:
.. " many changes can be observed in the body ego feeling......
The body outline seems lost and it appears confluent with the bed,
like a sheet lying on the bed...
With the changes in body ego feeling are associated changes

in the ego boundaries of the body. Ego feeling is withdrawn from
them, and they become weakened, fluid and variable. It becomes
increasingly difficult to tell where the body leaves off and the
rest of the world begins. Initially" the change is in the direction
of enlargement of the ego boundary so that anything that happens
within the room is felt within the body. The motions of others are
felt within oneself. The individual looks out the window at the
cars passing by and feels the cars running over him. He hears
noises in the next room and feels that he is making them. When he
lies in bed, the bed feels like part of his body, and when he gets
up, he feels as though the bed were still a part of him.
. . . Gradually, the ego boundaries are constricted. The clothes,
the shadow, the mirror reflection, the skin and finally the extremities are shed chrysalis-like and are no longer felt as belonging
to the body. The body ego feeling for them has been lost... "
In time the body is totally estranged. The individual feels that
his body is not his, that it functions automatically, that he has
nothing to do with its activity. He watches the movement of. his
hands and does not feel that he has initiated it..... He feels
that the saliva in his mouth is not his, that someone is pumping it
in from the outside....
In one subject the depersonalization proceeded to a degree

where his body was projected as an influencing machine which
made him see pictures (hallucinations) and controlled his
thoughts, feelings and actions. He complained of "an indwelling
television set," that the LSD had transformed him into a television
set and that someone else was controlling him by sending out impulses which caused him to see pictures and induced sensations in
364
his face and lips, which were misinterpreted as the fade out and
ripples on a television screen.. "
His concept of spatial relations is impaired. He loses the ability
to integrate objects in space. The stability of the outer world is
lost. Comers lose their rectangularity; solid objects move; lines
and planes bend. "The walls flap in the breeze like tapestriesthey run like melted wax." "The floor flows like a river." ....1
Eventually the individual withdraws ego feeling from not only

the extemal world (objects) and from his body, but also from his
thoughts, ideas and feelings.
He no longer has any identification with his own feelings.. He
laughs; yet, he feels no mirth. He weeps, yet he feels no sadness.
It is as though he were standing by watching the emotions of
another person ..... [126c].
Savage's two papers (126~ 127) provide good examples of a

phenomenon which I have repeatedly emphasized here: the
schizophrenic individual's experiencing, as a concrete perception}
that which to us would be a figurative psychological concept. In
the paper from which I have just been quoting, Savage reports
that
Thoughts can be shown to be directly translated into symbols
which are seen as visual hallucinations. One subject was asked,
I'What does a 'warning' bring to mind?" He saw "an owl chasing
people down a street." . . . Insanity suggested "a wall and a
drawbridge being slammed shut" [126d].
And in the previously mentioned unpublished paper (127)

Savage describes, among various other examples, a subject's
perceiving another person as being literally colored yellow-a
1 Wemer~ in reviewing some of the literature concerning experimental in
toxication with hashish and mescaline, presents similar material" and he coaeludes that in such a ,tate, 'JEgo and world. " . conatitute a diffule togethernell. The objectivity of the world, the resistance offered by the thing-like,
become. relaxed and vanishes. 'Objects give the impression that they are
made of robber; the walls, too, are loft~ and rigid objects have a waxen
malleability! And it may happen that the person, own body cfloods over
without limit into the aurroundinga'' (162z).
365
person whom the subject, when not under the influence of the
LSD, considered to be figuratively "yellow"--eowardly.
I regard Savage's data as providing us with richly detailed
views of the kind of experience which, I feel sure, is endured for
years by many deeply schizophrenic patients----experience which
they, unlike the subjects with LSD-induced psychosis, can only
relatively rarely communicate to us. When one compares his
data with those from anyone of the schizophrenic patients whom
I have been describing, one is impressed with the close similarity.
Savage formulates his clinical findings, concerning LSD psychosis, in terms of Federn's theories of ego psychology (39), and
I should like to add that I myself have found these theories to
be extremely meaningful and clarifying in the interpretation of
clinical material which I have obtained with regard to the status
of the ego in deeply regressed schizophrenic patients.
The Therapist's Anxiety in This Regard

Now I shall present some clinical examples of a therapist's
experiencing anxiety upon finding either that he is dealing with
the patient as if the latter were nonhuman, or that the patient
is dealing with him as if he, the therapist, were nonhuman, or
upon finding that both are doing so, mutually, to one another.
When the therapist experiences such anxiety, he may well be
sampling at first hand the kind of anxiety which assails the
child who, in later years} develops schizophrenia-anxiety which
assails the child in the course of interpersonal events, presumably
comparable with those to be presented below, which interfere
with his developing a durable conception of himself as being
human.
1. The first example is from my work with a schizophrenic
woman whom I have already mentioned: the person who
referred to her head as if it were an inanimate object, saying
that the whole left side of it "is gone . caved in," and on
another occasion demanding of a nurse, "Why did you take
that piece out of my head?"
This woman, for many months after my beginning psychotherapy with her, often glanced at me with an expression on
366
her face of mingled fear, shock, and awe, as if I were a weird

monster at which she scarcely dared to gaze for an instant. My
discomfort at being so regarded amounted. at times, to a
fonnidable level of anxiety. This anxiety was heightened by the
circumstance that I felt toward her, much of the time during
that period of the therapy, an intensity of hatred and loathing
which, my superego repeatedly admonished me, no human being
should feel toward another person-and which a physician, in
particular, should never experience toward his patient. I shall
not go into the reasons for my feeling so negatively toward her
at that time. My point here is that my conception of myself
as a human being was under assault from two directions: the
patient was reacting to me as being a kind of monster, and my
superego was condemning me as being monstrous, inhuman, in
terms of the way I was feeling toward this woman. The fact
that her own appearance and behavior, throughout this time,
was extraordinarily freakish) in the opinions of personnel members generally (suggesting that her reacting to me in this fashion,
as being a weird monster, involved much projection of her part),
was only partially reassuring to me, and her becoming able to
confide to me, "I know I look weird sometimes, but I'm all
right," was a later development, when this difficult though
necessary period, of her projecting upon me these weird selfconceptions, was drawing to a close.
I felt additionally threatened in one of the hours when, as
I walked into her room, she looked closely at my face and head
and asked me in a shocked, awed voice, "How is your head
injury?" as if she regarded my head as an inanimate object
which had been damaged to an almost unmentionably grievous
extent. My knowledge of this as representing a projection on her
part, of at-the-moment unconscious feelings about her own head,
was not instantly there to comfort me.
I should like to describe, as material of relevance and interest,
although not as data precisely limited to the matter under
consideration at the moment) an hour which helped to reveal
the defensive nature of this woman's treating me as something
subhuman. By way of introduction to this material-material
367
which has already been touched upon, very briefly, on page 295
-let me mention two items of background information: the
patient had shown on a number of occasions a self-condemnation
for having, as she felt it, not taken proper care of her aged aunt
who lived in the family home; and she often reacted to me not
only with the shock and fear and so forth which I have just
described) but also with intense loathing.
In this particular hour she was sitting on the floor in her
room} leaning on the end of her bed. At one point she said,
"Would you like to go to California with Auntie? .... I should
have been there with you," in a self-reproachful tone.
I asked, "You perhaps felt, every time that you went out
anywhere, that you were deserting Auntie?" recalling that the
parent, had told me that, whenever the girl went out on a
date, her aunt would wait up until she got home.
At this she smiled ruefully, then broke into sobs, with tears
dripping copiously onto the floor.
I felt much moved by her grief, and asked gently, after a few
moments, "You feel so deserted?"
Thereupon she looked over and said directly to me} uGod,
you're so slimy!" in a tone of intense loathing. After a few
moments of similar expressions of loathing-during which she
called me, among other things, "nail biter!" [her own lifelong
nail biting had been a source of great exasperation to both her
parents]--she went over and sat on the far end of her bed,
curled up, and hugged her pillow, while she alternately (a)
wept with intense grief, hugging the pillow closely to her, with
her head buried in it, and (b) said to me, "God) you're freakish!
-slimy !-dopey I" At the times when she said this, she was
looking directly into my eyes, and speaking in a tone of utter
loathing. Then she would bury her head in the pillow, clutch
the pillow closer to her, and burst out again in overwhelming
grief.
My reaction at the time was not of personal defensiveness,
which I often experienced with her; rather, I clearly saw that
she was so afraid of closeness-closeness to which her grief
repeatedly exposed her-that she had to try to defend herself
368
against it by loathing me, while at the same time the desire

for closeness with me was being expressed in her hugging the
pillow.
2.. This material is from my work with the forty-year-old

schizophrenic man described on pages 300,317 and 359.362, the
person with whom the therapeutic sessions for nearly two years
were spent very predominantly in silence. I often felt, as I sat
in the room with this man} who dressed untidily and who rarely
made any sounds except for grunts} belches, and the frequent
passing of flatus, that I was cooped up with a creature more
animal than human. Beyond this, I experienced myseH in the
therapeutic relationship as being, oftentimes, animallike, This
eventually came to be at times a comfortable feeling; but for
the first several months, while I was getting used to this
extremely nonverbal fonn of relatedness, it felt quite threatening
to me. My anxiety at what I experienced as a threat to my own
humanness seemed to stem from at least the following sources:
a. The almost entirely nonverbal nature of the therapeutic
relationship, for very long periods, gave me to feel that the
patient and I were relating to one another as animals do, with
that element which is uniquely human-s-speech-c-shut out of the
situation. After several months I was able to feel this----our
relating to one another as animals do-e-as an enriching, pleasurable experience. But prior to that time I felt it as a distinctly
threatening lack in the situation; this process of verbal com..
munication, upon which so much of my own sense of humanness,
I believe, rests, was for all practical purposes denied to me in
my relationship with this man. It is unnecessary to go into detail
here as to why verbalizing seemed to be forbidden me; briefly,
whenever I spoke it seemed only to frighten him, infuriate him,
or cause him to become even more withdrawn. Much of the
time, in the early months of the individual therapy, I felt too
afraid of him to speak} knowing that my doing so tended to
infuriate him, and having abundant reason to feel that his
control over his rage was precarious.
b. A second factor was, again, a function of the extraordinarily predominant silences. These tended, I think, to render
Psychosis and N eurosls
369
my ego boundaries indistinct, tended to make me feel at one

with this patient whose appearance and behavior were so animallike. I have observed not only in my work with him, but also
in my experience with various other patients whose therapy
involved long periods of silence, that prolonged silence seems
to promote a great deal of projection by each person, patient
and therapist, onto the other individual-projection which is at
once revealed as such at the moment when either person starts
to verbalize. t
That is, during a lengthy silence it is easy, and in fact inevitable, for one to become involved in assumptions as to what
the other person is thinking or feeling; it is easy to assume that
he is sharing one's own experiences, and easy to attribute to him
various experiences which one does not wish to acknowledge
within oneself. But when either therapist or patient begins to
speak, his words serve at once to set him apart from the other
person, to demarcate his own personality from the other's personality. Every therapist has been startled, I am sure, to hear a
patient begin to verbalize, after a prolonged silence, thoughts
which are entirely different from those which one has been
attributing to him. To phrase this differently, I think that one
of the reasons why prolonged silences are so often uncomfortable
to us, as therapists, is that these silences tend to threaten our
conception of ourselves as human beings, tend to take us back
to the "anirnallike" preverbal period of our very early lives. The
prospect of such regression is something to which we react, I
think, ambivalently: we long for it, and we feel threatened by it
as representing perhaps the most basic kind of castration.
c. A third element in the situation which pushed me toward a
subjective sense of oneness with this animallike patient, and
another threat to my ego boundaries, was his previously menJ This mutual projection selVes. however, constnsctive purposes. It .erves
to maintain a primitive object relationship; it functions, that is, as a defense
agaimt breaking of all contact between the two persons, Furthermore, the
fluidity of ego boundaries, in such a aituation, enables the therapiJt to experience at fint hand, as it were-i.eo. by introjection-the patient's anxietyarousing CODfticu. . . I have described elsewhere (134). Thil latter phe..
DOInenon U an invaluable. although at time. most uncomfortable, aid to the
therapist in his efforts to learn what is ailiDg the patient.
370
tioned massive projecting upon me of his own unconscious

experiences. This was a function of the manifestly great fluidity
of his ego boundaries, and the silences presumably fostered
his already great tendencies toward projection, as they fostered
my own. He treated me persistently as if I were an extension
of his self which from my view was animallike. On these infrequent occasions when he was verbalizing, my own self was
barraged by these projections-projections having an intensity,
an utter conviction on the part of the patient as to their being
real aspects of myself, which are so characteristic of many
schizophrenic patients, and which are so much more formidable
than the often relatively halfhearted, uncertain projections of
neurotic patients.
d. A fourth factor was) as in my work with the schizophrenic
woman just described above, an intensity of negative feeling
in myself, toward the patient, about which I felt self-condemnstory. That is, it was threatening to my conception of myself as
a human being to find myself thinking and feeling, upon looking
at this man, things like, "The pig! . .. . The crazy son of a
bitch!" and often} to find myself feeling murderous toward him.
3. This twenty-five-year-old woman, diagnosed as a severely
schizoid personality, was in therapy with one of my colleagues.
Two of the patient's most prominent symptoms were emotional
detachment) and overeating; she was a markedly, and to most
person repellingly, obese individual..
The following excerpts from her therapist's presentation, to
the hospital staff, of his work with her at the end of the first
four months, will serve to show something of the anxiety which
he felt in terms of her regarding him, and his own regarding her,
as nonhuman:
The treatment with her has been very difficult for me. There
has been a great deal of silence in the hours, a great deal of a
kind of deadly sort of silence. It just seems as if one is sitting
there with a patient who is refusing to talk, and I have often had
the fantasy, when I get something out of her, of extracting a tooth
or something of this sort. This went on for a couple of months.
Alternately I would feel utterly hopeless--that I could do nothing
371
-and utterly angry, and several times I expressed a lot of anger

to the patient which did not do any good whatsoever.
Some of the early work: I'll just mention one fantasy of the
patient during some of these terrible silences. Finally I'd get things
moving a little and I'd hear words from the patient that 1 looked
like a strange animal to her, that I seemed to be distorted, that
my face looked angry and cruel and she thought of Joan of Arc
being faced by the Grand Inquisitor. Then she thought that the
J18m e of the Inquisitor was "Cochon" (I think the actual name is
"Couchon"; but she had it as "Pig," anyway), that I looked to her
like a pig and that 1 looked, on the other hand, as if I were far
above her. We got into quite a lot of things about living in different spheres) the patient seeing me as far above her, but, from
the way I heard it, she was seeing me as far below her....
Let me tell you some of my own fantasies during this time.
One was that 1 was sitting there working with a great amoeba,
and I thought very much of the amoebas that I had formerly
looked at under a microscope. I thought of the amoeba ingesting a
particle of food-and ingesting me, actually. If one thrust out
with any kind of comment toward her, instead of this provoking
a reaction, it just sank in and vanished-just was consumed. 1 had
this fantasy a lot. Another fantasy I had in response to several
people telling me that "What that girl needs is for somebody to
really kick her good and hard," and several people actually told
me this. I tried it some} not literally, although I felt like trying it
literally. When I did this, I thought of the old Uncle Remus tale
of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.. Br'er Rabbit was hitting Tar
Baby with one hand and it gets stuck, then the other hand gets
stuck) then the two feet, and then he hit it with his head and his
head gets stuck) too. This is what would happen to me when 1
would lash out and say, "Now, it is about time you began getting
here on time I" She had a habit of coming late.
4. A twenty-two-year-old woman was in therapy with another

