3

THE HUMAN SITUATION

THE KEY TO HUMANISTIC
PSYCHOANALYSIS

THE HUMAN SITUATION

Man, in respect to his body and his physiological functions,
belongs to the animal kingdom. The functioning of the animal is
determined by instincts, by specific action patterns which are in
turn determined by inherited neurological structures. The
higher an animal is in the scale of development, the more flexi-
bility of action pattern and the less completeness of structural
adjustment do we find at birth. In the higher primates we even
find considerable intelligence; that is, use of thought for the
accomplishment of desired goals, thus enabling the animal to go
far beyond the instinctively prescribed action pattern. But great
as the development within the animal kingdom is, certain basic
elements of existence remain the same.
The animal "is lived" through biological laws of nature; it is
part of nature and never transcends it. It has no conscience of a
22 THE SANE SOCIETY

moral nature, and no awareness of itself and of its existence; it

has no reason, if by reason we mean the ability to penetrate the
surface grasped by the senses and to understand the essence
behind that surface; therefore the animal has no concept of the
truth, even though it may have an idea of what is useful.
Animal existence is one of harmony between the animal and
nature; not, of course, in the sense that the natural conditions do
not often threaten the animal and force it to a bitter fight for
survival, but in the sense that the animal is equipped by nature to
cope with the very conditions it is to meet, just as the seed of a
plant is equipped by nature to make use of the conditions of
soil, climate, etcetera, to which it has become adapted in the
evolutionary process.
At a certain point of animal evolution, there occurred a
unique break, comparable to the first emergence of matter, to the
first emergence of life, and to the first emergence of animal
existence. This new event happens when in the evolutionary
process, action ceases to be essentially determined by instinct;
when the adaptation of nature loses its coercive character; when
action is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms.
When the animal transcends nature, when it transcends the
purely passive role of the creature, when it becomes, biologically
speaking, the most helpless animal, man is born. At this point, the
animal has emancipated itself from nature by erect posture, the
brain has grown far beyond what it was in the highest animal.
This birth of man may have lasted for hundreds of thousands of
years, but what matters is that a new species arose, transcending
nature, that life became aware of itself.
Self-awareness, reason and imagination disrupt the "har-
mony" 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
 HUMAN SITUATION-KEY TO HUMANISTIC PSYCHOANALYSIS 23
shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental
place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being
aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limita-
tions of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is
he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid him-
self of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself
of his body as long as he is alive—and his body makes him want
to be alive.
Reason, man's blessing, is also his curse; it forces him to cope
everlastingly with the task of solving an insoluble dichotomy.
Human existence is different in this respect from that of all other
organisms; it is in a state of constant and unavoidable dis-
equilibrium. Man's life cannot "be lived" by repeating the pat-
tern of his species; he must live. Man is the only animal that can
be bored, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only
animal who finds his own existence a problem which he has
to solve and from which he cannot escape. He cannot go back to
the prehuman state of harmony with nature; he must proceed to
develop his reason until he becomes the master of nature, and of
himself.
But man's birth ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically is
essentially a negative event. He lacks the instinctive adaptation to
nature, he lacks physical strength, he is the most helpless of all
animals at birth, and in need of protection for a much longer
period of time than any of them. While he has lost the unity
with nature, he has not been given the means to lead a new
existence outside of nature. His reason is most rudimentary, he
has no knowledge of nature's processes, nor tools to replace the
lost instincts; he lives divided into small groups, with no know-
ledge of himself or of others; indeed, the biblical Paradise myth
expresses the situation with perfect clarity. Man, who lives in the
Garden of Eden, in complete harmony with nature but without
awareness of himself, begins his history by the first act of free-
dom, disobedience to a command. Concomitantly, he becomes
24 THE SANE SOCIETY

