The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life’s predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem. It is always true that love and will become more difficult in a transitional age; and ours is an era of radical transition. The old myths and symbols by which we oriented ourselves are gone, anxiety is rampant; we cling to each other and try to persuade ourselves that what we feel is love; we do not will because we are afraid that if we choose one thing or one person we’ll lose the other, and we are too insecure to take that chance. The bottom then drops out of the conjunctive emotions and processes—of which love and will are the two foremost examples. The individual is forced to turn inward; he becomes obsessed with the new form of the problem of identity, namely, Even-if-I-know-who-I-am, I-have-no-significance. I am unable to influence others. The next step is apathy. And the step following that is violence. For no human being can stand the perpetually numbing experience of his own powerlessness.

So great was the emphasis on love as the resolution to life’s predicament that people’s self-esteem ascended or fell depending on whether or not they had achieved it. Those who believed they had found it indulged in self-righteousness, confident in their visible proof of salvation as the Calvinist’s wealth used to be tangible evidence of his being numbered among the elect. Those who failed to find it felt not simply bereft to a greater or lesser extent, but, on a deeper and more damaging inner level, their self-esteem was undermined. They felt marked as a new species of pariah, and would confess in psychotherapy that they awoke in the small hours of the morning not necessarily especially lonely or unhappy but plagued with the gnawing conviction that they had somehow missed the great secret of life. And all the while, with rising divorce rates, the increasing banalization of love in literature and art, and the fact that sex for many people has become more meaningless as it is more available, this “love” has seemed tremendously elusive if not an outright illusion. Some members of the new political left came to the conclusion that love is destroyed by the very nature of our bourgeois society, and the reforms they proposed had the specific purpose of making “a world in which love is more possible.”¹

In such a contradictory situation, the sexual form of love—lowest common denominator on the ladder of salvation—understandably became our preoccupation; for sex, as rooted in man’s inescapable biology, seems always dependable to give at least a facsimile of love. But sex, too, has become Western man’s test and burden more than his salvation. The books which roll off the presses on technique in love and sex, while still best-sellers for a few weeks, have a hollow ring: for most people seem to be aware on some scarcely articulated level that the frantic quality with which we pursue technique as our way to salvation is in direct proportion to the degree to which we have lost sight of the salvation we are seeking. It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love. Whatever merits or failings the Kinsey studies and the Masters-Johnson research have in their own right, they are symptomatic of a culture in which the personal meaning of love has been progressively lost. Love had been assumed to be a motivating force, a power which could be relied upon to push us onward in life. But the great shift in our day indicates that the motivating force itself is now called into question. Love has become a problem to itself.

So self-contradictory, indeed, has love become that some of those studying family life have concluded that “love” is simply the name for the way more powerful members of the family control other members. Love, Ronald Laing maintains, is a cover for violence.

The same can be said about will. We inherited from our Victorian forefathers the belief that the only real problem in life was to decide rationally what to do—and then will would stand ready as the “faculty” for making us do it. Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide. The very basis of will itself is thrown into question.

Is will an illusion? Many psychologists and psychotherapists, from Freud down, have argued that it is. The terms “will power” and “free will,” so necessary in the vocabulary of our fathers, have all but dropped completely out of any contemporary, sophisticated discussion; or the words are used in derision. People go to therapists to find substitutes for their lost will: to learn how to get the “unconscious” to direct their lives, or to learn the latest conditioning technique to enable them to behave, or to use new drugs to release some motive for living. Or to learn the latest method of “releasing affect,” unaware that affect is not something you strive for in itself but a by-product of the way you give yourself to a life situation. And the question is, What are they going to use the situation for? In his study of will, Leslie Farber asserts that in this failure of will lies the central pathology of our day, and that our time should be called the “age of the disordered will.”²

