moral ideas is much more complex

and subtle, but it gives us the essential structure of the process. All kinds of deep emotional urges may lead an individual or a whole group of human beings to the acceptance or condemnation of certain moral criteria which they will try to justify by all means, or to reject by all kinds of apparently logical, philosophical, historical, or even scientific arguments. This does not mean that these arguments are always totally valuless; it means only that if we want to check and examine them, we must not forget that, beyond the arguments themselves, there is the unconscious tendency to adopt them.

Another very important point in characterizing the rationalizing process and, in the case with which we are dealing, the building of a set of moral ideas, is the compulsory defense which the individual has to set up in order to maintain them, and which very often leads him to extraordinary emotional latitudes in regard to them. If someone were to be so unwise as to tell the subject just mentioned that his justifications or explanations are completely worthless and that he performed his act for motives having no connection with his reasoning, intelligence, or conscious convictions, he would meet with powerful resistance. The subject would try to multiply his pseudoarguments and very probably would finally become angry and cut short all discussion by saying that you do not understand him, that you have insulted him, and that you are intentionally contradicting him. Well, is this not precisely the attitude we find with some of our opponents when we try to 'demonstrate, for instance, that homosexuality is not necessarily the abominable crime it is called in English law, or that masturbation at puberty is not a vice

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but a normal and passing expression of sexual development? Yet, after the demonstration just given, it is hardly of any use to tell him that these pseudo-moral definitions are absurd, or to try to destroy them by rational arguments. Time and again, we will meet not with real arguments, but with emotions and emotional defenses that originate in the unconscious of the individual or of the group, and the only attitude we might adopt as good psychologists is not to face them directly, but to influence them indirectly by ways which may gradually modify the attitudes of the personal, cultural, or national super-ego.

In addition to this we have the principle of homeostasis, by which men always tend to smooth to a common level all things which appear different, or even try to exclude them more or less actively from the field of perception. For example, very precise experiments have shown that if an individual is shown for a few moments a geometrical design having some asymmetrical element, and is then asked to reproduce the design from memory, the subject will rectify the asymmetrical element and reproduce a regular and orthodox design.

of

This common characteristic our mental make-up surely has a great importance in the acceptance or rejection of differences, inequalitiés, and asymmetric aspects in the world of ideas or in human beings. Obstacles are raised immediately at the moment of perception. Parents and educators know of the withdrawal shown by small children when meeting an unknown person for the first time. As Prof. Allport said, everything unknown is a potential danger.

I should like to add that, while repeated experience can easily help. overcome the impression of strange-

mattachine REVIEW

ness and danger in the field of purely cognitive processes, this is much less easy in the case of the modification of deep-rooted notions, as for instance with changes implying a deep emotional reorientation.

In a personal psychoanalysis, or even during a rather rapid psychological anamnesis, we' can fairly easily trace back the history of these defenses. Let us for instance take the case of pseudo-morals concerning homosexuality. In his infancy, Mr. X was forbidden to play certain games with comrades of his age; he was denied certain early manifestations of sex. He was told that this was very naughty, scolded, and punished. The infantile super-ego rapidly adopted the following equation: homosexual play-naughtiness -guilt. Later on, precept and numerous cultural influences reinforced this equation. During puberty, the temptation to repeat these infantile games was repressed a second time. Some boy, or other who had been said, or supposed, to have homosexual leanings, was shown to X as a despicable, nasty being who should be avoided because he was living in sin. Mr. X's heterosexual impulses, however, were later satisfied in his relations with women.

We can well imagine that now, being called upon to give his opinion on homosexuality, the moral judg ment of Mr. X will, a priori, be heavily loaded with all the emotional weight of the struggle which he had himself against the homosexual components of his personality, and that it will be heavily influenced by the theories of condemnation which he has several times impressed upon himself. Always on the unconscious level, the subject now projects his guilt, which means that he denies ever having had "guilty" leanings, and so his condemnation is directly transposed from hisvinner

being to those with whom he wishes to dis-identify himself and who often openly proclaim these very same tendencies he has so laboriously and carefully repressed. Therefore, in this series of unconscious mechanisms, the projection of what is being considered "bad" completes the introjection of what the subject has believed to be "good." In the field of homosexuality, therefore, the "morals" of Mr. X, insofar as they have been determined mainly by the emotional repressions we have just mentioned, are in reality pseudo-morals which he will easily, and in all good iaith, convert into criteria which he will believe to be completely rational, and which no mentally "healthy" person will ever dare to contest. We can also understand that it is completely impossible to destroy suddenly the ancient and authoritative foundations of these twisted morals; only by a very slow process of explanation and a gradual liquidation of the unconscious premises upon which these judgments are based, will it ever be possible to change this situation.

Within the individual, as well as within society as a whole, this work of slow re-orientation and of gradual expurgation of the pseudo-morals can, in my opinion, be accomplished only on the scientific level. We must not forget, however, that developments in this field are too recent, so that their imprint upon our culture and upon human thought, though beginning to be felt, is still very slight when compared to the overpowering mass of biases, traditional ideas, and irrationalities still, controlling the vast majority of opinions, behavior, and the entire field of human relations. Yet we could well imagine an era in which the moral evaluation of this or, that specific problem of psycho-sexual life would seem as devoid of any sense