The Ego
In this lecture I want to start giving an answer in contemporary terms to the extremely difficult question of who we are.
Let us begin with the notion of ‘I’. The ‘I’ remains very much what it was in Homer’s time—that is to say, the self-conscious being who uses verbal symbols, who is able to employ reason, who looks before and after. This ‘I’ was defined in its essential form by Descartes as the creature who thinks: ‘cogito ergo sum’—I think, therefore I am. More recently, beginning with Maine de Biran in the eighteenth century and going on with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, later, Henri Bergson, William James, and John Dewey, the ‘I’ has also been defined as the creature who wills. Instead of ‘cogito ergo sum’ the phrase should be ‘volo ergo sum’—I will, therefore I am.
I would say that, in fact, the ‘I’, the self-conscious being, is the creature who wills and who thinks. This creature finds itself habitually confronted by what Maine de Biran called ‘organic resistances’. In a word, the ‘I’ finds itself surrounded by a number of ‘not-I’s’ within its own organism; it is only one among a considerable number of very important and dynamic factors.
We will begin thinking of these ‘not-I’s’ on the level of the body because this is quite clearly the basic level on which the unconscious functions. At its deepest level, the unconscious is the body. We are dictated to by this strange intelligence within our physical organism which carries on and does extraordinary things without our knowing how. An obvious example of what the body can do apart from the ‘I’ is what happens when the ‘I’ gives a command. I will that my hand shall go up into the air. I will it all right, but I haven’t the faintest idea how the act is performed. We have discovered, as a result of very long and arduous research, that the processes involved in lifting my hand are incredibly complex, but I have, as a self-conscious being, absolutely no idea of what they are.
I merely give a command and leave it to ‘somebody else’ to carry it out. Furthermore, this ‘somebody else’ works in an almost infallible way, if we leave him alone, to carry on the main processes of our bodily existence. The heartbeat, the digestion, the respiration, the glandular secretions, the healing process—all these things go on without the ‘I’ being in any way able to help them. In fact, what are called psychosomatic diseases are the consequences of the ‘I’ and the personal unconscious interfering with the otherwise almost infallible proceedings of this deeper self within us.
What on earth is this ‘deeper self’ on the physiological level? We have no really satisfactory name for it at present, although in the past we had some names. In the Aristotelian psychology and physiology there was a kind of trinity of soul: there was the rational soul, which was the soul belonging to the ‘I’, and there were also the vegetative and the animal souls, which looked after the physiological processes in the body. We have, then, to think in terms of this strange kind of physiological intelligence, which is looking after us without our knowing how it does its work, and which we can’t help, but which we can interfere with.
We can observe this physiological intelligence in certain animals. There is, of course, the intelligence of the instincts, which is remarkable enough and which has been developed by evolution in the course of millions of years. But over and above instinctive purposive actions, there are actions carried out by the ‘not-I’—the vegetative soul or entelechy—which are not instinctive at all and which yet betray the most exceptional degree of intelligence and purpose.
Perhaps one of the most fantastic examples of this kind of physiological intelligence is the ability of the parrot to imitate the human voice. The parrot presumably listens to the human voice; is conscious, in so far as parrots are conscious—and I suppose they are conscious; takes some kind of interest in what is being said; wishes—heaven only knows why—to reproduce it; and then something else takes over. The remarkable physiological intelligence within the parrot, which is infinitely more intelligent than the parrot itself, proceeds to manipulate literally hundreds of muscles in the parrot’s speaking apparatus—a noise-making apparatus which is utterly different from the human one: The parrot has no teeth and no soft palate, its tongue is perfectly different from ours, its vocal chords are different, and it has a beak.
Yet it is able to reproduce articulate human speech so well that sometimes human beings are actually deceived by it. And very often parrots, with their curious sense of humour, will annoy dogs by imitating their masters and calling them. The more one thinks of this extraordinary behaviour, the odder it becomes; it has nothing to do with instinct and it has nothing to do with biological survival. But parrots, for some unknown reason, desire to imitate, and their physiological intelligence is able to arrange the relevant muscles so as to reproduce the sounds it hears with a precision which no merely conscious mind could possibly equal.
Something similar occurs in very small infants. The fact that infants at a very early age will smile back at a smiling face is the result of an imitative process. When such infants see a smile, there is something within them which proceeds to arrange the muscles of the face in such a way that the smile is reproduced.
We see then that over and above the merely vegetative faculties—the power of keeping the heart beating, the respiration and the digestion going—the physiological intelligence is capable of very remarkable ad hoc performances. In our conscious life these take place all the time. We visualize something we want to do and it is done—not by the ‘I’, but by this extraordinary thing we carry about inside us. It is one of the basic physiological facts with which the ‘I’ is associated, one of the powers with which it has to live.
Another physiological fact with which the ‘I’ has to live is the body’s morphology, its actual shape and structure. What influences do these have upon our psychological life? Here obviously the most remarkable fact about human beings is that they are very different from one another—which illustrates the general evolutionary tendency that the higher up in the scale of evolution a species is, the more profound the variations within it: the most highly variable species is homo sapiens.
Along with these morphological variations, there are also very remarkable biochemical variations within the human species, and it is possible to carry on human life with quite different biochemical arrangements. This biochemical variability is one of the things which annoys pharmacologists very much, because unfortunately different human beings will react in entirely different ways to the same drug; the one desire of any scientist is to have a standard that he can work upon, and the human being is very, very far from standardized. It is this tremendous variability within the physical organism which is at the basis of all our moral ideas about the goodness of democracy and the value of such things as tolerance and living and letting live.
It seems pretty obvious that creatures which are so extremely different from one another physically are probably different from one another psychologically. It would be very surprising if hereditary differences as great as we can observe between one individual and another should not be correlated with very considerable differences in their behaviour and in their general psychological set-up. Indeed, the realization of the interdependence of mental behaviour and physical structure goes back to great antiquity. It was formulated by Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, who spoke about two main physical types—what he called ‘phthisic’ habitus and ‘apoplectic’ habitus. The apoplectic habitus is the sort of big, burly, rather fattish, typical businessman or politician, who is going to have the renal-cardiac syndrome in later life. This is still a variety of human being we clearly recognize. The phthisic habitus was a slight mistake. Hippocrates evidently thought that the thin, slender type was particularly subject to phthisis or tuberculosis, but there is no particular evidence to show that this is the case.
Aristotle had a very curious approach to the mind-body problem: He tried to correlate mental characteristics with only one physical characteristic. For example, he was very interested in the shape of the nose. He was also interested in the resemblance of human beings to certain animal types, and he would classify them in this way, so that leonine-looking people were leonine in character—or, rather, like what he supposed lions to be like; we are not sure what they are like at all. There is something in this; if you look at a photograph of Garibaldi, you see he looked exactly like a lion, and he was a leonine man. But this is a very crude system of correlation.
With Galen, in the beginning of our era, we get a much more elaborate typology, a correlation between mind and body in terms of the four humours—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. It is interesting to see that this very ancient psychophysical theory has left its trace