therapist on the hospital staff, for chronic schizophrenia with
paranoid and hebephrenic features. This patient, too, was upon
admission an unusually ugly-looking person, one of the small
372
percentage-possibly 5 per cent~f our patients who are, for

a longer or shorter time after their admission, difficult to regard
as fellow human beings. This young woman had already been
hospitalized, in three other hospitals) for the greater part of
seven years, and her relatives held little hope for her recovery.
She had shown considerable evidence of dangerous homicidal
tendencies; on one occasion, for example, she had threatened
her mother, a cold and domineering individual, with a hammer.
The patient had received not only psychotherapy but also a large
number of both insulin coma treatments and electroshock treatments, and COW'8es of Thorazine and Serpasil, without benefit,
before her admission to Chestnut Lodge. The admission physician
here was shocked to hear her father express the belief that his
daughter should be chained up somewhere) and that people
should come near only to feed her.'
Her therapist, in twice-weekly seminars with five other therapists including myself, confided to us, early in his work with this
woman, that he felt very anxious in the sessions with her. He
described her behaving in a physically threatening manner toward
him, and her saying very little to him except for growling
I I t is by no means unheard of for such deeply ill psychotic patients to be
treated, in aetuality~ in almost such an animallike way. One young schizophrenic patient, for example, prior to his admission at Chestnut Lodgea man who had been labeled 88 Clutterly unmanageable" by the hospitals
where he had been housed prior to his transfer to the Lodgehad lived for six months in one of these hospitals in a seclusion room which
bore the sign, UVery Dangerous. Keep Away. Do Not Disturb This
Patient," It was deeply gratifying to our whole staff' to see this young man
progress, at the Lodge, from an initial state, here, of unusually dangerous
assaultiveness to a state, within about one year, of being a fellow human
being who was generally liked.
At the Lodge, we find that when an inspiring therapeutic result such as
this does occur, it comes as a product of dedicated and courageous working
logether. by the patient, the therapist, the IKychiatric administrator, the
ward nursing personnel, and the occupational therapy personnel. Dr. FrommReichmann once.phrased this to me in a way which I shall always remember: "It takes many minds and hearts to cure a schizophrenic!" Gertnld
SChwing's volume, .If Way 10 eh, Soul of 'he MeneGll" III (130). contains
accounts of patients- improving) as did this young man, from an initial animaUike state to a condition of clear-cut humanity and relative mental health.
It would appear that her patients improved solely through the beneficial
therapist-patient relationship; but in our experience, the efforts of the therapist alone are not enough.
PJrychosis and Neurosis
373
occasional curses and threats of physical violence. He particularly

stressed how shocked he felt at times when, during long silences
when she was lying on her bed facing away from him, she
would then roll over and he would see her monstrous-looking
face. In one seminar, awed at the magnitude of the therapeutic
task, he said, "What a patient like this needs is a therapist who
can train wild animals and be comfortable with people, too."
During the seventh month of the therapy, we had the pleasure
of hearing him describe a crucially important change which had
taken place in the therapeutic relationship. The first indication
of this change which we noticed was that he now, for the first
time, was referring to her not as "Morrison," her last name,
but as "Elaine," her first name, giving one to feel that he was
speaking of a feminine human being, rather than-as had
previously been the case-a creature which he felt to be quite
alien to himself. I shall present his brief, informal recapitulation
of the change as he summed it up to me, at the end of the
seminar meeting in which he had first told us about it. He said
that prior to the change, it had been
As though there wasn't a person there at all, but instead a
wild beast. One of the things that kept bothering me was that
there was nothing about the relationship that was of a positive
nature to me, as though there were no limits on what this girl
might do if she lost control of herself-like being with a lion and
having no assurance that the 'lion would set limits on what it did.
Last week as I was sitting there I became aware" for the first
time, that she was Elaine and I was I J rather than being overwhelmed with a lot of anxiety. [This came, he explained, upon
his seeing a relaxation in her facial expressions, in response to
which he realized that she was a girl rather than CCa fierce beast."]
Rather than seeing this horrible-looking face, with the mouth
movements and opening and closing her eyes, I would see the face
of a girl.
One sees, in his description, evidence of the same phenomenon

which I have described as my own experience in my work with
374
the second patient in this present series of clinical examples-the schizophrenic man, so animallike in appearance, with whom
I spent nearly two years of almost totally silent sessions, That is,
this therapist had evidently come to feel, partly as a function of
the ego-boundary-threatening silences, a sense of oneness with
the "monstrous-looking" patient. It was of much interest to me
that, apparently, his realization of his own separateness from
her-s-t'that she was Elaine and I was I"-eame simultaneously

with his realization that she was a human being, a girl, rather
than a wild beast.
I was interested, also, to find ( and this was specifically
substantiated by him when I asked him further about it) that
silence had been the context of all this important transformation
in the relationship. That, too, coincides with my own experience
with the schizophrenic man just mentioned. During my work
with him I had come for the first time to the realization that
a long period of silence, covering the initial months (or, as in
his case, even years) of therapy is not to be looked upon as
merely a prelude to a deeper, verbally communicative relationship. Rather, within this nonverbal phase itself, I had realized,
a profound evolution may take place in the relationship, a
profound transformation of the attitudes of each person toward
the other, from predominantly negative feelings to predominantly
positive feelings, all in the practically complete absence of words.
Next I shall briefly summarize what I believe to be the main
factors which contribute to the therapist's anxiety-in working
with such patients as these-lest he himself be, or become,
nonhuman:
a. Simply witnessing another human being appearing, and
functioning. in such an animallike way tends to make the
therapist feel, "If this incredible thing has happened to him,
then it could befall me, also."
b. The patient's own anxiety lest he be nonhuman tends to
become communicated to, and shared by, the therapist.
c. The patient's relentless relating of himself to the therapist
as if the latter were nonhuman tends to undermine the therapist's
assurance of his own humanness. It may be that the therapist
PsychOJis and Neurosls
375
fears the threat of utter nonrelatedness as being even greater than

the threat of relating in whatever fashion to the patient, and
hence feels pulled toward relating on the patient's own terms, as
a nonhuman creature or object.
d. Prolonged, ego-boundary-threatening silences are often encountered in work with such patients. Then the therapist tends
to feel at one with his animallike patient.
e. Toward such patients, the therapist often finds himself
experiencing attitudes (of Ioathing, horror, intense hostility and
rejection, and so on) which, in the eyes of his own superego,
render him nonhuman.
f. The therapist, like human beings in general, has unconscious
desires to become nonhuman. These desires, largely unacceptable
to him, add fuel to his anxiety lest he become nonhuman.
Michael Balint, in a recent article entitled "Friendly Expanses
-Horrid Empty Spaces" (9), has presented some theoretical
formulations which are of much relevance to the present topic,
fonnulations having to do with extremely early ego states
antedating even the establishment of a sense of infant-mother
identity. I shall not try to detail his concepts in full, for they
are too elaborate to condense succinctly. The following two
passages convey his major technical point that it is essential for
the analyst to be able to function, at times when patients have
repressed very deeply in the course of psychoanalysis, in what one
might call a nonhuman mode of participation with the patient,
so that these very early ego states can be re-experienced with a
more fully mature outcome. Balint says that, in approaching this
deep regression, the patient makes known his wish
. . . that the analyst should keep quiet and should not demand
attention from his patient. On the other hand it is most important
that the analyst should be there, should stay with the patient,
should not only do this but should enable the patient to remain
aware all the time that the analyst is there for him.... To quote
an example: one patient when in this state asked me not to
speak, to keep quiet, but occasionally to move a little, for instance
to make my chair creak gently, or let my breathing become somewhat audible, etc. But I was not allowed to use any words, because
376
they demanded to be understood, which meant coming out of this

regressed state into the adult world {9a].
[Balint acknowledges that this transference relation is, of course,
overdetermined, but emphasizes that a] possible determinant, in
my opinion a most important one, is that the analyst should become part and parcel of the patient's world, Le, should assume the
qualities of a primary object in complete harmony with him. In
other words, the analyst should not be an entity in his own right,
with his own ideas) clever suggestions, and profound interpretations; in fact not a separate object at all, but should merge as
completely as possible into the "friendly expanses" surrounding the
patient [9b].
I have observed, in my own psychotherapy of unusually deeply

regressed schizophrenic patients, precisely this clinical phenomenon which Balint has found in his analysis of (presumably
neurotic) patients, and it is gratifying to leam from him a theory
which gives these clinical observations a clearer meaning than
I had been able to find in them.
In the work with the schizophrenic patients, this phase (of
the patient's relating to the therapist as being a "primary object"
-Balint's term-s-rather than as being an entity in his own right)
is, in my experience, much longer and of far greater importance
than it is in the work with neurotic patients. In analysis with
neurotic patients--where I have also observed it-the successful
working through of this phase can add a good deal to the depth
of the patient's self-awareness and personality integration. But in
psychotherapy with such deeply regressed schizophrenic individDais as those whom I have been describing, a successful therapeutic dealing with this phase is, in my experience, absolutely
crucial; I believe that the whole issue of whether or not the
patient emerges from his "nonhuman" or animallike state, and
goes on later to a resolution of his psychosis, depends upon the
therapist's success or failure in helping him to work through this
phase of his regression. In my experience with such patients) this
phase may predominate at the beginning of the psychotherapy, or
377
may ensue only some months or years later; but it is likely to

last for several months or even, as in one of my cases, for
years,"
I shall describe briefly my experience in this respect with two
patients, as examples, to highlight the relatively great prominence
of this phase in psychotherapy with schizophrenic individuals, as
compared with its more subtle appearance in analysis of neurotic
patients such as Balint has described. It was partly through such
clinical experiences as these that I became convinced of the
validity of the concept, presented in Chapter IX, of "recovery
via phylogenetic regression."
One schizophrenic man was in this phase when I began
working with him, and remained so for more than two years.
In various, largely nonverbal, ways he made clear to me that
my presence was of great importance to him; but he showed
fury of murderous intensity whenever I would try to say anything,
however briefly and infrequently, and showed great anxiety and
anger when I would move about in my chair. After several
4 Incidentally, I believe we have here one hint as to why the p8ychotherapy-venus-psychoanalysis controversy engenden, year after year, such remarkably passionate feelings when it is discussed in professional meetings. I
have long felt that there must be some early developmental phase, some phase
which normally involves deeply conflictual feelings for the infant or young
child, which one group of individuals resolve by a predominant characterological emphasis upon one Bide of the conflict, and the other group resolve
through a major emphasis upon the opposite side of the conflict. Only the
presence of such a previously unsuspected phase in nonnal human development would account) it has seemed to me, for lome of the quite irrationally
deep splits which occur in the ranks of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists
whose working lives are devoted to the resolution of psychological suffering.
Specifically, I surmise that those who champion, with a zeal approaching
ferocity, the "neutral screen" technique of classical analysis, and who condemn any noteworthy emotional respomiveneas in a colleague as prims Isei.
evidence of unwanted countertranaference j and at the other extreme, those
who have nothing but scorn for the analyst'a functioning as a neutral screen)
and who advocate a ceaseless _activity1i and '-Warm respcnsiveness" on the
part of the analyst or theraput-] surmise that these two groups of practitionen have established, characterologically, opposing solutions of that early
developmental phase which involved conflict between a self.identity as inanimate, or a self-identity as animate. The ideal analyat or therapist would be
one who feels entirely free to be animate--aJive, warm, responaive--as the
needs of the situation may dictate, but who feels also unafraid to function as
a ftlatively "neutral screen," 81 a kind of inanimate object, much of the
time-without fear. that ii, that he will thereby 10le his alivenesl and his
human essence.
378
months he came to commanding me, openly, to "Shut up and

just sit there!" Similarly, when he himself was being active,
either physically or verbally, whether making violently sudden
physical movements, or bursting out in a furious, cursing "inter...
change" with a hallucinatory figure or, later on in the two-year
period, similarly cursing at me, I grew to realize that therapy
went better here, too, if I simply sat, silent and motionless) most
of the time. I had many trying, and often frightening, times
with him; but by the end of about one year of this I had become
firmly convinced that he needed for me to simply be there and
not threaten him by making my presence felt as a separate
entity, any more than was absolutely necessary.
The other patient, a schizophrenic woman, for about three
years was so deeply involved in an autistic world that, although
she was able to verbalize fairly freely to me, she did not seem to
react to me at an emotional level as being someone capable of
showing initiative myself, apart from her. It was only after about
three years, as she started to move out of her very long-standing
psychosis, that she began to be extremely irritably conscious of
the real world about her, including myself during the therapeutic
hours. Previously, I had been amazed, many times, at her utter
obliviousness to any sounds on the disturbed ward where the
hours were held; more than once I had felt considerably upset
by the loud raging or terrified screaming of one or another
patient in nearby rooms, and had marveled at the degree of
apartness from all this which she had achieved, as it were. But
now, by contrast, it seemed that even the slightest sounds-the
faint ticking of a watch, the sound of someone's shifting position
slightly or momentarily brushing their clothing with their hand,
and so forth-were almost intolerable to her.
She was now in a phase which lasted several months, during
which time she absolutely insisted that I not look at her, that
I sit in a certain corner of her room, that I not talk; and she
was, like the male patient I have just mentioned, extremely
irritated at any physical movements that I made. After I had
become able to go through these hours with her, accepting
at an emotional level the need for them to go in this fashion
Psychosis and N'eurosis
379
(and my acceptance of this came only after intense feelings of

frustration, anger, hopelessness) and so on), she was able to
progress to a further resolution of her psychosis, concomitantly
with an increasing tolerance on her part for my functioning more
freely. It seemed to me abundantly clear that her formerly very
deep psychosis had served as an insulation, protecting her from
an intolerably irritating awareness of the real world outside
herself.
In my experience, if the therapist is to be successful in helping
his patient to go through, and emerge from, this phase which
Balint terms the primary object relation, wherein the therapist
is related to as being not an entity in his own right but rather a
harmonious part of the patient's self, then it is necessary for the
therapist to be able to be aware of, and to cope with, his own
anxiety lest he become nonhuman. That is, in this phase the
therapist is treated by the patient more like an inanimate object,
a piece of furniture, for example, than as a human being; and
upon being treated in this fashion persistently, over a long period
of time, the therapist inevitably tends to be confronted with that
particular anxiety.
PART
FOUR
FROM THE CULTURAL FRAME