In such an age of radical transition, the individual is driven back into his own consciousness. When the foundations of love and will have been shaken and all but destroyed, we cannot escape the necessity of pushing below the surface and searching within our own consciousness and within the “collective unarticulated consciousness” of our society for the sources of love and will. I use the term “source” as the French speak of the “source” of a river—the springs from which the water originally comes. If we can find the sources from which love and will spring, we may be able to discover the new forms which these essential experiences need in order to become viable in the new age into which we are moving. In this sense, our quest, like every such exploration, is a moral quest, for we are seeking the bases on which a morality for a new age can be founded. Every sensitive person finds himself in Stephen Dedalus’ position: “I go forth…to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

My term “schizoid,” in the title of this chapter, means out of touch; avoiding close relationships; the inability to feel. I do not use the term as a reference to psychopathology, but rather as a general condition of our culture and the tendencies of people which make it up. Anthony Storr, describing it more from the point of view of individual psychopathology, holds that the schizoid person is cold, aloof, superior, detached. This may erupt in violent aggression. All of which, says Storr, is a complex mask for a repressed longing for love. The detachment of the schizoid is a defense against hostility and has its source in a distortion of love and trust in infancy which renders him forever fearing actual love “because it threatens his very existence.”³

I agree with Storr as far as he goes, but I am contending that the schizoid condition is a general tendency in our transitional age, and that the “helplessness and disregard” in infancy to which Storr refers comes not just from parents but from almost every aspect of our culture. The parents are themselves helpless and unwitting expressions of their culture. The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized—and it may explode into violence. In its “normal” sense, the schizoid does not require repression. Whether the schizoid character state later breaks down into a schizophrenic-like state in any given case, only the future can decide. But this is much less apt to happen, as in the case with many patients, if the individual can frankly admit and confront the schizoid characteristic of his present state. Anthony Storr goes on to indicate that the schizoid character has a “conviction of being unlovable, and a feeling of being attacked and humiliated by criticism.”⁴

While I value Storr’s description, there is one point where it breaks down. This is in his citing Freud, Descartes, Schopenhauer, and Beethoven as examples of the schizoid. “In the case of Descartes and Schopenhauer, it is their very alienation from love which has given birth to their philosophies.” And with Beethoven,

Storr’s dilemma is that if these men are seen as psychopathological and then had assumedly been “cured,” we would not have had their creations. Thus, I believe it must be admitted that the schizoid state can be a constructive way of dealing with profoundly difficult situations. Whereas other cultures pushed schizoid persons toward being creative, our culture pushes people toward becoming more detached and mechanical.

In centering upon the problems of love and will, I do not forget the positive characteristics of our time and the potentialities for individual fulfillment. It is an obvious fact that when an age is torn loose from its moorings and everyone is to some degree thrown on his own, more people can take steps to find and realize themselves. It is also true that we hear most hue and cry about the power of the individual when the individual has least. But I write about the problems; they are what clamor for our attention.

The problems have a curious characteristic not yet adequately appreciated: they predict the future. The problems of a period are the existential crises of what can be, but hasn’t yet been, resolved; and regardless of how seriously we take that word “resolved,” if there were not some new possibility, there would be no crisis—there would be only despair. Our psychological enigmas express our unconscious desires. Problems arise where we meet our world and find it inadequate to ourselves or ourselves inadequate to it; something hurts, clashes, and, as Yeats puts it,

PROBLEMS AS PROPHETIC

I write this book on the basis of my experience of twenty-five years of working intensively as a psychoanalytic therapist with persons trying to meet and work through their conflicts. Particularly in the last decade or so, these conflicts have generally been based upon some aspect of love or will gone wrong. In one sense, every therapist is, or ought to be, engaged in research all the time—research, as the word itself states, as a “search” for the sources.

At this point, I hear my experimental-psychologist colleagues challenging me with the argument that the data we get in therapy are impossible to formulate mathematically and that they come from persons who represent the psychological “misfits” of the culture. At the same time, I hear philosopher friends insisting to me that no model of man can be based centrally on data from neuroses or character disorders. With both of these cautions I agree.

