The Ninth Street Center Ninth Street Center Journal

Principles of Psychological Growth and Social Change [1950?]
by Paul Rosenfels

1.

All living things have a nature which impels their actions, but only when circumstances arouse this nature to expression. Once aroused, the organism brooks no opposition; as long as it remains healthy it seeks expression. The process can only end in expression, exhaustion, or extinction of the organism itself. That the nature of an organism is aroused only by circumstances testifies to that nature's adaptive significance.

The phases of an organism's life are filled with resting periods which are quite different from exhaustion, and which are essential to the existence of the adaptive process. A resting period in no sense means the end of the impulse toward expression, although, on the surface, in the cessation of action, it resembles exhaustion.

The capacity to wait is a natural capacity of living things, and does not rest on discipline and self-denial. The seed which rests in the arid soil of the desert does not necessarily sprout with the first spring rains. There are species which only sprout in certain years of heavier rainfall, and only in such years can the plant survive long enough to come to seed. There is for all living things an accumulation of stimuli and experience which goes forward in a kind of resting phase in which the bombardment from outside falls on that which appears to respond not at all. But something is changing inside. There is a turgidity, a preparation for a future that is different from the past. And when the change comes it has the quality of crossing a threshold, the impulses emerging with a full charge of organized energy, like Minerva springing full armored from the head of Jove.

Without this quality of accumulation of tension before action, the organism would have no identity. It would bend with each capricious wind. Even those recurrent impulses like ingestion of food, for example, are subject to this process, for the animal does not necessarily have an appetite for everything edible it sees.

This process is a means whereby the organism responds to contexts of events, rather than to isolated events, in the outside world. Man is the only animal who can identify that context as a thing in itself, through the use of his high cortical development. But all living things, in varying degrees, respond to contexts which they do not comprehend as entities but nevertheless unerringly identify in action through their natures.

The coming to fruition of the impulse toward a goal is a time which marks the response of the organism to the environment, and all impulses of living things must come to fruition in this manner, and no impulses can have autonomous or self generated status if the organism is in a state of naturalness or health. Thus the organism is molded by the environment, but only by having its true nature aroused; and the more the environment makes its demands upon the organism, the more expression of its individuality does the organism make. The organism is truly a well of potential, unguessed and unseen; the more the environment stimulates the use of this potential, the more the nature of the organism becomes observable and concrete.

By this process of maturation of impulses, nature provides the means to a fusion of two aspects of behavior which otherwise would be fated to eternal warfare; it encircles in one evolutionary whole the irresistible energies behind the impulses and the delicate choice of alternatives of goals. The energy is not engaged until the goal is chosen. Thus the energy, on its side, is not weakened, and the goal, on its side, is not chosen except in relation to purely external events. The organism hungers deeply, but it does not see the world with eyes that hunger but with eyes that see what is there to see.

Waiting energy does not give the organism an identity, but gives it a quality of turgidity, or restlessness, and of aliveness, evident or latent, which is markedly different from apathy. This state feeds tremendously the capacity for experience in the external world. It is as if the organism reaches to the world outside, to see it, hear it, taste it, waiting for the impulse to be born, the impulse which will deliver the organism from its tension. And when it comes, it is a moment of triumph for the organism, for it can seek satisfaction fully with that unity of organization which befits the life of impulse. It is a roaring river which races in the bed which nature has given it, not a reservoir breaking through its retaining wall and threatening the whole countryside. This phasic alternation between hidden mobilization and the apparently sudden emergence of impulse is the means by which that which accepts no obstacles is in harmony with a world external to it, a world unconscious of it, a world which bears it no love and takes no responsibility for it, a world it never made.