OF REFERENCE
Cultural Attitudes Concerning

Man in His Nonhuman
Environment
CHAPTER
14
Thus far I have dealt with this over-all subject primarily in

terms of the human individual. In this chapter the subject will
be discussed in a difierent, and broader-scale, frame of reference,
Here we shall be concerned with the effects which the institutions
of various cultures have upon human beings' relatedness with
their nonhuman environment.. In what follows, here, I shall use
the term "nonhuman environment" to include, as usual, not
only the world of nature surrounding man, but also the world of
his own artifacts.
L. K. Frank in Nature and Human Nature (44) says,
. . . man has created his symbolic, cultural worlds of meanings
and values which, like a screen or pattern, he has interposed between) or imposed upon nature and himself so that he sees everything, thinks about everything) acts toward everything and every
person, including himself, largely in terms of these self-created and
self-imposed meanings and purposes [44b].
384
.. According to their customary ethos, people will . impute

value and worth to plants, animals or certain individuals and deny
it to others [44c].
The degree to which any particular culture fosters, or on the
other hand interferes with and distorts, the members' healthy
relatedness with their nonhuman environment is doubly important because it has repercussions, for good or ill, upon the
members' relatedness with their fellow human beings. Specifically,
an interfering culture may result in the individual's failing to
relate to his fellow human beings as human. He is prone, instead,
to regarding these other human beings as either superhuman or
subhuman (equivalent, for example, to animals or inanimate
objects). This point will be developed, as I say, more fully as
this chapter proceeds.
To give some inkling of the variety in this regard, among
various cultures, I shall touch very briefly upon two cultures
other than our own; by "our own" I mean contemporary
Western culture, and most particularly the culture of urban
areas of the United States.
First, in this following glimpse into a "primitive" culture (of
an aboriginal. tribe in the interior of Ceylon}, we catch something of how intimate a relatedness may exist between the
individual and his nonhuman environment, an environment consisting predominantly of the elements of nature in a state only
minimally altered by man's own hand, an enviromnent in which
man's own artifacts are sparse indeed. This quote is from a
work by Robert Ranulph Marett, and is included in Primitive
Heritage (104), the anthropological anthology edited by Margaret Mead and Nicolas Calas:
.. Said a Vedda cave-dweller .. : "It is pleasant for us to
feel the rain beating on our shoulders, and good to go out and dig
and sit around It" [104e].
yams, and come home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave,
Such a glimpse as that given above lends conviction to the following opinion of the anthropologist Paul Radin:
The Cultural Frame of Reference
385
It is one of the salient traits of so-called primitive man ..

that he allows a full and appreciative expression to his sensations.
He is pre-eminently a man of practical common sense just as is
the average peasant. . . . primitive man is endowed with an overpowering sense of reality and possesses a manner of facing this
reality, which to a western European implies an almost complete
lack of sensitiveness. It is true that facts of everyday life, in
every primitive community, are clothed in a magical and ritualistic dress, yet it is not unfair to say that it is not the average
native who is beguiled into an erroneous interpretation of this
dress but the ethnologist .[104f].
Secondly) let us consider, similarly briefly, the culture of Western Europe of the Middle Ages, prior to the industrial revolution.
Here, too, there prevailed an intimacy of relatedness between man
and his nonhuman environment which, although of distinctly
lesser degree than that prevailing in so-called primitive cultures,
was still very considerable. The vast majority of the adult individuals of the culture were either peasants or craftsmen. The
peasants lived in dwellings which they had built with their own
hands, out of the materials which were provided by environing
nature. They wore clothing which they themselves had woven
from the fibers of plants which they had grown on their land, or
which they had fashioned from the hides of animals which they
had fed and tended.. The food with which they nourished themselves was food which they themselves had grown, in the form of
plants and animals, upon the land surrounding, or close to, their
home. The craftsmen lived and worked in comparably intimate
relatedness with a nonhuman environment in which Nature was
dominant, and toward the elements of which it was presumably
easy to feel a kind of respect, a sense of personal kinship, which
seems difficult for members of our culture to experience, living
as they do in an environment containing so much which has been
made over by the hand of man. That is, these craftsmen began
their work process with raw materials which were still a part of,
or only one step removed from, a natural state (hides, lumber,
stone, metal, and so on), and themselves carried through the
complete process until these materials were transformed into the
386
definitive state in which they were utilizable in the daily life of

fellow human beings-human beings who, moreover, were probably not uncommonly personally known to the craftsman himself.
When we come to consider now, thirdly, our own culture, we
find that this culture fosters, in its members, a distinctly nnhealthy
psychological estrangement from the nonhuman environment,
whether part of nature or manmade.
For example, in our culture relatively few persons are fanners,
living and working in intimate relatedness with a nonhuman environment wherein nature predominates. As fanning grows
rapidly more mechanized, even here man becomes increasingly
separated, by his own artifacts, from the nonhuman manifestations of the larger nature of which he is a part. Similarly those
other inhabitants who wrest an existence from nature-lumbermen, miners, and so on-make contact with environing nature
in an increasingly indirect way, through the medium of increas..
ingly abundant and complex machinery. The formerly greatly
valued domesticated animals which aided man in his workhorses, dogs, oxen-have been largely relegated, particularly
during the past fifty years, to a position of little significanceto his
labors; he has, therefore, little occasion to experience his erstwhile
sense of respect, of meaningful kinship} toward these nonhuman
creatures.
The steadily increasing majority of the population who live in
large cities have, of course, still vastly less daily contact with nature. They work, and many of them have their homes} in buildings whose architecture is minimally expressive of the special
beauties of the environing nature of the city's geographical region.
I remember vividly, for example, the sense of unpleasant surprise
which I experienced when} after a number of days spent amid the
natural beauties of a small Maine seacoast village, I traveled into
an industrial city only a few miles away. Upon entering the city
I suddenly found myself in what could have been an ugly factory
city anywhere. This city was geographicaIly adjacent to Maine's
natural beauties, but psychologically as far removed from those
beauties as though one were now in a different world, a squalid
387
world of ugly factories and tenements in which the beauties of

seacoasts and neat litde hamlets had no part whatsoever.
Further, in our culture it is a rare inhabitant indeed, whether
city dweller or countryman, who builds his home with his own
hands. And only a small percentage of inhabitants even own the
home which has been built for them by others, or the ground
upon which their home stands. Much more often, the house and
land are owned by a bank somewhere, and I, at least, am convinced that this makes a real-however subtle-difference in the
kind of relatedness, or nonrelatedness, which one feels toward
one's "own" home and land.
The advancement of our technology has made for a psychological distancing of man not only from his home and land, but from
innumerable other elements of his nonhuman environment. Probably not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the specific tree
from which was fashioned some article of furniture which he
uses, and probably not one person in ten would even recognize
along the highway the kind of trees from which the article came.
By contrast, see the psychological linkage which Thoreau could
perceive between his own homely furniture and the nature from
which it came:
. . . It was pleasant to see [during house cleanings] my whole
household effects out on the grass . . . It was worth the while to
see the sun shine on these things, and hear the free wind blow on
them; so much more interesting most familiar objects look out of
doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its
legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn
about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be
transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads,.........
because they once stood in their midst [154g].
Not only has man in our culture lost, to a large degree, contact
with nature, in other words, but he does not view the manufactured substitutes in his possession as cherished objects with which
be has had, as it were, a richly meaningful shared experience.
388
Our culture encourages him to regard these possessions simply

as prestige symbols, to be acquired or discarded primarily in keeping with the demands of his prestige needs. Probably there are
many reasons for the prominence of this factor in our culture;
certainly two major reasons are (a) the extreme social mobility
which our culture allows, thereby rendering social prestige a matter of urgent and pressing concern to the inhabitants; and (b) a
highly industrialized, capitalistic economy which requires, for its
maintenance, that the inhabitants be perpetual overconsumers of
the products of this economy-requires that, for instance, the
inhabitants buy far more of automobiles, electrical appliances,
clothing, items of furniture, and so on and on, than these individuals actually need. Thus the average individual lives with an
overabundance of manufactured nonhwnan things about him,
and the person is considered eccentric who continues to use an
old automobile or to wear an old suit of clothes because he is fond
of it, when he has money enough to exchange it for a new and
more prestigious automobile or suit. Similarly, family heirlooms
are almost unknown, now, in urban homes.
When one works with schizophrenic patients, to whom these
matters are so important that they can no longer remain disguised,
one sees clearly how deeply a human being can cherish, for example, an old and tom shirt, or a worn purse, or a worn and, by
ordinary standards, unattractive dresser, if these things have ac..
companied the person through a great deal of life experience.
It is not, I believe, that the "normal" culture member is so very
different from the schizophrenic in this regard; it is that the
"normal') person continuingly underestimates, or entirely over..
looks, a fact which the schizophrenic simply cannot afford to
ignore: the material objects in one's life are an emotionally mean-
ingful part of it.

Certainly I would not assert that such objects possess the degree
of emotional significance to the average culture member, whose
interpersonal life is more or less rewarding, which they do for the
schizophrenic. But I surmise that when one considers the average
infants and children of the culture, we may :find that nonhuman
objects possess fully as high a degree of emotional significance
The Cu.ltural Frame of Reference
389
for these particular human beings as they do for the adult schizophrenics. Thus the culture member who repeatedly discards his
material possessions-his house, his car, and so on-for more
prestigious ones probably is not only unwittingly keeping his own
emotional life impoverished to a significant degree, but is inflicting upon any small children in his family an emotional impoverishment, a continuing series of losses, of a much more traumatic
degree. This point is readily believable to one who has come to
know, as I have, schizophrenic adults who have been the children
of rapidly socially advancing, highly prestige-conscious parents.
I recall the astonishment I felt on an occasion when my young
son expressed a great deal of personal fondness for the particular
car which our family owned at that time, a car in regard to which
I had consciously experienced little except a sense of some social
embarrassment because it was a somewhat aging Chevrolet. After
I had then taken courage from the example which my little boy
had set for me, I suffered only moderate sheepishness when, some
time later, I found myself noticing some similar feelings of personal fondness toward this "prestige symbol.n
Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson in Communication-The
Social Matrix of Psychiatry (119) find various of these cultural
factors much more accentuated in the United States than in the
countries of Western Europe, whose culture is in so many other
regards much like our OYm. They point out that Europeans, in
contrast to Americans, have great interest in protecting inanimate
objects, even going so far as to place the guarding of works of
art, furniture, books, houses, and churches ahead of the needs of
the individual. The caste society in Europe, the authors say, with
its limitations upon social mobility promotes mastery and virtuosity as ends in themselves, whereas in the United States the
worker will strive for mastery only to the point where success is
secured. and, significantly, almost all our artisans and skilled
workers are of immediate European descent. Ruesch and Bateson
note also that in America, by contrast to the situation in Europe,
houses are built to last only a generation, and in structure and
aesthetic appearance are determined by the needs of the moment.
As to the psychological consequences of the fact that we spend
390
The Nonhuman Enotronment
our lives, in this culture, amid such an overabundance of material possessions, we wonder, as we read the following passage
from Admiral Byrd's description of his solitary life in the Antarctic, whether this fact of our dally lives may not be of greater
detriment to our emotional well-being than we have realized. He
describes how he found out what it was like to live without masses
of material things:
There were moments when I felt more alive than at any other
time in my life. Freed from materialistic distractions, my senses
sharpened in new directions, and the random or conunonpJace
affairs of the sky and the earth and the spirit, which ordinarily
I would have ignored if I had noticed them at all, became exciting and portentous [22g].
Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (55), makes many relevant

and penetrating observations about our culture. He points out
that there are two ways of relating oneself to an object-in its
concrete uniqueness, or in an abstract way by emphasizing only
those qualities which it has in common with all other objects of
the same genus. A full and productive relatedness involves both
modes of relatedness, he says, and he emphasizes that in contemporary Western culture we have come to a one-sided view in
which everything is unduly abstractified, with a consequent loss,
on our part, in the relatedness to the concrete reality of people
and things. Things are experienced now, he asserts, as being mere
commodities, possessing only exchange value. And he notes that
we are still further alienated, psychologically, from the things
which surround us by reason of our ignorance of their nature and
origin. We do not understand the working of the complex machines which are part of our daily lives, nor do we know even
how bread is made, or how cloth is woven, and so on; we live
in a world of things which we can only manipulate or consume.
Having dwelt thus far primarily upon the relationship (or lack
of relationship) per se between the individual and his nonhuman
environment, I shall attempt to show how closely interrelated is
the culture members' psychological orientation toward this environment, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, their social,
391
political, moral, and philosophical attitudes and approaches to

their living with one another.
L. K. Frank has portrayed the beneficial effects upon the social
order which have flowed from man's increased understanding of
the physical processes at work in the nonhuman world about him.
He points out that the old beliefs in supernatural forces which
supposedly laid down incontestable laws governing social behavior
for all time tended to maintain the social foundations, among the
citizenry, for authoritarian govenunents; whereas Newton's insights into the physical forces actually governing the universe
encouraged people to participate in the making, and administration, of their own laws in accordance with natural laws.
But, Frank notes, though the carry-over of Newtonian concepts
of physics to man's thinking about himself was helpful in making
man less ready to assume that he stood helpless in the grip of
superhuman authority figures, these concepts nonetheless left him
feeling that, just as there were universal physical laws which
governed the processes of Nature, so was his own social life governed by similarly large-scale social processes in which his own
individual activity counted for little or nothing.
Frank asserts that here, again, more recent discoveries in the
realm of physics point the way to a still more effective participation by individual man in his own social affairs. As quantum
physics has come to realize how important is the dynamic inter..
relatedness of the single electron with the total field in which it
exists, he says, so, too, are we beginning to realize that we can
understand the large-scale operations of a society only as we can
come to understand the psychological functioning of the individual member in the social field. And with the development of
nuclear physics and the promulgation of such concepts as relativity} space...time, curved space, and so on, physics has come to
see the universe as possessing unbelievable potentiality and plasticity; this, Frank suggests, provides us with a comparably lively
orientation to social life as well.
The particular tone in which Frank speaks of these mattersa tone of soaring optimism-is one seldom heard in descriptions
of the state of social and psychological life in our culture. Much
392
more often, the voices raised about this general subject register not
exuberance but deep concern. Paul TOOch ( 156) , for instance, finds
that modem life, for the individual of our culture, is permeated
with a profound sense of meaninglessness. The particular point
which I wish to emphasize at the moment is that Tillich at least
implies, when he speaks of "man's separation from the whole of
reality" (156a), that this so-prevalent meaninglessness derives not
only from impairment of man's relationship to himself and to his
fellow men, but also from impairment of his relationship to his
nonhuman environment.
TiIIich describes how the individual's mode of dealing with his
own "anxiety of meaninglessness,') namely, by identifying himself
with something transindividual, such as authoritarian organizations, makes for fanaticism in his social life. Here again we have
then, in sum, a reference to the repercussions in various areas of
human living (in this instance, Tillich refers to the sociopolitical
area) which result from disjointedness in the individual's relationship with his nonhuman environment.
In saying that the member of our culture, habituated to dealing
with his overabundance of material possessions in a noncherishing
manner, deals with his fellow men in a way which is similarly
impoverished as regards meaningfulness, I do not wish to overstress the possibility of such a causal relationship; it may well be
that our culture simply fosters our relating alike to our material
possessions and to our fellow men in such a fashion-that these
are simply two parallel manifestations of a common cultural
cause. But I do think that the former causal relationship applies
at least to some degree. When one recalls that in terms of sheer
volume, the vast preponderance of one's total environment is
comprised of nonhuman environment, one can believe that a
culture-fostered impairment of relatedness to this vast section of
our environment can have a significant effect upon our relatedness to that much smaller section of the environment-namely,
that section comprised of our fellow human beings--and an effect
which is in the direction of similar impairment.
Fromm points out that millions of persons in our culture look
and feel like automatons; the neurosis from which they suffer is
393
not perceived as such by themselves or by other persons, for this