But neither these psychologists in their laboratories nor those philosophers in their studies can ignore the fact that we do get tremendously significant and often unique data from persons in therapy—data which are revealed only when the human being can break down the customary pretenses, hypocrisies, and defenses behind which we all hide in “normal” social discourse. It is only in the critical situation of emotional and spiritual suffering—which is the situation that leads them to seek therapeutic help—that people will endure the pain and anxiety of uncovering the profound roots of their problems. There is also the curious situation that unless we are oriented toward helping the person, he won’t, indeed in some ways cannot, reveal the significant data. Harry Stack Sullivan’s remark on research in therapy is still as cogent as when he first made it: “Unless the interviews are designed to help the person, you’ll get artifacts, not real data.”⁶

True, the information we get from our patients may be hard or even impossible to codify more than superficially. But this information speaks so directly out of the human being’s immediate conflicts and his living experience that its richness of meaning more than makes up for its difficulty in interpretation. It is one thing to discuss the hypothesis of aggression as resulting from frustration, but quite another to see the tenseness of a patient, his eyes flashing in anger or hatred, his posture clenched into paralysis, and to hear his half-stifled gasps of pain from reliving the time a score of years ago when his father whipped him because, through no fault of his own, his bicycle was stolen—an event giving rise to a hatred which for that moment encompasses every parental figure in his whole world, including me in the room with him. Such data are empirical in the deepest meaning of the term.

With respect to the question of basing a theory of man on data from “misfits” I would, in turn, challenge my colleagues: Does not every human conflict reveal universal characteristics of man as well as the idiosyncratic problems of the individual? Sophocles was not writing merely about one individual’s pathology when he showed us, step by step, through the drama of King Oedipus, the agonizing struggle of a man to find out “who I am and where I came from.” Psychotherapy seeks the most specific characteristics and events of the given individual’s life—and any therapy will become weakened in vapid, unexistential, cloudy generalities which forgets this. But psychotherapy also seeks the elements of the human conflict of this individual which are basic to the perdurable, persistent qualities of every man’s experience as man—and any therapy will tend to shrink the patient’s consciousness and make life more banal for him if it forgets that.

Psychotherapy reveals both the immediate situation of the individual’s “sickness” and the archetypal qualities and characteristics which constitute the human being as human. It is the latter characteristics which have gone awry in specific ways in a given patient and have resulted in the former, his psychological problems. The interpretation of a patient’s problems in psychotherapy is also a partial revelation of man’s self-interpretation of himself through history in the archetypal forms in literature. Aeschylus’ Orestes and Goethe’s Faust, to take two diverse examples, are not simply portrayals of two given characters, one back in Greece in the fifth-century B.C. and the other in eighteenth-century Germany, but presentations of the struggles we all, of whatever century or race, go through in growing up, trying to find identity as individual beings, striving to affirm our being with whatever power we have, trying to love and create, and doing our best to meet all the other events of life up to and including our own death. One of the values of living in a transitional age—an “age of therapy”—is that it forces upon us this opportunity, even as we try to resolve our individual problems, to uncover new meaning in perennial man and to see more deeply into those qualities which constitute the human being as human.

Our patients are the ones who express and live out the subconscious and unconscious tendencies in the culture. The neurotic, or person suffering from what we now call character disorder, is characterized by the fact that the usual defenses of the culture do not work for him—a generally painful situation of which he is more or less aware.⁷ The “neurotic” or the person “suffering from character disorders” is one whose problems are so severe that he cannot solve them by living them out in the normal agencies of the culture, such as work, education, and religion. Our patient cannot or will not adjust to the society. This, in turn, may be due to one or both of the two following interrelated elements. First, certain traumatic or unfortunate experiences have occurred in his life which make him more sensitive than the average person and less able to live with and manage his anxiety. Second, he may possess a greater than ordinary amount of originality and potential which push for expression and, when blocked off, make him ill.