aware of himself, of his separateness, of his helplessness; he is

expelled from Paradise, and two angels with fiery swords prevent
his return.
Man's evolution is based on the fact that he has lost his ori-
ginal home, nature—and that he can never return to it, can never
become an animal again. There is only one way he can take: to
emerge fully from his natural home, to find a new home—one
which he creates, by making the world a human one and by
becoming truly human himself.
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual,
he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as
the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and
open. There is certainty only about the past, and about the future
as far as it is death—which actually is return to the past, the
inorganic state of matter.
The problem of man's existence, then, is unique in the whole
of nature; he has fallen out of nature, as it were, and is still in it;
he is partly divine, partly animal; partly infinite, partly finite. The
necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find
ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself, is the source of
all psychic forces which motivate man, of all his passions, affects and anxieties.
The animal is content if its physiological needs—its hunger,
its thirst and its sexual needs—are satisfied. Inasmuch as man is
also animal, these needs are likewise imperative and must be
satisfied. But inasmuch as man is human, the satisfaction of these instinctual
needs is not sufficient to make him happy; they are not even sufficient to make
him sane. The archimedic point of the specifically human dynamism lies in this
uniqueness of the human situation; the understanding of man's psyche must be
based on the analysis of man's needs stemming from the conditions of his
existence.
The problem, then, which the human race as well as each
individual has to solve is that of being born. Physical birth, if we
think of the individual, is by no means as decisive and singular
an act as it appears to be. It is, indeed, an important change from
 HUMAN SITUATION-KEY TO HUMANISTIC PSYCHOANALYSIS 25

intrauterine into extrauterine life; but in many respects the

infant after birth is not different from the infant before birth; it
cannot perceive things outside, cannot feed itself; it is com-
pletely dependent on the mother, and would perish without her
help. Actually, the process of birth continues. The child begins to
recognize outside objects, to react affectively, to grasp things and
to co-ordinate his movements, to walk. But birth continues. The
child learns to speak, it learns to know the use and function of
things, it learns to relate itself to others, to avoid punishment and
gain praise and liking. Slowly, the growing person learns to love,
to develop reason, to look at the world objectively. He begins to
develop his powers; to acquire a sense of identity, to overcome
the seduction of his senses for the sake of an integrated life. Birth
then, 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 should be fully born, when we die—although it is
the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
From all we know about the evolution of the human race, the
birth of man is to be understood in the same sense as the birth of
the individual. When man had transcended a certain threshold
of minimum instinctive adaptation, he ceased to be an animal;
but he was as helpless and unequipped for human existence as
the individual infant is at birth. The birth of man began with the
first members of the species homo sapiens, and human history is
nothing but the whole process of this birth. It has taken man
hundreds of thousands of years to take the first steps into human
life; he went through a narcissistic phase of magic omnipotent
orientation, through totemism, nature worship, until he arrived
at the beginnings of the formation of conscience, objectivity,
brotherly love. In the last four thousand years of his history, he
has developed visions of the fully born and fully awakened man,
visions expressed in not too different ways by the great teachers
of man in Egypt, China, India, Palestine, Greece and Mexico.
26 THE SANE SOCIETY

The fact that man's birth is primarily a negative act, that of

being thrown out of the original oneness with nature, that he
cannot return to where he came from, implies that the process of
birth is by no means an easy one. Each step into his new human
existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state,
which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one
has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at
the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would
experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this
first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we
are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tenden-
cies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of
existence into a more human existence, from bondage to free-
dom; 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 phenom-
ena of mental illness and the regression of the human race to
positions apparently relinquished generations ago, show the
intense struggle which accompanies each new act of birth.'

MAN'S NEEDS—AS THEY STEM FROM THE

CONDITIONS OF HIS EXISTENCE
Man's life is determined by the inescapable alternative between
regression and progression, between return to animal existence
and arrival at human existence. Any attempt to return is painful,
it inevitably leads to suffering and mental sickness, to death
either physiologically or mentally (insanity). Every step forward
is frightening and painful too, until a certain point has been

It is in this polarity that I see the true kernel in Freud's hypothesis of the
existence of a life and death instinct; the difference to Freud's theory is, that the
forward-going and the retrogressive impulse have not -the same biologically
determined strength, but that normally, the forward-going life instinct is
stronger and increases in relative strength the more it grows.