neurosis is regarded as "normal" in our culture. In our capitalistic
culture, Fromm protests,
.. a man, a living human being, ceases to be an end in himself)
and becomes the means for the economic interests of another man,
or himself, or of an impersonal giant, the economic machine [55h].
He says that man's relatedness to his fellow man is one between

two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other; and
that man experiences even himself as a thing to be employed
successfully on the market, rather than as a real human being
rich in emotion.
In the various critical analyses of Capitalism we find remarkable
agreement. While it is true that the Capitalism of the nineteenth
century was criticized for its neglect of the material welfare of the
workers, this was never the main criticism. What Owen and
Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and
Schweitzer talk about is man and what happens to him in our in..
dustriaJ system. Although they express it in different concepts, they
all find that man has lost his cen tral place, that he has been made an
instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that he has been
estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to, his fellow
men and to nature, that he has ceased to have a meaningful life.
I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept
of alienation [55i].
[Fromm condemns both Capitalism and Communism alike for
the following reasons:] Both systems are developing into managerial societies, their inhabitants .... automatons, who follow without force, who are guided without leaders, who make machines
which act like men and produce men who act like machines; men,
whose reason deteriorates while their intelligence rises, thus creating the dangerous situation of equipping man with the greatest
material power without the wisdom to use it.
. . . The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The
danger of the future is that men may become robots [55j].
Next, I wish to make brief mention of the influence upon
394
philosophy which derives from the relative nonrelatedness of man

to his nonhuman environment which we have seen to be a characteristic of our culture. In essence, this nonrelatedness tends, I
think, to foster one or another variety of solipsism. Solipsism is
a philosophical theory or belief (a) that the self knows and can
know nothing but its own modifications and states; (b) that the
self is the only existent thing.. Certainly William James comes
close to solipsism. when he asserts that "Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with
are . . . pure gifts of the spectator's mind" (8St).
Martin Buber, in taking issue with the philosophy of Jean-Paul
Sartre, expresses a viewpoint which amounts, in essence, to a
vigorous and eloquent rejection of solipsism, and a statement of
the importance of man's developing a meaningful, personal relatedness with an outer reality-a reality which is acknowledged
by man as being real in itself. Rejecting Sartre's belief that God
is dead and that life has no meaning or value except the meaning
which the indivi.dual man chooses to give to it, Buber asserts that
In our age the I-It relation, gigantically swollen, has usurped,
practically uncontested, the mastery and the rule. The I of this
relation, an I that possesses all, makes all, succeeds with all, this
I that is unable to say Thou, unable to meet a being essentially,
is the lord of the hour. . . . man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having
a relation with it [54e].
To go OD, now, to another point: in Chapter VII, I described

the individual's (particularly the psychotic or neurotic individual's) anxiety lest he become, or be revealed as, nonhuman; but
we know that this anxiety is a culture-wide phenomenon also. The
whole world is now, and for a number of decades has been,
occupied with great anxiety concerning what Buber terms "the
struggle of the human spirit against the demonry of the subhuman and the anti-human." My point, here, is that man's
impaired relatedness with his nonhuman environment may contribute significantly to the magnitude of this threat with which
mankind is grappling.
395
Huber, having been the leader of the Gennan Jews in their

spiritual battle against Nazism, can speak with authority about
man's large-scale inhumanity toward his fellow man. Friedman
quotes portions of the speech which Buber made upon the occasion of his acceptance in 1953 in Frankfurt of the Peace Prize
of the German Book Trade.
&; an explanation of his felt sense of duty to accept his prize,
Buber says,
Manifestations such as the bestowal of the Hansian Goethe
Prize and the Peace Prize of the Genoan Book Trade on a superannuated arch-Jew . . . are moments in the struggle of the
human spirit against the demonry of the subhuman and the antihuman.. . . . The solidarity of all separate groups in the flaming
battle for the becoming of one humanity is, in the present hour,
the highest duty on earth [54f].
It seems to me that, in our culture, a conscious ignoring of the

psychological importance of the nonhuman environment exists
simultaneously with a (largely unconscious) ooerdependence
upon that environment. I believe that the actual importance of
that environment to the individual is so great that he dare not
recognize it. Unconsciously it is felt, I believe, to be not only an
intensely important conglomeration of things outside the self, but
also a large and integral paTt of the self. That is, I hypothesize
the existence, in this regard, of an intrapsychic situation which
is analogous to that situation which is well known to exist in
neurotic and psychotic patients as regards interpersonal matters:
the patient steadfastly and sincerely denies the importance to him
of certain other persons upon whom he is unconsciously extremely
dependent and who constitute, via his unconscious identification
with those persons, important parts of his very personality.
If such a psychodynamic process goes on in our culture to a
large extent, as I believe it does, then it becomes understandable
that we are inordinately vulnerable to the anxiety lest we become,
or stand revealed as, nonhuman. Our personalities have become
so greatly invaded by elements of the nonhuman environment
with which we have unconsciously identified-c-or, to put it in a
396
more accurate way, the institutions of our culture have so greatly

hindered us from psychologically differentiating ourselves from
the nonhuman environment, from growing out of that state,
normal in infancy, of subjective oneness with the totality of the
environment-that, in a real sense, we are less than fuUy human.
Looking at these same matters from a different viewpoint) we
have much evidence from psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that
only through a growingly close and direct relatedness between the
analyst or therapist and the patient, does the latter develop a
growing sense of his own individuality as distinct from the personality of the therapist; prior to such a development, unconscious
identifications with the therapist (as well as with persons from
his past life) tend to hold sway.. I believe that a similar situation
obtains as regards the relationship between the individual and his
nonhuman environment: as long as he cannot experience the
nonhuman environment as something meaningful and real "over
against') (to use Buber's phrase) himself, he cannot, at a deep
psychological level, distinguish between himself and that environment. He can feel, then, neither a sense of profound kinship with
that environment, nor a sense of profound difference from it.
I believe that this psychodynamic formulation illuminates certain features of one of the most important and pressing situations
in our culture: our living under the imminent threat of atomic
annihilation.
Whether we think about it frequently or rarely, it remains true
today that, as Einstein wrote in 1946:
The construction of the atom bomb has brought about the effect
that all the people living in cities are threatened, everywhere and
constantly, with sudden destruction [30c]..
Now, my belief is that when other persons are conscious of this

threat, the threat usually takes somewhat the form that it does in
my own conception of it: one relatively seldom experiences it as
a threat of being killed by enemy human beings; much more
often, one experiences it that the atomic bomb (or, in more recent
years, the hydrogen bomb) threatens to destroy us. It seems to
397
me, in other words, that our basic fear is that the most alien portion of our nonhuman environment (the inorganic portion of it,
in the fonn of the atomic bomb) will rise up and destroy us, along
with the rest of humanity and much of all the rest that is animate
in our environment.'
It seems to me that the members of our culture (and, likewise)
the members of cultures in the other highly technological nations,
including Russia) tend to project the "nonhuman" part of the
self and perceive it as a nonhuman thing which threatens the
conscious self with destruction; it is too threatening to let oneself
recognize the extent to which the nonhuman environment has, as
it were, already invaded and become part of one's own personality. The real threat of atomic annihilation readily lends itself,
then, to becoming the bearer of this paranoid projection, and
thus, I think, the danger that we will indeed be destroyed by the
atomic bomb becomes intensified. That is, clinical experience with
paranoid patients shows clearly enough that the patient, after
projecting onto the outer world an attitude which is sensed as an
inner danger, threatening to the integrity of the self, unwittingly
sets about behaving in such a way as indeed to bring upon him1 Another point which is tangential to my main argument here: an additional reason for the sense of shock with which I believe most persons, like
myself,) read of. the dropping of the atom bomb upon Hiroshima is that one
sensed here that, for the fint time, man had the power to dlstro1 his own
,nviTonmlnt-the nonhuman as well as the human elements of that environment. Any 8uch anxiety was heightened by the published opinions of Var10W
nuclear physicists, after the development of the hydrogen bomb, that it might
now be posaible to produce an explosion which would set off such an uncontrollable chain reaction that the whole earth would be destroyed. Although
such a fear has since been demonstrated to be) apparently, unwarranted, our
anxiety in thia regard still finds much to feed upon: the televised photograph. of the total destruction of a small Pacific island by a test explosion;
the news reports that vast areal of the Pacific are rendered unfit not only
for human habitation but also, perhaps. to other forms of life; and so on.
In general terms, one can say that the advent of the atomic bomb was
profoundly shaking to the individual man not only because he felt his life to
be now in unprecedented jeopardy. but also because hia orientation viJ..a-vD
his nonhuman environment, a deep-seated and ordinarily unquestioned area
of his being. was shaken in its very foundations. Now he had reason to feel
that not only might he be tleslroYBd
but also that he might d.st'o,~ this
environment, this environment which throughout his life had provided him
with t among myriad other benefits, a vast protection against his own relatively puny destructive pawen.
b,.
398
self that threat which, he is convinced, looms in the outer world.

k a simple example, a paranoid patient who is unable to face the
fact that he has a brutal streak in him will perceive the personnel
as brutes and will relate himself to them in such a fashion as to
make it very difficult for them to avoid treating him in a really
brutal way; if he "succeeds" in receiving brutal treatment from
them, his own brutality remains, then, safely projected.
In medical school one of my professors who was a specialist in
diseases of the thyroid gland seemed to be convinced that most of
the world's troubles were traceable, in the final analysis, to one or
another malfunction of the thyroid gland. It is easy enough for a
specialist of any sort to see the world only through his own pair of
glasses, SO to speak, and to convince himself that there is nothing
really significant outside the narrow realm which he perceives. I
realize, that is, that for me to attempt to formulate the problem
of threatened atomic warfare as a problem which grows out of
this area of human living of which I have been making a special
study-the area of man's relatedness with his nonhuman environ.
ment-may appear to be a ridiculous oversimplification of a
problem which has, in reality, myriad roots-not only Individualpsychological and sociological, but economic, political, and so on
and on. My reply to any such objection is that the problem is, to
be sure, vastly greater than the confines of anyone scientific
specialty; but because of this very fact it can be met successfully
only if each scientific discipline contributes toward a solution any
such findings and recormnendations as emerge from the work of
that particular discipline in regard to this great and supremely
important problem.
To repeat, then, our culture tends to discourage our conscious
recognition of the importance of our nonhuman environment,
and to foster our acting out of the esteem in which we unconsciously hold it, with the result that we paradoxically deny its importance at a conscious level, while unconsciously allowing it to
hold, in our daily lives} a position whose paramountcy overshadows our own, uniquely wonderful, humanness.
I believe that our culture fosters, actually, an unconscious
identification with the ingredients of our nonhuman environment,
399
to such a degree that we are barred from experiencing either the

fulness of the realization of our own uniqueness or the rich sense
of relatedness with that environment. I believe there is at work
here a culturally fostered pathological process which one unquestionably encounters in the exploration of a deeply ill patient's
interpersonal relations: a severely neurotic or psychotic patient
may be so strongly identified, at an unconscious level, with one of
hi~ parents- with, most frequently in my experience, his mother
-as to interfere grossly with any sense of his own individuality,
and to interfere, by the same token, with any sense of relatedness
with this mother who is so poorly demarcated from his own self.
Then, when the therapeutic process has advanced sufficiently far,
one finds that there appear on the scene, concomitantly, (a) the
patient's realization that he is a separate person, and (b) his presentation to us of accounts of meaningful interaction with his
mother. It is this kind of maturational development, I think,
which the institutions of our culture make it difficult for us to
achieve with respect to our nonhuman environment.
These views which I have advanced above are ones which I
have not encountered in any literature-whether newspapers and
news magazines, or psychiatric and psychoanalytic books and
periodicals. But Einstein, in the following excerpts (the first, from
an address in 1948; the second, from a paper in 1947) presents
some views which approximate certain of those which I have
expressed above. I have italicized the especially relevant portions
of his statements:
.... where belief in the omnipotence of physical force gets the

upper hand in political life this force takes on "life of its own" and
proves stronger than the men who think to use [orce as a tool.
The proposed militarization of the nation. . . immediately
threatens us with war [30d].
It is characteristic of the military mentality that nonhuman
factors (atom bombs, strategic bases) weapons of all sorts, the
possession of raw materials, etc.. ) are held essential, while the
human being, his desires and thoughts--in short) the psychological
factors-are considered as unimportant and secondary [30e].
400
In the few years which have intervened since Einstein presented these views, international tensions have become such that
one rarely hears a voice raised for demilitarization, and it is irrelevant, both to my purposes here and to my professional qualifications, to enter into this subject. But I think it pertinent to add
a note concerning the dilemma in which we in the United States
find ourselves in this connection:
Our government is founded upon a cherishing of the worth of
the individual human being, and we reject Communism as placing the worth of the human individual far secondary to the needs
of a gigantic and impersonal State, those needs being determined
by a relative handful of persons who wield despotic power. But
in our struggle to keep up with, or preferably keep ahead of, the
military power of the Communist countries) we are driven into
more and more gigantically impersonal military projects, projects
many of which (such as the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the
intercontinental ballistic missile, the earth satellite, and other
programs) must, worst of all, be eanied on in a top-secret fashion. Such secrecy prevents not only the general public, but also
nearly all the "participants') in the projects themselves, from
really psychologically participating at all fully in what is going
on. Here the dehumanizing effects of modem scientific technology are at their worst.
Our dilemma is that if we shift our national effort away from
intensive militarization, we stand in real danger of being incorporated by countries which possess a dehumanizing political system, whereas increasing militarization tends in itself to erode
away our psychological status as participating human individuals.
Thus far I have referred, here, to the advances made by physical science chiefly in terms of their negative effects upon our
relationship with the nonhuman environment-s-by pointing out,
for instance, how these advances have fostered in us a kind of
grandiose view of the nonhuman world about us, a kind of contempt for that world which does not allow for a more psychologically meaningful relatedness with it; and by pointing out how the
superabundance of material products of our scientific technology
401
tends to surround us and shut us off from a healthier relatedness

with that environment.
But on the other hand through these advances we have become
largely free, over the past few centuries, from many of the animistic distortions which caused ancient man, and which still cause
the people of the so-called primitive societies today, to react to the
nonhuman environment with irrational fear and awe," Frank
points out not only the task which is still before us in this regard
-the task of reformulating culturally ingrained patterns of thinking and feeling so that these patterns will be more in accord with
the recent findings of the physical sciences-but suggests by implication that through the successful accomplishment of this task
we can reap great benefits in terms of an improved psychological
relatedness with the physical universe about us.
And Einstein emphasizes, in a similar vein, the advances in
man's sense of security, in the face of his own self as well as of
nature, which the scientific understanding of the universe has
brought. In a description of the classical advances in astronomy
made by Johannes Kepler, he shows that such advances are won
only through the overcoming of barriers, barriers both outside
and inside oneself, which have been placed there by the existing
culture. He points out that Kepler was investigating a subjectnamely, the movements in space of the earth and the other planets in our solar system-which held immediate danger for him
who professed the truth, because this troth challenged the authority of the Church. He shows that Kepler's lifework was possible
only after the latter had succeeded in freeing himself to a great
extent from the intellectual traditions, concerning both religion
and science, into which he had been born. And he describes how
Kepler's letters reveal, in occasional remarks about astrology. a
:I Although it may be, u
was suggested by my comments about our psychological reaction to the threat of atomic annihilation, that we are less free
from animism than we might like to suppose; perhaps some animism persists, unbeknownst to us because it wears a modern guise in keeping with
modern technology. To be sure, we are no longer convinced that the nonhuman environment is peopled with devils and ghosts; but we react to the
atomic bomb and to such concepts or phenomena as "creeping socialism,"
"inflation," "television," and so on, as though they were living and threatening entities.
402
continuing inner struggle with the animistic beliefs of that day.