THE ARTIST AND THE NEUROTIC

The relation between the artist and the neurotic, often considered mysterious, is entirely understandable from the viewpoint presented here. Both artist and neurotic speak and live from the subconscious and unconscious depths of their society. The artist does this positively, communicating what he experiences to his fellow men. The neurotic does this negatively. Experiencing the same underlying meanings and contradictions of his culture, he is unable to form his experiences into communicable meaning for himself and his fellows.

Art and neurosis both have a predictive function. Since art is communication springing from unconscious levels, it presents to us an image of man which is as yet present only in those members of the society who, by virtue of their own sensitized consciousness, live on the frontier of their society—live, as it were, with one foot in the future. Sir Herbert Read has made the case that the artist anticipates the later scientific and intellectual experience of the race.⁸ The water reeds and ibis legs painted in triangular designs on neolithic vases in ancient Egypt were the prediction of the later development of geometry and mathematics by which the Egyptian read the stars and measured the Nile. In the magnificent Greek sense of proportion of the Parthenon, in the powerful dome of Roman architecture, and in the medieval cathedral, Read traces how, in a given period of history, art expresses the meanings and trends which are as yet unconscious, but which will later be formulated by the philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists of the society. The arts anticipate the future social and technological development by a generation when the change is more superficial, or by centuries when the change, as the discovery of mathematics, is profound.

By the same token, we find the artists expressing the conflicts in the society before these conflicts emerge consciously in the society as a whole. The artist—who is the “antennae of the race,” to use Ezra Pound’s phrase—is living out, in forms that only he can create, the depths of consciousness which he experiences in his own being as he struggles with and molds his world.

Here we are plunged immediately into the center of the issues raised in this book. For the world presented by our contemporary painters and dramatists and other artists is a schizoid world. They present the condition of our world which makes the tasks of loving and willing peculiarly difficult. It is a world in which, amid all the vastly developed means of communication that bombard us on all sides, actual personal communication is exceedingly difficult and rare. The most significant dramatists of our time, as Richard Gilman reminds us, are those who take as their subject matter precisely this loss of communication—who show, as do Ionesco and Genet and Beckett and Pinter, that our present fate as man is to exist in a world where communication between persons is all but destroyed. We live out our lives talking to a tape recorder, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; our existence becomes more lonely as the radios and TV’s and telephone extensions in our houses become more numerous. Ionesco has a scene in his play, The Bald Soprano, in which a man and woman happen to meet and engage in polite, if mannered, conversation. As they talk they discover that they both came down to New York on the ten o’clock train that morning from New Haven, and, surprisingly, the address of both is the same building on Fifth Avenue. Lo and behold, they also both live in the same apartment and both have a daughter seven years old. They finally discover to their astonishment that they are man and wife.

We find the same situation among the painters. Cézanne, the acknowledged father of the modern art movement, a man who in his own life was as undramatic and bourgeois as only a middle-class Frenchman can be, paints this schizoid world of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He speaks to us out of the old world of mechanics but forces us to live in the new world of free-floating spaces. “Here we are beyond causes and effects,” writes Merleau-Ponty of Cézanne; “both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cézanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. There is a rapport between Cézanne’s schizoid temperament and his work because the work reveals a metaphysical sense of the disease…. In this sense to be schizoid and to be Cézanne come to the same thing.”⁹ Only a schizoid man could paint a schizoid world; which is to say, only a man sensitive enough to penetrate to the underlying psychic conflicts could present our world as it is in its deeper forms.