The organism is a many-faceted instrument, constantly being tuned and retuned by the world outside to resonate with the tones of that world. All organisms exist in the same world, yet the capacity to respond to that world is different in each. Somewhere there lies a barrier beyond which lies nothingness for that organism. The blade of grass is potentially responsive to the temperature of the earth and of the air, moisture, the passage of time, and the rays of the sun, but not to the sighs of lovers reclining beside it. Man, the animal with by far the greatest mass of cortical brain substance, lives in the widest world of all. Man is king among the animals in his capacity to be altered by experience, although a dog's eyes perceive motion better than his, and a fly can perceive detail better; the sheep smells things a man never does, and a rabbit hears things to which a man is deaf. But man's perceptions may be stored and arranged in patterns which reflect nature's laws. His capacity for storage and arrangement of information far exceeds that of any other animal.

As experience creates the matrix in which impulses are aroused, the organism develops a capacity for choice between various alternative aspects of its environment. The experiences which aroused impulses yesterday do not necessarily do so today. The more complex and broad the world of experience becomes, the more occasions for judgment and choice exist. The impulses of man are not altered by this fact. Whether wise or simple, inconstant or steadfast, his impulses are the same.

2.

Somewhere in the evolutionary development of the living organism a branching developed in its perceiving of the world outside, making evident a faculty which divides organisms into two groups: those with social organization and those without. This faculty, which is the capacity to feel close to others of the same general biological type, makes its most obvious mark on the evolutionary record with the appearance of sexual differentiation and social cooperation. However, some form of this faculty may exist in all living things, however primitive.

This tendency to cohere is not an impulse, although it gives rise to many impulses, but is a basic capacity or faculty and will be referred to as a state of being, namely, the cohesive state. The cohesive state rests on some kind of sameness between the observer and the object and is characterized by warmth, tenderness, intimate feeling, awareness of the nature of the other, a sense of knowledge of the other arising from shared experience. In contrast to the cohesive state stands the capacity for knowledge of the world through the actions of that world, including both the actions of the organism on the world and the actions of the world on the organism. This is also not an impulse, but a general faculty characterized by a state of being which rests on a manipulative capacity of the organism, a sense of control over the environment, or of being controlled, a feeling of mastery, or being mastered, a feeling of relationship to events in the world in terms of accomplishment of some kind. This state of being will be referred to as the occupational state. It is a biological force which brings the organism to the world ready to deal with it by means of work or labor, or letting nature do work on it, and has a fundamental feeling tone connected with it of satisfaction in activity which utilizes effort without question of its value, and is connoted by the buzzing of bees or the whistling of a man at his work bench.

The impulses which arise from a cohesive background include nestbuilding, homemaking, caressing, sexuality, the care of the young; impulses arising from the occupational state include the basic muscular patterns of action for the species -- walking, running, flying; the food gathering and storing impulses, including pecking, hunting, burying food, and others.

The special senses -- sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste -- are the instruments by which the impulses are mobilized. The data so gained is analyzed and ordered by the brain -- whether consciously or unconsciously -- and gives rise to feeling states which lead either to further observation or to action. These feeling states are related to vegetative nervous system activity and its higher integrative organization in the basal ganglia. When the impulse to action is born the musculature and its own special nervous system, the proprioceptive and vestibular, with higher integrative function in the cerebellum, are the instruments of this action.

The impulses take their being in action; action in a healthy organism never occurs in a vacuum. It is always in relationship to an object and in the moment of action the organism and the object fuse into a unity, the completion of the act being a product of the qualities of both. Thus the organism is always joined to the world outside: its impulses come into being in relationship to the object, and its actions are a part of the object.

The feeling states which precede the emergence of action will be referred to as tension states and the term action states will include the feeling component of action as well as its motor component.

Observation of the world which fails to lead to tension states on the one hand, and action states on the other, has no potential for altering the adaptive behavior of the organism. A stone has a relationship to the world around it through the operation of physical laws, but it has no potential for adaptive behavior. Nature has no stake in its survival as a stone. This fact provides a psychological definition of life, namely, that which is living is organized to maintain a selective relationship to the forces of nature. In the absence of tension and action there can be no knowledge. The air, the sea, the earth have been witness to every drama of life's struggles since the beginning of the story of life, and each event has left some record there, but the story cannot be told because they do not know what they have seen. The world of moving waters, blowing winds, shifting earth and sands, in spite of all the movement and the changing contours, is a dead world. That which lives is only a speck in the great dead world. If the earth be our mother, it is a mad woman behind whose eyes lies no capacity for sight and whose heaving breast conceals no beating heart.