The values-including psychological ones--to mankind of
Kepler's discoveries have not yet ceased; for instance, they will
presumably form one of the foundation stones, some day, of interplanetary navigation, which in tum can bring to man the enrichment, not only material but also psychological enrichment, of a
first-hand knowledge of worlds other than his own.
The achievements of the natural sciences can help man to
develop a richer ego than was ever possible in prescientific times.
Modem means of transportation and communication which have
been brought into existence by these sciences enable the average
member of our culture to come into contact with his nonhuman
environment on a vastly broader--and therefore much more
varied-scale than was ever attainable by his predecessor of several hundred years ago. The latter could seldom, if ever, range
far beyond the town or the valley where he had his home, whereas
the average person now can know at first hand much of the rich
variety, as regards nonhuman environment, which is offered by
our whole country-its forests and plains, its mountains and seacoasts, its great and infinitely varied works of man himself. And
travel even to foreign lands is, of course, much more within the
reach of the average person that was even remotely possible a few
hundred years ago.
The crucial issue, I believe, is whether the members of our
culture are able to integrate their experiences a of this vastly
broader) richer, and more varied nonhuman environment which
science bas opened up for us within, particularly, the past two
hundred years. In so far as one can assimilate these experiences)
can make them an integral part of one's conscious self, can find
a sense of personal feeling-participation in these experiences) to
that extent they enrich the ego-they help one to become literally
a greater human being.
But, on the other hand, in so far as one is exposed to these exI A phrase I borrow from Jurgen R.uesch who, in the previoualy mentioned
book by himaeU and Gregory Bateson, expresses the opinion that "because of
the great speed of things {in the American culture], the essence of therapeutic procedures in America should consist of giving the patients enough
time to integrate their experiences" (119a).
403
periences in too great a variety and abundance, and at too rapid a

rate, for one to be able to so integrate them, to that extent they
tend instead to overwhelm the ego. These experiences then become so anxiety-laden that they must be dissociated from our
conscious experience, and subsequently such experiences only contribute to an increasing accumulation of undigested, unintegrated
"foreign bodies," as it were, in one's personality: experiences
which are not available to the conscious self, experiences which
represent a chronic drain upon one's energy to maintain them in
their dissociated state, experiences which chronically threaten to
well up from the unconscious and, with their chaotic disorder,
overwhelm the ego.
Another way of phrasing the criticism of our culture which I
have expressed in this chapter, then, is to say that the cultural
institutions (including here all the emphasis in our culture upon
the physical sciences and their products) are such as to make it
inordinately difficult for the culture members to integrate their
experiences with the nonhuman environment. The predominant
tendency is instead, I think, for us to be overwhelmed by those
experiences.
I believe that a few examples, taken along with what has already been said earlier in this chapter, will suffice to illustrate our
tendency to become overwhelmed by our contacts with a nonhuman environment which, in this culture, we find to be bewilderingly changeable and varied. An airplane trip, which to an
Anne Morrow Lindbergh-as shown in her book, North to the
Orient-r-ot to an Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Wind, Sand, and
Stars) can be a beautiful and even glorious experience of personal
participation in relatedness with the nonhuman environment, is
to the average airline passenger of today, apparently, little if anything more than a mode of getting with time-saving rapidity from
one place to another; incredibly enough, he may barely glance
out of the window during the whole trip, but instead may bury
himself, with a kind of world-weary nonchalance, in his newspaper.. Ostensibly this phenomenon of our culture is due simply
to the fact that the novelty of air travel has worn off; actually,
I believe, it is due also to the fact that the traveler has uncon-
scious anxiety about his nonhuman environment's shifting at such

a great rate that he cannot assimilate this experience as a personally meaningful one. He reacts in a very similar way, too, I believe, during the train and automobile trips which are so very
prominent a part of the lives of the people of our culture, and
which used to be, a few decades ago, relatively rare and personally
cherishedexperiences.
I have already made a number of comments about the super
abundance, in our lives) of the material products of scientific
technology. Here again one can find a homely example of what
I am talking about. The average home library today is one in
which only a small percentage of books have been read, or ever
will be read, by their owners; and a much smaller percentage
of the books are personally cherished. The others are there largely
for appearance's sake, for reasons of social prestige. Books today
are produced in a superabundance far beyond the output even a
few decades ago, and are more or less shoveled upon us through
the medium of giant book clubs which utilize, in their vastly impersonal operations, various procedures (of marketing their
product and billing the consumer for it) which science had not
yet brought into being several decades ago. We have come a
long way, and in some psychological respects a quite unfortunate
way, from the days when one bought much fewer books, one
bought them at the neighborhood bookstore, one selected them
with one's own hands, one took them home and read them, and
consequently, much more often than is now the case, one cherished them as valued participants in one's life.
It is of course obviously easy, but equally obviously questionable, to assume that the "good old days" were really much better
than the times in which we are now living. With that matter of
the books, I personally value the advantages which are afforded
by these giant book clubs-the ease with which one can obtain a
greater variety of books than could readily be procured in earlier
years, even within my own lifetime. The crucial point, again, is
for the individual culture member to determine for himself to
what degree he can integrate his experiences with the nonhuman
environment-to find out that degree beyond which such experi-
The Cultura.l Frame of Reference
405
ences become a psychological burden and disruption to his self.

Schizophrenic patients, for all their undeniably great differences from normally functioning human beings, provide, once
more, a striking example of the pathological process which, at a
much lower intensity and in a much less readily detectable fonn,
I consider to be taking place here on a broad scale among the
"normal" members of our culture. One patient of mine, for instance, whose state of regression was so profound that her ego
remained very feebly integrated for many months, showed this
process in an especially clear-cut fashion.
She was able to tolerate only the barest simplicity as regards
room furnishings; whenever the ward personnel tried in a wellmeaning way to afford her somewhat more of what are ordinarily
thought to be the bare conveniences of living, her personalityfunctioning became so profoundly fragmented that in my hours
with her I had no feeling of being able to deal with any remnant
of integrated ego in her for more than an occasional fleeting moment. In later months, as she became well enough to venture an
occasional trip to my office for her hours, she showed, while in it,
an unmistakable sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of material objects in the room, objects which to us are takenfor-granted concomitants of daily living, but which to her evidently possessed a kind of myriad, chaotic unfamiliarity.
In still later months, she became able to go with an attendant
for occasional shopping trips in the shopping district a half mile
from the sanitarium. Prior to each shopping trip she had become,
by now, sufficiently well integreted so that I was able to have
meaningful communication with her throughout the greater part
of each therapeutic session. The attendant would describe her
behavior, on each shopping trip, as a kind of rather indiscriminate buying up, with hectic artificial gayety, of everything she
could get her hands upon, until the attendant placed a limitgenerally a very liberal limit-upon this, each time. During the
first therapeutic session with her following the shopping trip, then,
I would find her in a shockingly worsened state-almost palpably
fragmented, and quite unable to maintain any continuous relatedness with me whatsoever. It would be two or three days
406
before she was able to regain the level of personality integration

which she had manifested prior to the shopping trip. I had the
distinct impression that each of these first several and rather widely
spaced shopping trips, for which she evidenced a pathetic yearning, proved to be quite overwhelming to her, and that one of the
reasons why the experience had this traumatic effect upon her
was that she was exposed, each time, to such a multitude and
variety of objects in the nonhuman environment that she was
quite unable to cope with them psychologically.
In the cases of a very considerable percentage of the psychotic
patients with whom I have worked, I have seen evidence that one
of the reasons for the patient's initial seeking (consciously or unconsciously) hospitalization was that the hospital represented a
refuge wherein the nonhuman environment is relatively simple,
a refuge from a world in which he had found the comparable
environment to be progressively overwhelming to him. It is as
though he had to find surroundings where the number and variety
of incoming perceptual stimuli are sharply reduced, reduced to a
level, now, such that he could deal with them while simultaneously dealing with the great amount of nonintegrated memories
of past experiences.
I am well aware that the members of our culture are not all .
or preponderantly, schizophrenic. But a not inconsiderable percentage of them are, and even that great majority who are not
schizophrenic may bear more similarity with schizophrenic patients than is at all obvious, This is one of the many respects in
which, I believe, we "normals" are akin to the schizophrenic
patient: we, too, have a limited tolerance for exposure to complexity and change in our nonhuman environment, a limit up to
which we can find such complexity and change to be ego enrich..
ing, but beyond which it becomes disintegrating to us.
My colleague Joseph H. Smith makes the valuable observation
that we might best consider it a quite open question as to what
is "the mature attitude" toward a nonhuman environment such
as man had never before, until a relatively few decades ago, confronted--a nonhuman environment which is, for the first time in
the hundreds of thousands of years of mankind's existence on
407
earth, dominated, in a breathtakingly accelerating degree, by

man's own scientific devices. Smith points out that one of the
primary attributes of maturity is the courage to brave the uncertainty aroused when one faces such an open question rather than
fleeing to some pat "answer" as a refuge.
Such a note of healthy skepticism, of searching for ever more
meaningful "answers" rather than settling for lesser ones, should
certainly characterize the individual who aspires toward unceasingly deepening personal maturity in a mid-twentieth-century
world made up of not only human beings and the face of Nature,
but also of increasingly awesome scientific devices. But it is still
rightful, I believe, to point to a circumstance of his life which will
always be there, and which can help him find the courage to face
his future with open eyes: his relatedness with Nature, a relatedness which, though raised to increasingly complex levels which
bear less and less similarity to Thoreau's relatedness with. his
homely environment at Walden, will always be there for him to
feel if he will but open his heart to it. It is there, for him to feel
and know, in the working of man's proudest scientific achievements.
To cite but a single example, one can sense this relatedness
between man and Nature when one stands on the darkening land
at twilight and sees, high above the sunset, a transcontinental jet..
liner drawing its golden vapor trail, thin as a pencil line and
straight as an arrow, slowly-at this vast distance-across the
sky. Here is beauty which man could not create alone, and which
Nature could not create alone; here is beauty which man and
Nature, working through man's increasing knowledge of Nature's
processes, can create only in their mutual relatedness.
PART
FIVE
TOWARD THE FUTURE
The Potential Value in Further

Investigation oj This Subject
CHAPTER
15
Further exploration of this subject can be expected to yield information which will, I believe, be of significant value in various
areas of scientific endeavor and human living. In this concluding
chapter I shall deal with three such areas. Of these, I shall take
up first that one which is most concrete, and then go on to the
other two, increasingly abstract and theoretical, areas.
The Daily Care oj Institutionalized Psychiatric Patients

Much that has been said in this book has implications for the
administrative and nursing care of hospitalized psychiatric patients, and if such work will be approached with an eye to finding
out more about the significance of this general subject, many additional implications will, I think, come to light-implications
for improvement in our care of these patients.
412
When one realizes how integral a part of the deeply psychotic

patient's self is formed by the nonhuman environment, how a
total loss of the familiar nonhuman environment may be experienced as, literally, a loss of the sense of self, then one may be
somewhat less ready to recommend hospitalization in the first
place. And if-as will surely still be the case in a great many
instances-it is impossible for the patient to be maintained in
that environment which is familiar to him, then at least we may
see if he can benefit from being permitted to keep with him, on
entry into the hospital, a few long-cherished personal possessions.
Such possessions might be of real help in affording him some
remnant of personal identity, some continuity in his sense of self,
upon his being admitted to a ward peopled by strangers whose actions are bewildering to him.'
I do not overlook the possibility that the patient's relationships
with the entirety of his familiar environment, including the nonhuman as well as the human ingredients of it] may have become
so detrimental to him that he needs to throw off that environment
quite completely, in order to get a fresh start in life. It is entirely
possible that he might not wish to carry with him into the hospital
any unnecessary reminders of a life which has become so bankrupt for him. But at least we should give him. a chance to have
them if he wishes them.
And even if such things could not be a useful part of his life
at the outset of his hospitalization, later on, after he has passed
through the most profound phase of his illness and is trying to
make contact with such elements of his prepsychotic life as can
be built into the foundation of a new and better existence, such
formerly cherished personal possessions may now come upon the
scene in a constructive, integrative way. Dr. Otto A.. Will has
done some (unpublished) work at Chestnut Lodge in this regard,
work of sufficient promise so that further efforts along this line
I After the above passage had been writteD t in a preliminary draft, there
appeared the volume, Chf"onie Schizophrenia, by Freeman, Cameron, and
McGhie) which contains a brief discussion of the importance, to hospitalised
schizophrenic patients, of their personal possessions, and which notes that "the
habit of dressing patients in the clothing of others has a marked effect in
perplexing them and reinforcing their doubts about their personal identity"
(45b) .
Toward the Future
413
are worth making, in a research spirit, to see how much of a place