But in the very grasping of our world by art there is also our protection from the dehumanizing effects of technology. The schizoid character lies in both the confronting of the depersonalizing world and the refusing to be depersonalized by it. For the artist finds deeper planes of consciousness where we can participate in human experience and nature below superficial appearances. The case may be clearer in Van Gogh, whose psychosis was not unconnected with his volcanic struggle to paint what he perceived. Or in Picasso, flamboyant as he may seem to be, whose insight into the schizoid character of our modern world is seen in the fragmented bulls and torn villagers in Guernica, or in the distorted portraits with mislocated eyes and ears—paintings not named but numbered. It is no wonder that Robert Motherwell remarks that this is the first age in which the artist does not have a community; he must now, like all of us, make his own.

The artist presents the broken image of man but transcends it in the very act of transmuting it into art. It is his creative act which gives meaning to the nihilism, alienation, and other elements of modern man’s condition. To quote Merleau-Ponty again when he writes of Cézanne’s schizoid temperament, “Thus the illness ceases to be an absurd fact and a fate, and becomes a general possibility of human existence.”¹⁰

The neurotic and the artist—since both live out the unconscious of the race—reveal to us what is going to emerge endemically in the society later on. The neurotic feels the same conflicts arising from his experience of nihilism, alienation, and so on, but he is unable to give them meaningful form; he is caught between his incapacity to mold these conflicts into creative works on one hand and his inability to deny them on the other. As Otto Rank remarked, the neurotic is the “artiste manqué,” the artist who cannot transmute his conflicts into art.

To admit this as a reality not only gives us our liberty as creative persons but also the basis of our freedom as human beings. By the same token, confronting at the outset the fact of the schizoid state of our world may give us a basis for discovering love and will for our own age.

THE NEUROTIC AS PREDICTIVE

Our patients predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. The neurotic is cast by destiny into a Cassandra role. In vain does Cassandra, sitting on the steps of the palace at Mycenae when Agamemnon brings her back from Troy, cry, “Oh for the nightengale’s pure song and a fate like hers!”¹¹ She knows, in her ill-starred life, that “the pain flooding the song of sorrow is [hers] alone,”¹² and that she must predict the doom she sees will occur there. The Mycenaeans speak of her as mad, but they also believe she does speak the truth, and that she has a special power to anticipate events. Today, the person with psychological problems bears the burdens of the conflicts of the times in his blood, and is fated to predict in his actions and struggles the issues which will later erupt on all sides in the society.

The first and clearest demonstration of this thesis is seen in the sexual problems which Freud found in his Victorian patients in the two decades before World War I. These sexual topics—even down to the words—were entirely denied and repressed by the accepted society at the time.¹³ But the problems burst violently forth into endemic form two decades later after World War II. In the 1920’s, everybody was preoccupied with sex and its functions. Not by the furthest stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that Freud “caused” this emergence. He rather reflected and interpreted, through the data revealed by his patients, the underlying conflicts of the society, which the “normal” members could and did succeed in repressing for the time being. Neurotic problems are the language of the unconscious emerging into social awareness.

A second, more minor example is seen in the great amount of hostility which was found in patients in the 1930’s. This was written about by Horney, among others, and it emerged more broadly and openly as a conscious phenomenon in our society a decade later.

A third major example may be seen in the problem of anxiety. In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, some therapists, including myself, were impressed by the fact that in many of our patients anxiety was appearing not merely as a symptom of repression or pathology, but as a generalized character state. My research on anxiety,¹⁴ and that of Hobart Mowrer and others, began in the early 1940’s. In those days very little concern had been shown in this country for anxiety other than as a symptom of pathology. I recall arguing in the late 1940’s, in my doctoral orals, for the concept of normal anxiety, and my professors heard me with respectful silence but with considerable frowning.

Predictive as the artists are, the poet W. H. Auden published his Age of Anxiety in 1947, and just after that Bernstein wrote his symphony on that theme. Camus was then writing (1947) about this “century of fear,” and Kafka already had created powerful vignettes of the coming age of anxiety in his novels, most of them as yet untranslated.¹⁵ The formulations of the scientific establishment, as is normal, lagged behind what our patients were trying to tell us. Thus, at the annual convention of the American Psychopathological Association in 1949 on the theme “Anxiety,” the concept of normal anxiety, presented in a paper by me, was still denied by most of the psychiatrists and psychologists present.