When the organism is stimulated by this world and acts in it, the instrumentality of its action lies in the manipulative faculties. The goal of the manipulative faculties is not to alter nature, not to instruct it, nor to change its laws, but to discharge impulses through the interaction with objects and forces in nature. When, however, the organism is stimulated by that which is living, and similar enough to the organism to enter the area of cohesive forces, the manipulative faculties are replaced by the social faculties, in which the cohesive state is invoked and has the characteristic of paired or matched responses; that is, the world in which the organism acts contains another acting organism whose status is created in the context of the moment; neither member of the pair can act without the other; the actions of one create the possibility of the actions of the other. This state of rapport is an interlocking one, and the world which brings it to existence is vibrantly alive. The channel of action resembles the manipulative activities in utilizing the muscular system, but the sense of orientation becomes highly intensified and includes a sense of relationship to that which is changing as it acts. This paired spatial relationship expresses itself through the activities of assertion and yielding.

Well-adapted behavior has the quality of spontaneous action on a background of tension; that is, the action is sought and needed. It comes with a quality of transition, the action being the discharge channel of something that existed before. It is a moment of change, the forces producing the tension being different from the action itself. It is as if there were two worlds, populated by different forms without the slightest outward connection, yet they are as related as day and night, or the crest and trough of a wave. Action cannot be the goal of the organism, nor can tension be its goal; it is the organic product of their interaction which is meaningful: integrated or adaptive behavior.

The felt goal of the organism is a state of well-being, a feeling of strength, aliveness, adequacy. When either tension or action is the felt goal, then the organism is no longer spontaneous, natural or self-confident.

When either tension or action fills the center of the organism's attention, and the cycle toward the polar phase becomes lengthened, the harmony of the organism is threatened. High tension leads to intensity of feeling about action which threatens to destroy the capacity for action, whereas the long action cycle threatens a weakening of its discharge function, a shallowness of impulse which renders action valueless to the organism, possessing freedom which leads nowhere. This weakens the organism and leads to a hunger for tension which threatens its capacity for tension.

The brain makes the long cycle possible, and is its characteristic function in human beings to an extent so far beyond other animals as to give it the characteristics of an entirely new evolutionary trait. It is the biological basis of the soul, and makes of man a yearning animal who seeks and reaches. It is the key to his superior adaptive behavior. It also divides men into two classes, because the exploration of human capacity leads to something new in the evolutionary scene -- the emergence of character. Character rests on specialization, namely, the freedom to intensify the depth of integrative behavior by voluntarily choosing to pursue tension or action. This involves courage, faith, hope, and other moral qualities because the organism passes close to imbalance in the process. To pursue the total goal -- strength -- does not illuminate the means. The more the total goal is frustrated by imposing problems, the greater the need for the development of means which can be felt, comprehended, and utilized as tools. Character is thus in the service of growth and is the consequence of temporary failure, being produced by the willingness to test the deeper capacities conferred by human qualities. Growth is characterized by actions which leave basic tensions unresolved, and by tensions which are not tied to fully discharging actions, permitting deepening without the necessity of immediate integration. Man skirts close to disaster as a means of solving more problems, confident that he knows the difference between what is possible and what is impossible. He will take a poison as a medicine -- if the concentration is proper; he will ask his body to endure fatigue or other unnatural conditions up to a certain limit. The freedom to be unbalanced is, for him, the freedom to explore the hidden spaces of the world. This right to become an enthusiast is at the basis of romance. Growth is not his goal, but rather strength; but growth permits the process to be broken down into that which can become real to him.

Man thus builds his home on the edge of a precipice and the sense of goals means everything to him. The greater his temporary imbalances are, the greater the need for the moral satisfactions. To be strong is the justification of his life.

[Copyright 1981 Dean Hannotte]

-- reprinted from The Ninth Street Center Journal 7, Winter 1987