there is for this kind of activity as a part of the over-all hospital
treatment of patients. The data which I presented in Part Three
suggest that patients, in the course of development of a psychotic
illness prior to hospitalization, can in many instances maLntain
meaningful relationships with some of the nonhuman elements
of their environment (a dog or cat or horse, or a household plant,
or various material possessions) for some time after their relationships with other human beings have become swallowed up by
the illness. It may well be, then, that as they later start to emerge
from the illness, during the course of hospital treatment, relationships with nonhuman, rather than the human, elements of their
environment may be the initial development in their slow struggle
back-to reality.
If that is so, as I believe, it would then be most worth while
for us to pay attention to the patient's developing ability, or inability, to relate himself to nonhuman objects-s-whether new ones,
or ones which have been procured for him from his home. The
clinical material which I have presented here suggests that a
timely provision of such objects may help the patient to develop
a sense of self, where an unwise allowing him to be exposed to
myriad such objects, too early, may undo some ego building
which he has already accomplished. I do not mean that it is for
us simply to manipulate his nonhuman environment; more than
anything, we could gain much information of great clinical as
well as theoretical value from observing closely how the patient
himself goes about dealing with his nonhuman environment, in
the course of the deepening or lessening of his illness.
I was much interested to find, after having developed some
tentative thoughts in this direction as a result of my own experience, that Margaret Schoenberger Mahler had published in 1952
a paper which touches upon this very subject, in connection with
the psychotherapy of psychotic children. In this paper., entitled
"On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic
Infantile Psychoses" (101), Mahler describes two types of psychosis found in young children. The less severe, or symbiotic, type
occurs, she states, in children who in infancy participated in the
414
symbiotic infant-mother relationship which Mahler considers a

part of normal infancy; but these children were not able subsequently, prior to treatment, to mature beyond this symbiotic interpersonal relatedness. Of special interest to us is her discussion of
the more severe, or autistic, type of psychosis, in which a symbiotic infant-mother relationship never became established in the
first place. Concerning these children she says, in part, that
. . . the most striking feature is their spectacular struggle against
any demand of human (social) contact which might interfere with
their hallucinatory delusional need to command a static, greatly
constricted segment of their inanimate environment, in which they
behave like omnipotent magicians. . . the autistic child is most
intolerant of direct human contact. . . . Such children must be
gradually approached with the help of inanimate objects.
In line with the concept of phylogenetic regression which I

presented earlier in this book, it seems to me that many deeply
regressed schizophrenic patients experience themselves as more
inanimate, or animal, than truly human) and that many of them
go through a prolonged phase, a phase roughly analogous to in..
fancy, in which much of their meaningful relatedness has to do
with nonhuman objects, before they can move on to durable relatedness with other human beings. Further investigation of the
daily-life behavior of hospitalized patients who are in intensive
psychotherapy may enable us to discern that before they manifest
much improvement in interpersonal relationships, they have
already gone through a significant) but heretofore unnoticed by
us, evolution in their relatedness to the nonhuman elements of
their enviromnent. We shall also come to count it, I think, a most
significant landmark of progress for any particular patient to
whom most of the personnel had been reacting as being nonhuman, when most or all of them now find themselves thinking
and feeling about him as a fellow human being. And we shall
count it as similarly significant when a patient who has been addressing, or otherwise dealing with, other persons about him as
though they were inanimate objects or animals, begins to show a
realization that they are human beings. To date, we have paid
Toward the Future
415
too little heed to such clinical developments, and if they have

actually come to our attention we have had no theoretical basis
for assessing their significance. I hope that this book has succeeded
in providing such a theoretical basis..
As regards the selection of personnel for the ward care of such
deeply ill patients, it seems to me that a primary requisite should
be their having the capacity to sense, and respond to, the
fellow human being in these ill, and sometimes quite unhumanappearing persons. By contrast, it is the personnel member who
is characterologically prone to reacting to his fellow human beings
as nonhuman who does these patients the most harm. For these
patients, it seems to me, any cc human" response that another person can feel and express toward them---whether it be a response
of kindness and solicitude, or of anger or even of contempt-rnay
be felt as a form of loving relatedness; on the other hand, the
thing which they can least endure, and which is most harmful to
them, is to be reacted to as a kind of nonhuman object, as a something which is on a different plane of existence from the personnel
member himself." A head nurse who is prone to reacting to the
patients as being nonhuman objects-clothing-store mannequins,
for example-to be clothed and fed and bathed and kept quiet,
can nullify much of one's labor in intensive psychotherapy with
these patients. Chestnut Lodge has been fortunate in having only
rare experience with such nurses.
I do not mean to say that a patient should never be dealt with
as if he were a nonhuman object. It is possible that, at times when
he is minimally able to assume responsibility for himself, to be
so dealt with may come as a great relief to him. But the per
2 As one paranoid Ichizophrenic woman phrased it, with reference to aD
oft-recuning situation in her childhood when abe was witneuing a struggle
of wills between her mother and the maternal grandmother, UI wasntt even
given the acknowledgment of a piece 01 furniture in the room]" The motherJ
when not absorbed with her relationship with her own mother, was often
immersed in highly.aututic fantasies, such that her daughter could seldom
experience a perscn-to-perscn meeting with her. It is not surprising that a
patient, after this kind of experience in her formative years, cannot endure to
regard any of the actions of other persons as connoting indifference to) or
ignoring of, herself; it is Jess anxiety provoking to her to construe these
actions as expre!sive of murderow feeling or contempt toward herself, rather
than to realize that no acknowledgment of her existence is implied in them.
416
sonnel about him should not be accustomed to dealing with

people in this fashion; they should be capable of meeting the
patient as a fellow human being at the earliest indication that he
is seeking for such a relatedness..
The deeply regressed patient, more than anyone else except
for the infant, needs to have a nonhuman environment which is
not only relatively stable and relatively uncomplex, but also beautiful. Beauty is here of far more than merely aesthetic significance.
I think it not too much to say that a schizophrenic patient who
has gone through many months of living on a drab, and even
ugly, disturbed ward of a hospital has suffered the additional
trauma, beyond those which he had suffered prior to entry into
the hospital, that this drabness and ugliness has become an integral part of himse1f-a detrimental effect which will require much
additional psychotherapy, and much of a more beneficial life
experience, to undo. Contrariwise) whatever of beauty we can
bring to him may be of great and lasting benefit to his personality..
There are many other implications, from what has been presented in this book, for the hospital care of these patients. For
example, patients should be freely allowed to cherish nonhuman
objects for "sentimental") reasons, as a small child does, irrespective of the so-called practical value of these objects. They should
have much greater access to animal pets and to plants than is now
generally the case; some tentative efforts have been made at
Chestnut Lodge in providing animal pets for hospitalized patients, and further experience needs to be gained in this regard.
I shall not try to cover any further details here; such detailed
applications of what has been said here will become obvious
enough to anyone who continues to give long and serious consideration to this subject. One general benefit which I would expect to see emerge from further attention to all this is a more
meaningful collaboration between psychotherapists on the one
hand and the occupational therapy department of the hospital
on the other hand; I am assuming that the difficulty which obtains at Chestnut Lodge in this respect is present, in varying
degrees, in other psychiatric hospitals.. That department, much of
whose activity involves the patient's relating himself to the non-
Toward the Future
417
human environment (in various crafts, gardening, and other

forms of work) has thus far existed in a realm somewhat far
apart from that of intensive psychotherapy, which to date has
concerned itself almost exclusively with the patient's intrapersonal
and interpersonal relationships. Heretofore our psychoanalytic
theory has been too limited to help us bridge the gulf to a meaningful collaboration with those fellow personnel members who
work in the occupational therapy branch of the hospital. I hope
that this book will provide some of the theory which can fonn
such a bridge.
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

An increased alertness, on the part of the analyst or therapist,
to data concerning this general subject as those data come to light
in the course of his ongoing relationship with the patient will, I
think, yield rich information both for a deeper understanding of
individual psychology and interpersonal relations in general, and
for improved psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique.
Particularly would we benefit, I think) as regards a deeper understanding of early ego formation.
An increased ability to detect data of this sort) and to assess
their significance, would enable us to arrive at psychodynamically
more meaningful diagnoses, sounder prognoses, and more effective
techniques of therapeutic intervention.
For instance, we may be able to find that the various types of
neurosis and psychosis involve differing psychodynamics, each
characteristic for that particular variety of illness, in this area
of the patient's relatedness with the nonhuman environment. If it
were established that this is the case) then in undertaking psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with a patient of any particular diagnostic category, we would not consider our task complete until
those particular psychodynamics had been dealt with and the
neurotic or psychotic mechanisms here had been resolved.
I have not sufficiently explored this matter of differential psychopathology in respect to the relatedness of different patients to
the nonhuman environment, to attempt more than to suggest
418
The Nonhuman Enuuonment
some of the possibilities with reference to a few diagnostic entities.

As regards schizophrenia, it seems that one characteristic feature is the patient's inability to conceive of a nonhuman environment which is apart from, and vastly larger than, either individual man or collective mankind. The patient instead seems to conceive of that environment as an expression of the personality of
an omnipotent other person, or of himself at those times when he
himself is subjectively omnipotent. I do not know, but I think
there may be further distinctions among three of the subtypes of
schizophrenia. The paranoid schizophrenic seems relatively inclined to conceive of the nonhuman environment as being under
the more or less finn control of some omnipotent human beingwhether another human being, or himself. By contrast, I have
seen some evidence that the catatonic patient conceives of himself
as coterminous with a nonhuman environment in a state of imminently threatening chaotic uncontrollability. "And from what I
know of hebephrenic schizophrenia} it appears that the "self" of
anyone of these patients exists in the form of innumerable fragments, completely indistinguishable to the patient from a similarly
highly fragmented nonhuman (as well, of course, as human)
environment. These three different types of ego states can be
found in the course of future investigation, I think, to have their
parallels in the early ego development of the normal infant
Concerning hysteria, Harry Stack Sullivan (151) has made
the comment that the hysteric was treated, during childhood, as
a toy-"as something of a plaything-a decoration of the parent's
personality-s-rather than as a growing personality," and my findings in my own work with such patients have indicated likewise
that this is one of the characteristic features of this kind of
neurosis.
As regards obsessive-compulsive states, it may be that the patient's time.consuming preoccupation with keeping (for instance)
his office and his desk top in an excessively neat condition, while
the secret contents of the desk drawers are in great disorder) may
be indicative not alone of such interpersonal difficulties as a highly
ambivalent compliance-defiance and an anal sexual orientation,
but also may be expressive of a deep-seated confusion, disorienta-
Toward tne Fuiur
419
tion, comparable perhaps with a state of ego development in the

infant wherein the latter is struggling to find order in the totality
of the outer environment. It is noteworthy that in severe compulsive states the patient spends a disproportionately great amount
of time in relating to nonhuman objects around him (whether in
straightening furniture, checking gas jets and doors, fussing with
clothing or books or papers, or what not) and a relatively small
amount of time in relating directly to other human beings; even
when he is doing the latter, he tends to deal with them as relatively unmanageable inanimate objects rather than as truly
human. All this suggests to me that part of his ego exists at a
primitive level wherein, as is perhaps the case with the normal
infant, it is struggling to establish some perceptual order in the
nonhuman environment before it can go on to form truly interhuman relationships.
In fetishism, it may well be that the patient's sexual interest in
the particular nonhuman object in question rests not alone upon
various transference determinants, sexual and otherwise, but also
upon a remnant of unconscious identification with his nonhuman
environment. His symptom may indicate, that is, a failure fully
to differentiate himself from that environment, an ego defect
qualitatively akin to that of the schizophrenic, although much
less pervasive a defect than one finds in the latter. I have had
some experience with patients who manifested the symptom of
fetishism, but not enough experience to advance this as a more
than quite tentative hypothesis.
A special study of patients' Rorschach responses) and of their
dreams in the course of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, with
an eye to data indicative of the patients' state of relatedness to the
nonhuman environment, might well yield valuable information as
to their current level of ego development, information which
would help in assessing, in the first instance, their ability to utilize
psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, and, in the second instance,
subtle evidence of change for better or worse during the course of
treatment. Also as regards prognosis, we may find historical data
indicative of meaningful relatedness with the nonhuman environment which, even in the absence of many indications of con-
420
The Nonhuman Environmen'
structive interpersonal relations in the patient's past, will show us

that the patient does indeed have some foundation to build upon
in our present work with him.
My basic conviction, here, is that in every patient, of whatever
diagnostic category, we will become able to detect, in the course
of deeply reaching psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, evidences of
an unceasing struggle toward fuller differentiation as a human
being as distinct from that which is sensed as nonhuman within
the personality. Perhaps this struggle can be more accurately
described as an unceasing effort to transform those elements of
the personality which are subjectively nonhuman into increments
of the subjectively human area of the personality. This is a
struggle analogous to, and probably at many points linked with,
the ongoing struggle to transform id into ego. It is a struggle
which is, I believe, universal among human beings, rather than
being limited to psychiatric patients. The deeply repressed nature
of this struggle, the anxiety attendant upon it, in psychoanalysts
and psychotherapists themselves accounts, to my way of thinking, for the widespread neglect of this area of psychodynamics
to date. In the future, if we can carry our psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy deeply enough to include the unearthing of this
struggle, we can help the patient to a deeper realization of his
own humanness, than is achieved at present when we work exclusively within conventional "intrapersonal" and "interpersonal"
concepts.
We need to become able to sense the existence of this struggle
behind the more superficial struggle within the patient toward
establishing a sexual identity as either a man or a woman; behind
this stands a deeper conflict) the conflict between a desire to be
human and a desire to be nonhuman. 'When a patient spends
much of a session in talking about an animal pet, we need to be
aware that this may be another manifestation of that basic
struggle, despite however many data-data still worthy of investigation in their own right-suggesting that the patient is experiencing toward the animal various feelings and attitudes which
are transferred from some other human being. When we find the
patient reacting to us as being nonhuman (as when one of my
Toward the Future
421
male patients, awed and incredulous at the degree of "my" being