But in the 1950’s a radical change became evident; everyone was talking about anxiety and there were conferences on the problem on every hand. Now the concept of “normal” anxiety gradually became accepted in the psychiatric literature. Everybody, normal as well as neurotic, seemed aware that he was living in the “age of anxiety.” What had been presented by the artists and had appeared in our patients in the late 30’s and 40’s was now endemic in the land.

Our fourth point brings us to contemporary issues—the problem of identity. This was first a concern of therapists with their patients in the late 40’s and early 50’s. It was described on the basis of data from psychological studies by Erikson in Childhood and Society in 1950, by myself in Man’s Search for Himself in 1953, by Allen Wheelis in The Quest for Identity in 1958, and by other interpreters in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. We find the problem of identity becoming a concern on every sophisticated person’s lips in the last of that decade and the early 60’s; it has taken its place as a “steady” in New Yorker cartoons, and the spate of books dealing with it became best-sellers in their fields. The cultural values by which people had gotten their sense of identity had been wiped away.¹⁶ Our patients were aware of this before society at large was, and they did not have the defenses to protect themselves from its disturbing and traumatic consequences.

All of these problems, to be sure, carry a certain momentum related to the ups and downs of fashion. But it would fail entirely to do justice to the dynamic historical emergence of psychological problems and of social change to dismiss them as mere fashions. Indeed, van den Berg, in a stimulating and provocative book, argues that all psychological problems are a product of the sociohistorical changes in culture. He believes that there is no “human nature” but only a changing nature of man depending on the changes in the society, and that we should call the conflicts of our patients not “neurosis” but “sociosis.”¹⁷ We need not go all the way with van den Berg: I, for one, believe psychological problems are produced by a three-cornered dialectical interplay of biological and individual and historical-social factors. Nevertheless, he makes clear what a gross and destructive oversimplification it is to assume that psychological problems emerge “out of the blue” or simply because society is now aware of the problem, or to assume that the problems exist merely because we have found new words to diagnose them. We find new words because something of importance is happening on unconscious, unarticulated levels and is pushing for expression; and our task is to do our best to understand and express these emergent developments.

Freud’s patients were mostly hysterics who, by definition, carried repressed energy which could be released by the therapist’s naming of the unconscious. Today, however, when practically all our patients are compulsive-obsessional neurotics (or character problems, which is a more general and less intense form of the same thing), we find that the chief block to therapy is the incapacity of the patient to feel. These patients are persons who can talk from now till doomsday about their problems, and are generally well-practiced intellectuals; but they cannot experience genuine feelings. Wilhelm Reich described compulsive characters as “living machines,” and in his book, David Shapiro refers to this as well as to the “restraint and evenness in living and thinking” of these compulsive-obsessives. Reich, here, was ahead of his time in insight into the problems of twentieth-century patients.¹⁸

THE EMERGENCE OF APATHY

Earlier, I quoted Leslie Farber’s assertion that our period should be called the “age of disordered will.” But what underlies this disordered will?

I shall take my own leap in proposing an answer. I believe it is a state of feelinglessness, the despairing possibility that nothing matters, a condition very close to apathy. Pamela H. Johnson, after reporting the murders on the moors of England, found herself unable to shake loose her conviction that “We may be approaching the state which the psychologists call affectlessness.”¹⁹ If apathy or affectlessness is a dominant mood emerging in our day, we can understand on a deeper level why love and will have become so difficult.