so nonhuman, so like a machine, said ironically, "How long ago
did they install you at Chestnut Loclg~ght years? I didn't
know that Univacs had been invented that long ago!"), or when
we find ourselves unable to react to our patient as being a fellow
member of mankind) we can surmise that this basic struggle in the
patient is now on the analytic scene. Our cue is not to take
such developments "personally," as primarily indicative of our
own being less than human, but rather to see them as opportunities to help the patient become aware of this basic struggle within himself, a struggle which does not set him qualitatively apart
from ourself or from the rest of mankind.
The therapist's or analyst's own increased awareness of this
basic conflict) or struggle, in himself win pay dividends in his
work not only through his avoidance of taking those just-mentioned developments "personally." In addition, there is probably
a phase in the course of every psychoanalysis or psychotherapy)
a phase while the patient is deeply involved in regressive feelings
of subjective oneness with the totality of his environment, when
the therapist or analyst may participate most usefully as a kind
of nonhuman object, a relatively silent and motionless piece of
furniture, for example. For him to participate with more overt
activity may interfere with the patient's experiencing a sense of
oneness with the totality of his surroundings, and thus may interfere with the patient's going on to a really profound awareness of
himself as a distinct human entity. Thus the analyst or therapist
needs, not only for his own personal comfort in his work but also
for his performing it with deeper capability, to be able to meet
this conflict within himself.
There is another view of this matter which John L. Cameron,
a colleague on the Chestnut Lodge staff, has helped me to see.
For the deepest levels of therapeutic interaction to be reached,
both patient and therapist must experience a temporary breaching of the ego boundaries which demarcate each participant from
the other. In this state there occurs, we believe, a temporary introjection, by the therapist, of the patient's pathogenic conflicts;
the therapist thus deals with these at an intrapsychic, unconscious
422
as well as conscious level, bringing to bear upon them the capacities of his own relatively strong ego. Then, similarly by introjection, the patient benefits from this intrapsychic therapeutic
work which has been accomplished in the therapist. For both
therapist and patient to participate in this profoundly therapeutic
interaction-for, that is, this deepest level of therapy to be reached
~ach must brave the circumstance that such "interaction" tends
to give one the horrifying sensation that one is not fully human;
one tends to feel, instead, as though one were an animal, or even
something inanimate.
Cross-Fertilization Between the Behavioral Sciences and the
Physical Sciences
It seems to me that further investigation of this subject, the

place of the nonhuman environment in human personality development and functioning, may show us heretofore-unseen connections between the data of the behavioral sciences on the one
hand and the data of the physical sciences on the other hand..
That is, various of the processes which have been detected in
nature, for example, by physicists and chemists and astronomers
and so on, may have more to do with psychology and psychiatry
and sociology than we have thus far realized; and, conversely, our
study of this particular subject may very possibly unearth data
which are not Without relevance to those other sciences, the
physical sciences, which to date we have fructified practically not
at all.
Certainly a process of fertilization working in the former direction is easy to visualize; my very mode of presentation of the
subject in this book has indicated how heavily one must rely, in
investigating this area, upon the findings of persons who work in
other fields of human endeavor-physics, chemistry, embryology,
philosophy, ethics and religion, art, and so on. At many points in
my work here, I have felt convinced that if only I possessed an
expert knowledge of anyone of these other fields, I would be able
to perceive new facets of the subject before me.
T award the Future
423
Historically, psychology and the other behavioral sciences are

generally acknowledged to have benefited repeatedly by utilizing,
in the acquisition and evaluation of their own data, concepts
which have been developed by the physical sciences. In each instance, the concept proves eventually to be a chain which needs
to be" removed, but only after it has served as a guide-line in e'xpaneling our view beyond its former horizon. From the science of
hydrodynamics, Freud borrowed his hydraulic theory of the libido, a theory which carried psychiatry a long way forward before
the limit of its applicability was reached; and from the same gen.
eral field (Le., the science of physics) we have found that the
concepts of cybernetics can illuminate some of the data of human
behavior, From chemistry, the discovery of the phenomenon of
ambivalence-e-of a combined positive-and-negative electrical
charge upon certain chemical elements in solution-helped to
pave the way for our discovery of the state of emotional ambivalence in human beings; and our knowledge of the state of
dynamic equilibrium that obtains in a chemical reaction which
has progressed to "completion" helps to prepare us, after we
have passed from a study of chemistry in college and medical
school and come to the study of psychiatry, for seeing intraper...
sonal conflicts and interpersonal processes in similarly dynamic
terms. Likewise, what we have learned from physiology, of the
body's physiological state of dynamic equilibrium termed the
milieu interne by Claude Bernard and "homeostasis" by Walter
B. Cannon, assists us in becoming aware of similar dynamic equilibria in human groups-whether the families of psychiatric
patients, or the group of patients-and-personnel on a psychiatric
ward, or whatever other social group..
More than once, the influence of these physical concepts upon
the behavioral sciences has been deplored; but I think they have
been detrimental only when we have let them outlive their usefulness in our field-when we have tried to adhere to them after
they have been discarded even by the field of science in which
they originated and to which they were, once, most applicable.
W. R. D. Fairbairn, in An Object-Relations Theory of the Personali'y (38) , says in this regard:
424
It is a curious feature of modern times that the scientific atmosphere of a period appears to be always dominated by the current
conceptions of physics. . . . the scientific atmosphere of Freud's
day was largely dominated by the Helmholtzian conception that
the universe consisted in a conglomeration of inert, immutable
and indivisible particles to which motion was imparted by a fixed
quantity of energy separate from these particles. However, modem
atomic physics has changed all that; and, if psychology has not
yet succeeded in setting the pace for physics, it is perhaps not too
much to expect that psychology should at least try to keep in step
[38a].
Gregory Bateson, in the previously mentioned book by Jurgen

Ruesch and himself (119), presents evidence for his impression
that psychiatric thinking is currently undergoing changes in the
same direction as is the thinking in various other scientific disci..
plines. He says that there appears to be a convergence between
psychiatry and the mathematical, natural) and engineering scien-
ces.
J. Robert Oppenheimer in The Open Mind (110) expresses)

on the other hand, concern over what he regards as a tendency
toward increasing compartmentalization of the different sciences
from one another, and particularly compartmentalization of science as a whole from the daily thinking and living of the nonscientist majority of our people.
I know that it is a very happy occasion at the Institute [the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton of which Oppenheimer
is director] when some piece of work turns up which is of interest
to both the mathematicians and the physicists. I t is a very rare
occasion and we tend to ring bells when a small bit of cement can
be found between their interests [I lOa].
I believe that the science of today is subtler, richer, more relevant
to man's life and more useful to man's dignity than the science
which had such a great effect on the age of the enlightenment,
had such a great effect, among other things, on the forms and
patterns, traditions and hopes--reflected in our Constitution-of
human society. Science is not retrograde; and there is no doubt
that the quantum mechanics represents a more interesting, more
Toward the Future
425
instructive, richer analogy of human life than Newtonian mechanics could conceivably be. There is no doubt that even the theory
of relativity, which has been so much vulgarized and so little understood, that even the theory of relativity is a matter which
would be of real interest to people at large. There is no doubt that
the findings of biology and astronomy and chemistry are discoveries that would enrich our whole culture if they were understood.
And what is perhaps more troublesome, there is a gulf between
the life of the scientist and the life of a man who isn't actively a
scientist, dangerously deep [110b].
It seems to me that if psychiatry is ever to arrive at the proud

day when it can unearth findings which will be of value to the
natural sciences, that day can best be reached by our pursuit of
this particular subject, the psychological significance of the nonhuman environment in human living.
It may well be that the individual natural scientist who has
gained unusually great access to, awareness of, and psychological
freedom vis-a-vis, that portion of the nonhuman "environment"
which is in himself will be in an unusually favorable position to
make significant discoveries about the nonhuman environment of
the universe about him. And surely his advance to a position
from which he can make such discoveries will be facilitated if he
lives in a climate of public opinion which is relatively enlightened
with regard to the role of that environment in human living.
I believe that psychiatry-and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in particular--may come to be of value in this regard, in
three different respects. First, we may help the individual natural
scientist to achieve a fuller awareness of the nonhuman "environment" within himself. Secondly, we may make some contribution
to a more enlightened public opinion with regard to this subject,
possibly through such publications as this one and, more probably,
through sufficiently deep-reaching psychoanalysis or psychotherapy with our patients to include this area of their personality
development. Thirdly, analysts and therapists who have achieved
some detailed familiarity with one or another of the natural sciences may, in the course of exploring this area of personality development in themselves and in their patients) detect processes at
426
work which can be found to have analogues, as yet undetected,

in the processes of the physical universe about us.
To return to earth now, in closing, after having entered into
increasingly speculative realms, we come to the solid and unmistakable fact that we simply cannot know, ahead of time, what
benefits may flow from research into any particular subject. But
there is every reason to expect that the fruits of further investigation concerning this subject which I have been discussing will be
abundant indeed.
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420. (5) P4 1884 (t) PP4 80-81, 361. (u) p, 418. (v) pp.
2528., 145. (w) p. 361. (x) p4368. (y) pp. 370-371. (z)
P4 461.
J
Whyte, L. L. The Next Development in Man. New York:
Mentor Books, 19504 (a) p. 61.
Winnicott, D4 W. Transitional objects and transitional phenomena-a study of the first not-me possession. Int. ]. Prychoanal., 24: 89-97, 1953.
Winnicott, D4 W. Withdrawal and regression (1955). In:
D. W. Winnicott-Collected Papers. New York; Basic
Books, 1958, PP4 255-261.
Winnicott, D4 W. Metapsychological and clinical aspects of regression within the psycho-analytical set-up. Int. [, Psycho4nal., 36: 16-26, 1955. (Reprinted in: D. W. WinnitottCollected Papers. New York: Basic Books,1958J pp. 278-294.)
Wordsworth, W. Lines composed a few miles above Tintern
Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour,
July 13J 1798J A Treasury of Great Poems English and
American" edited by L4 Untenneyer. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1942, pp. 638-641.
Zilboorg, G. A History of Medical Psychology4 New York:
Norton, 1941.
Index
Ackerman~ N. W., 36
Ac.ting out, 252
Adler. A., 3
Adolescence, 37, 89-99 t 102
Aebenold, P. C., 9
Andersen, H. C.) 181
Animals, SII Dog, Identification,
Psychology, Transference
Animism" 6-7, 15, 35-36, 44~ 52, 5863, 66, 83) 147, 247-249, 292295, 302-304~ 309310, 396-397,
401
Anthropology, 6-7, 12,3 23 t 35-36J 38,
4~45J 88, 110-112, 383
.o\nxiety
in infancy, 30-53" 56, 69, 84, 151J

153-154
s also Castration anxiety~ Sex
Arieti, S.J 174
Arlow, J. A.J 331
Art(iBt), 11, 129-130, 248-249
.Autism, S04, 378
Bak, R. C., 145
Balint, M..) 34, 269-270, 282.283,

375-379
Bateson, G., 21) 389, 402, 424
Behrens, M. D., 36
Benjamin, J. D., 174
Benson, E. F.. , 266-267
Bernard, C., 423
Bertschinger, H., 254
Bexton, W. H., 49-50, 166
Biology) 12
Bleuler, E., 270, 304
Body image, 61, 128J 152-156, 178197, 234, 242,3 317 ..318
Borderline cases) 50,3 245, 291-292,
297, 359
Bornstein, B., 73
Boss, M.,48
Bowen, L. M., 170
Bradbury, R., 2#-245
Brain damage, 35
Brill, A. A., 326
Brodey, W. M., 170, 201.202, 270
Buber, M., 102, 116-119, 394-396
Burnham, D. L., 310
Bychowski, G., 304
Index
442
Byrd. R. E., 125-126, 131, 135, 156,
167-168, 390
Calas, N.,
Cameron.
422
23~
44-45, 384-385
75, 296, 412, 421-
J. L.,
Cannon, W. B., 423

Caricature, 62, 176-1 77
Carson, R. L., 12~ 40 t 109-110
Castration anxiety, 39, 152-155
Change of function, 71-72
Chemistry, 9, 12) 423
Child (ren)
autistic, 79, 89-91~ 200-203, 413 ..
414
depression in; s"
Depression,
anaclitic; Hospitalism
normal, psychology of, 35, 66-70,
78-88, 389; see also Thought
processes in children
objectless) 68-69
psychotic, 77, 79~ 166, 196-197,
234-235) 311-312 ~ 320, 345 1
413-414
Collier. J., 182
CoUodi, C., 45
Communication, schizophrenic, 296297) 310, 338-345 ; see also
Schizophrenia, psychotherapy or;
Schizophrenia, subjective experience of the patient
Confusion, 152-154, 176, 178, 230,
241..246) 289-291~ 312-314, 317S18, 418-419; see also Dedillerentiation: Schizophrenia, subjective experience of the patient
Countertransference) 232-233, 236238~ 255-256, 349-351, 365-379
Creativity. 107, 128-130
Custance, J., I5} ~1
Dante Alighieri, 181-182
Darr, G., 200
Darwin, C. R., 4, 5
Davies, L., 133-134
Death
fear of, 16 122, 224-226, 396397

t
instinct, 4
Dedifferentiation, 58, 73.77, 129 t
143-149, 174...183, 187, 198,
242...243, 253 t 289290, 307-312,
352-354, 359-364) 368-379 t 416,
4-20-421; se also Regression
Defense, 223-249, 272-324, 344-346,
367
Dejll vu phenomena, 331
Delusions, 165-166, 183.186, 192196, 233-234, 283-288, 296,
314-316, 326.328 t 340-345) 350
Denial, 166-167, 190-191) 284, 357
Dependence, 255-256, 352-359, 395
Depersonalization, 84, 363
Depression, 97-98) 191-192
anaclitic, 58, 69
Derealization, 84
Diagnosis, problem of, 417-419
Differentiation
between animate and inanimate,
56-70~ 147, 174-177, 191-204,
377, 396-397, 420-421
between infant and mother, 29.
57-58, 63-70~ 147-148, 202
Displacement, 296-298
Dissociation, 104, 403

Dogs, 15-16, 8687, 171] 189, 255256, 300, 310-311, 326, 350
355
t
Dream screen, 44
Dreams
general remarks about, 47
of neurotic patients, 212-213, 261
264 J 354
of psychotic patients, 47-48) 146
phylogenetic regression in, 55
Dunbar, F., 311
Duncan, 1., 129
Ego
autonomy, 70-76
boundaries, loss of, 107, 129 t 145,
174-177, 187, 242-245, 308~
S88 also Dedifferentiation
development, 29-53) 71-75J 190
191J 375-379
fragmentation, 80-81, 241-246,
405-406, 418 j $" QUO Dedifferentiation
identity) see Identity
Einstein, A. 24-25, S96t 399-401
EisslerJ K. R., 147) 203, 293
Ekstein, R., 73, 79, 147) 196, 234-
235
Elkiseh, P., 59,
77~
79, 147-148, 202-
203) 242, 311 t 345

Embryology~
10, 41
Index
Erikson, E. HI, 50, 71, 76, 80, 92,
103, 318
Ethics, 13
Ethology, 131-132
Evolution, Darwinian" 12, 40 t 109
110, 265
Fairbaim, W. R. D., 34" 423-424
Fairy tales, 4, 45, 181
Federn, P.,) 365
Feeding, early experience, 30-33, 39
Fenichel, 0., 29, 38, 52, 165) 190191, 308-309, 326
Ferenczi, S., 66, 73
Fetishism, 65, 419
Field theory, 23-25
Fountain, GI, 92
Frank, L. K.) 1,) 122-123t 383384.,
391
Freeman, T., 73~ 296) 412
Freud, A.) 31, 304
Freud, S.
bibliographical references to, 3., 4,
5, 25~ 52
on death instinct, 4
on development of object relations,
34, 71
on ego development, 74, 76, 191
on libidinal development, 144-145,
423
on mants animal nature, 4, 5, 254255, 326
on narciJsism, 34
on schizophrenia, 34, 144) 159~
160, 165
Friedman, M. S., 117-118, 395
Fromm, E., 43, 105-106, 119, 128,
246247, 390, 392-393
Fromm-Reichmann, F., 372
Furman, E., 77, 147J 166, 312
Galsworthy, 1.,) 93, 97
Gheerbrant, A., 110-112
Ghiselin, B., 129130
Gibson, R. WI' 291
Goffman, E.) 351
Goldfarb, W.~ 211
Goldstein, K., 173
Goldwater, R.,) 249
Grave,~ RI, 42
Greenson, R. R .., 245-246
Grief, 97.98" 107, 258~ 278-279., 295)
300, 332-333, 343-344~ 367
443
Hallucinations, 48, 166, g19~ 321324" 338-340, 352, 363" 378
Hamilton, E.. 6, 42, 180-181, 225226
Hartmann, H., 29, 34, 52, 57-58~ 62,
10-71, 74-76, 1#t 146, 251
Hashish, experimental intoxication
with, 364
Hebb, D.O., 49-50, 166
Heiman, M., 15-16, 88, 310-311, 326
Heron, W., 49-50, 166
Hertzman, M., 271
Herzog, M., 133-135
Heyerdahl, T ", 124.125
am, L. B., 29, 165, 113-(74) 200,
265-266
Hoffer, W.~ 29, 36-37, 57.58
Homosexualityt 145
Hospital administration, 14, 159~
351, 411411
Hospitalism, 33. 50-51, 58
Hudson, W. H.,) 92-99
Humor, 11-12, 45-47
Hypnosis, 50
Hysteria, 84J 211-214~ 308-309, 418
Identification
with animal, 1516, 36, 47-48, 82,
172-173 t 182-183, 191) 203209, 215, 218, 255-257, 266268~ 271t 310-311, 372-374
with inanimate object, 31-33) 36 t
47-51, 57-59~ 73, 77-80 9798, 147-150, 158..159) t87~
192-206~ 211..212, 216-217"
219-220J 229-23St 236-238,
242-243, 270, 311 t 345
Identity
disturbances, 92, 152, 245..246
loss of, 152-153
Inanimate objects
diRerentiation from animate, se.
Differentiation
identification with, Ie, Identification with inanimate object
Inc~poration) 354
Inhelder, B.., 31, 92
Introjection, 148" 308, 369, 421; Ie,
also Identification
j
Jacobson, E.~ 34, 246, 345

James, W., 8. 84 J 106~ 108" 114.115"
t 23., 187-188, 227-228, 394
Index
444
Jung, C. G., 3, 48
Kafka, F., 182

Kanner, L., 200-202
Klein, M., 34, 299
Kris, E., 29, 58, 62, 75, 129, 176..
177, 251
Kubie, L. S., 73
Langer, S. K., 73, 81-82
Language, 62~ 64-65, 112-113, 174175;
also Communication
Levi, J., 130
Lewin, B. D., 44
Lilly, J., 49, 166
Lindbergh, A. M. t 403
Linn) L.) 16-17
Literature, 11
Litde, M.;t 73
Loewenstein, R. M.~ 29, 58, 75
Loneliness, 105, 122, 168-169~ 171,
247-249, 300..3 01, 305306
Lorenz, K. Z., 131 ..139
Loss, $" Object> loss of human;
Object. losl of nonhuman
LSD psychosis, 48-49, 158-159, 188,
309-310, 362-365
s"
Macnaughton, D., 13
Mahler. M.. S., 31, 57-59 77-80, 147148, 202-203, 242, 311, 345.
413-414
Manic-depressive psychosis, 15, 41,
163..164, 272..2 78; se also Mel..
ancholia
Marett, R. R., 984
McGhie, A., 73) 296, 412
Mead> M., 23, 44-45, 88, 384-385
Melancholia, 42, 107-108, 155 187188; see also Depression. Grief,
Manic-depressive psychosis
Mescaline, experimental intoxication
with, 364
Moore, H., 128
Moravia, A.., 219-220, 345347
Mother-child relation
in normal development, see Differentiation; Ego development;
Feeding. early experience;
Object relations, development
j
of
in schizophrenia, 139. 169-1 73,

199-203, 206-211, 215-216,
236-238~ 258 ..261, 265-266,

270, 300, 356, 415
Mourning, 304; Stl, Qlso Depression,
Grief
Multiple therapy, 359-361
Mysticism, 13, 106, 108, 118
Myths, 4, 6, 41-44, 180-181, 186,
225-226, 247
Narcissism
primary, 34, 61
regression to primary. 144-145 J 160
Nature
identification with works of, 12..13,
47, 104~ 106, 123, 125..126,
246-24-7
pJychologicaI significance of, x~ 1113, 17, 8889, 92-139, 156,
246-247, 326, 383-384, 406407
Nunberg, H., 186, 188, 308
Object
animate and inanimate) 58' Differentiation, Identification
loss of human, 20, 39, 69~ 80.81,
304
loss of nonhuman, 20, 39) 55-56,

152-160. 323, 3+5, 397
transitional, r" Transitional ob..
jectl
Object relations
developmen t of, 29-53, 65..82, 146
147, 375-379
undifferentiated phase of, 29-53,
70-76, 81-82, 103, 143-144J
170, 176, 375-379
Obsessional neurosis, 79, 86~ 89.91,
157~ 418..419
Occupational therapy, 14-15, 416-41 7
Oedipus complex. 158
Omnipotence, 39, 88~ 106-107, 130135, 138-139, 233-241
Oppenheimer, J. R., 424-425
Pearce, J. 271
Perception
in infancy, 65, 76
in schizophrenia, 166-167,269288,
326-333, 338-345> 850,1 359
365; s" also Schizophrenia,
subjective experience of the
patient
445
Index
Philosophy, 12-14, 115-116, 390-394
Phobias, 65, 308-309, 326
Phylogenesis, 10, 40
Physics, 9, 12, 24-25, 391, 423-426
PhyJiology, 8, 9, 423
Piaget, J., 17-18, 30, 37, 50, 57-60 t
92. 103, 146
Picasso, P.~ 129..130
Play therapy, 299, 318
Poetry, 11, 91, 123
Pragmatism, 13-14
Primary love, 34Prognosis, 4-17, 419420

Projection, 190-191
on to nonhuman en\1ironment, 16,
78-82, 307-324, 396-397; SI8
also Dedifferentiation
Psychoanalytic therapy and tech..
nique, 167, 375-379, 417-422;
S88 also Paychotherapy; Schizo..
phrenia, psychotherapy of
Psychology
animal. 8
comparative, 8, 34-36
Psychotherapy
with silent patients, 84, 257, 294295, 356362, S68-379; see
also PsychOanalytic therapy
and technique; Schizophrenia
psychotherapy of
Rina, Norman C., 79

Rorschach test, 270-271, 419
Ruesch, J 21, 389, 402, 424Russell, B.) 13-14
I)
Sachs, H., 60~ 61. 73, 144, 309

Sachs L. J., 73, 79, 147, 196-198
Sadism, 205
Saint-Exupery, A. de, 403
Saroyan, W., 46
Same, Jean-Paul, 394Savage C., 48-49, 158..160, 188,
309-310, 362-365
Schilder, P., 42, 146, 155, 234
Schizophrenia
acute, 151, 157-158 187, 257-258,
309
catatonic, 74, 84, 144, 186-187.1
203, 236-238, 297, 301-302,
308, 359, 418
childhood, S'8 Child (ren) t autistic; Child (ren}, psychotic
hebephrenic, 74. 253, 255-257,
332-333. 418
object relations in, 145-146; $66
also Dedifferentiation; Regres..
sion, "phylogenetic"] Schizo..
phrenia, subjective experience
of the patient
paranoid, 74, 84, 114, 138-139,
145, 160-161, 168-169 172173, 183-186, 192-198, 206210, 226-227) 253. 258-261,
283..288, 296-297, 304-306)
314-316) 340-345, 356-359,
397-398, 415, 418
psychotherapy of, 51, 84, 160-163,
167, 172, 175-176, 18g.187,
191-196, 202-219~ 226238,
247-248J 253, 255-261) 278S33~ 338-345, 348-379, 397399, 405-406, 418
subjective experience of the patient, 41-42, 48, 51, 83, 98,
114, 116, 136-139) 146-154,
157-160, 165-169, 179, 183219, 229-233, 236-248, 252 ~
258, 268, 278-333, 338-345 t
350-365, 405-406, 415, 418
Scbweitzer, A., 13
Schwing, GI, 252, 372
Science, 8, 17. 391, 399-402, 406401, 422-426
j
Radin, P., 384-385

Rank, B., 73
Rank. 0., 3
Rapaport, D.) 50, 71, 74-76, 115,
160
Recreational therapy, see Occupational therapy
Regreuion) 250-252
fear of, 179.190, 242-243, 266-268.
283-288, 369
in service of ego. 129, 250-268
~hylogenetic,u 4041, 55, 97-98,
105-107, 145, 179-180, 250268, 283-288 jIflS.,
also
Dedjf..
ferentiation
Religion
Christian~ 7, 8, 104, 106, 181,
227228
Eastern, 186-187
Greek, 7, 104primitive, 7, 82, 247
Ribble. M. A., 93
Index
446
Scott, W. C. M., 128-129, 354Searles, HI F.) 62, 245-246J 295 J 354,
369
Sechehare, M. A., 252
Sensory deprivation, 49.51, 166-167
Thoreau, HI DI~ 99, 127, 135-136,

156, 248 J 387
Thought processes
development of) 37, 63, 73-74,
174-177
Sex
in children, 62
in "primitive" people, 62, 64-65,
385
in schizophrenia, 62~ 84~ 146, 148
149, 173..177, 192-196, 286287, 339-340, 343-345, 364365
Thurber, J., 12, 45
Tillich, PI' 122, 130, 392
Totemism, 4, 16
Toys, 22, 50, 66-70, 80, 85
Transference, 295, 314-, 325-337,
350-354
to animals, 16~ 326
to therapist as nonhuman, 255256, 351-362, 365-379, 421
Transitional objects, 22 t 6670
Treatment, see Psychoanalytic therapy and technique; Psychotherapy
Trevett) LI D., 43
anxiety concerning, 96, 99, 188190, 204, 228-233, 263-264,

344-345
identity disturbances in regard to,
188-190) 229-233, 263-264,
321-324, 420
Sharpe, EI FI, 73
Silence in treatment~ S66 Psychotherapy with silent patient
Smiling response, 31
Smith, J. H., 101, 406-407
Smith, P. B., 121
SociologyJ 351, 386-404
Solipsism, 114-115, 394
Spender, S., 129
Spitz, RI A., 31, 33, 50-51, 57-58,
60, 65-66, 69
Starcke, AIJ 31-32, 39, 153155
Stevenson, 0., 22,66-69, 88
Stevenson, R. L., 182
Stimulus nutriment, 50 J 160
Storch, A., 146) 165 245, J09
Suicide, 268
Sullivan, H. S., 3, 23, 29, 418
Superego, "archaic," 183..186, 235241, 246, 283, 316
j
Symbiosis
in normal infancy, 29-53, 72
in patient-therapist relationship,
368-374, 421-422
in schizophrenic patient's background, 259-260, 413-414
Symbol formation, 97, 66:73-74~ 80~
82, 174-177~ 192-196, 286-287,
339..340~ 343-345, 364-365
Syncretism) 35, 146
SzaIitaPemow A. B., 83
j
Tausk, V., 61. 73J 77, 145, 197.198~

308, 345
Therapy, sle Psychoanalytic therapy
and technique, Psychotherapy
Uncanny feelings. 37-38, 61, 232.

290-291~ 309, 365-367
Unconscious, 337, 344, 399
van Vogt, A. EI, 243
Werner, H.) 30, 34-36; 38 45, 59-60 J'
62-65, 111, 144, 146, 165-166,
309, 364
Whitehead A. N. 129
Will, O. A., 412-413
Whyte, LI L., 104-105
Winnicott) D. W., 66-67, 69, 252
Worden, F., 200
Wordsworth) W., 91~ 123
j
Zervos, c., 129-130

Zilboorg, G.J. 14
Zuni Indiana) 7

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THE MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA

THE GROUP OF SCHIZOPHRENIAS

A New Method of Psychotherapy Applied to

3-PSYOHOTHERAPY WITH SCHIZOPHRENICS

Edited by Eugene B. Brody and Frederick C. Redlich

WAY TO THE SOUL 0., THE MENTALLY ILL

MONOGRAPH SERIES ON SCHIZOPHRENIA NO.5

Harold F. Searles, M.D.

INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC.

Copyright 1960 by Harold F. Searles, M.D.

Library 0/ Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9579

Second Printing 1973

Manufactured in the United States of America

2 The Infant's Subjective Oneness with His

6 Confusion Between the Self and the Nonhuman

14 Cultural Attitudes Concerning Man in His

15 The Potential Value in Further Investigation of

with one's nonhuman environment are to be counted among those

My personal psychoanalysis, which concluded seven years ago,

An additional source of fascination which I have found in this

This whole subject may be likened to a vast continent, as yet

The late Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann made it possible for me

writing of this book. His ever-reliable support has been a major

most patient and kind, as well as extraordinarily competent,

Although the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry,

and the Problem of Adaptation, "Psychoanalysis and Develop..

Schizophrenia, by Lewis B. Hill; Martin Buber--The Life 01

the Stud')} of Interpersonal Processes." "The

Personal Meaning of the Human Figure in the Rorschach," by

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Green Mansions, by W" H. Hudson.

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry: "Problems of Nosology and

Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.: Primitive M4n as Philosopher, by

Most writings concerning human personality development and

The Nonhuman Environment

fully occupied with making his innumerable great discoveries

In the course of his development towards culture man acquired

is grown up does he become so far estranged from the animals as

The Nonhuman Envi.ronment

of course, a rich source of such anthropomorphic conceptions of

scientific endeavor, to realize so many of his uniquely human

The Nonhuman Environment

He foresees that science will turn from its pursuit of a coldly

including invertebrates as well as vertebrates, and most of these

When) lastly, we take the dimension of time into account and

The Nonhuman Environment

and laugh when James Thurber solemnly tells us of his Uncle

here, to a work by Albert Schweitzer and to one by Bertrand

It is my conviction that we need, similarly, to extend the focus

The Nonhuman Environment

their practical bearings, that the function of thought is as a guide

When we tum now to a sampling of the explorations which psy..

to me, in my own institutional work) that one reason for the

Marcel Heiman, a psychoanalyst, has written an extremely

The Nonhuman Environment

clinical documentation, an impressively original concept of his

The remarks of a number of discussants are appended to the

thesis, although not, it seemed to me, sufficiently elaborated.

In giving Heiman's paper the attention it deserves I have

The Nonhuman Environment

have thought that perhaps the nonhuman environment, if it

The Nonhuman Environment

tions, delusional distortions in his perception of himself and other

much shorter than a long novel. It is my strong impression that