What some of us were nonplussed to find in our patients in the 1950’s has, in its predictive fashion, during the last few years, emerged as an overt issue gravely troubling our whole society. I wish to quote from my book, Man’s Search for Himself, written in 1952 and published the following year:

It was not until the mid-60’s that this problem erupted in the form of several incidents that shook us to the very foundations. Our “emptiness” had been turning into despair and destructiveness, violence and assassination; it is now undeniable that these go hand in hand with apathy. “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens,” reported The New York Times in March, 1964, “watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”²⁵ In April of the same year, the Times said, in an impassioned editorial about another event in which a crowd urged a deranged youth who was clinging to a hotel ledge to jump, calling him “chicken” and “yellow”: “Are they any different from the wild-eyed Romans watching and cheering as men and beasts tore each other apart in the Colosseum?…Does the attitude of that Albany mob bespeak a way of life for many Americans?…If so, the bell tolls for all of us.”²⁶ In May of that year, a Times article was headed “Rape Victim’s Screams Draw 40 But No One Acts.”²⁷ A number of similar events occurred during the next months which awakened us from our apathy long enough to realize how apathetic we had become, and how much modern city existence had developed in us the habit of uninvolvement and unfeeling detachment.

I am aware how easy it is to exaggerate specific events, and I have no wish to overstate my case. Nevertheless, I do believe that there is in our society a definite trend toward a state of affectlessness as an attitude toward life, a character state. The anomie about which intellectuals had speculated earlier seemed now to emerge with a hideous reality on our very streets and in our very subways.

What shall we call this state reported by so many of our contemporaries—estrangement, playing it cool, alienation, withdrawal of feeling, indifference, anomie, depersonalization? Each one of these terms expresses a part of the condition to which I refer—a condition in which men and women find themselves experiencing a distance between themselves and the objects which used to excite their affection and their will.²⁸ I wish to leave open for the moment what the sources of this are. When I use the term “apathy,” despite its limiting connotations, it is because its literal meaning is the closest to what I am describing: “want of feeling; lack of passion, emotion or excitement, indifference.” Apathy and the schizoid world go hand in hand as cause and effect of each other.

Apathy is particularly important because of its close relation to love and will. Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision—which actually may represent the struggle of the effort to decide, as in William James—but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events. Then the issue of will never can arise. The interrelation of love and will inheres in the fact that both terms describe a person in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others or the inanimate world, and opening himself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the world or requiring that it relate to him. This is why love and will are so difficult in an age of transition, when all the familiar mooring places are gone. The blocking of the ways in which we affect others and are affected by them is the essential disorder of both love and will. Apathy, or a-pathos, is a withdrawal of feeling; it may begin as playing it cool, a studied practice of being unconcerned and unaffected. “I did not want to get involved,” was the consistent response of the thirty-eight citizens of Kew Gardens when they were questioned as to why they had not acted. Apathy, operating like Freud’s “death instinct,” is a gradual letting go of involvement until one finds that life itself has gone by.

Viewing the society freshly, students often have a clearer insight into this than older adults—though they tend, in oversimplified fashion, to blame it on the institutions. “We have just not been given any passionate sense of the excitement of intellectual life around here,” said the editor of the Columbia Spectator.²⁹ A student columnist in The Michigan Daily wrote, “This institution has dismally failed to inculcate, in most of its undergraduates at least, anything approaching an intellectual appetite.” He spoke of the drift “towards something worse than mediocrity—and that is absolute indifference. An indifference towards perhaps even life itself.”³⁰ “We were all divided up into punches on an IBM card,” a Berkeley student remarked. “We decided to punch back in the riots of 1964, but the real revolution around here will come when we decide to burn computer cards as well as draft cards.”³¹

There is a dialectical relationship between apathy and violence. To live in apathy provokes violence; and, in incidents like those cited above, violence promotes apathy. Violence is the ultimate destructive substitute which surges in to fill the vacuum where there is no relatedness.³² There are degrees of violence, from the relatively normal shock effect of many forms of modern art, through pornography and obscenity—which achieve their desired reaction through violence to our forms of life—to the extreme pathology of assassinations and the murders of the moors. When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.³³ This is one aspect of the well-known relationship between sexual feelings and crimes of violence. To inflict pain and torture at least proves that one can affect somebody. In the alienated state of mass communication, the average citizen knows dozens of TV personalities who come smiling into his living room of an evening—but he himself is never known. In this state of alienation and anonymity, painful for anyone to bear, the average person may well have fantasies which hover on the edge of real pathology. The mood of the anonymous person is, If I cannot affect or touch anybody, I can at least shock you into some feeling, force you into some passion through wounds and pain; I shall at least make sure we both feel something, and I shall force you to see me and know that I also am here! Many a child or adolescent has forced the group to take cognizance of him by destructive behavior; and though he is condemned, at least the community notices him. To be actively hated is almost as good as to be actively liked; it breaks down the utterly unbearable situation of anonymity and aloneness.

But having seen the serious affects of apathy, we need now to turn to the fact of its necessity; and, in its “normal schizoid” form, how it can be turned into a constructive function. Our tragic paradox is that in contemporary history, we have to protect ourselves by some kind of apathy. “Apathy is a curious state,” remarks Harry Stack Sullivan; “It is a way used to survive defeat without material damage, although if it endures too long one is damaged by the passage of time. Apathy seems to me to be a miracle of protection by which a personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else.”³⁴ The longer the situation goes unmet, the more apathy is prolonged; and it sooner or later becomes a character state. This affectlessness is a shrinking-up in the winds of continuous demands, a freezing in the face of hyperstimuli, letting the current go by since one fears he would be overwhelmed if he responded to it. No one who has ever ridden the subway at rush hour, with its cacaphonous din and hordes of anonymous humanity, will be surprised at this.

It is not difficult to appreciate how people living in a schizoid age have to protect themselves from tremendous overstimulation—protect themselves from the barrage of words and noise over radio and TV, protect themselves from the assembly line demands of collectivized industry and gigantic factory-modeled multiversities. In a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fossilize all breathing life in its path; in a world where “normality” is defined as keeping your cool; where sex is so available that the only way to preserve any inner center is to learn to have intercourse without committing yourself—in such a schizoid world, which young people experience more directly since they have not had time to build up the defenses which dull the senses of their elders, it is not surprising that will and love have become increasingly problematic and even, as some people believe, impossible of achievement.

But what of the constructive use of this schizoid situation? We have seen how Cézanne could turn his schizoid personality into a way of expressing the most significant forms of modern life, and could stand against the debilitating tendencies in our society by means of his art. We have seen that the schizoid stand is necessary; now we shall inquire how, in its healthy dimensions, it can also be turned to good. The constructive schizoid person stands against the spiritual emptiness of encroaching technology and does not let himself be emptied by it. He lives and works with the machine without becoming a machine. He finds it necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so to protect his own inner life from impoverishment.

Dr. Bruno Bettelheim finds the same supremacy of the aloof person—whom I would call schizoid—in his experiences in the concentration camps during World War II.

Indeed, studies have shown that the persons who survive most effectively in space ships, and who can adjust to the sensory deprivation necessary for such a life—our comrades of the twenty-first century—are those who can detach and withdraw into themselves. “There are reasons to believe,” writes Arthur J. Brodbeck after summarizing the evidence, “that it may well be the schizoid personality that will be best able to endure the requirements of extended space travel.”³⁶ They preserve the inner world which the very hyperstimuli of our age would take away. These introverts can continue to exist despite the overpowering stimuli or lack of it, for they have learned to develop a “constructive” schizoid attitude toward life. Since we must live in the world as we find it, this distinguishing of the constructively schizoid attitude is an important part of our problem.

Apathy is the withdrawal of will and love, a statement that they “don’t matter,” a suspension of commitment. It is necessary in times of stress and turmoil; and the present great quantity of stimuli is a form of stress. But apathy, now in contrast to the “normal” schizoid attitude, leads to emptiness and makes one less able to defend oneself, less able to survive. However understandable the state we are describing by the term apathy is, it is also essential that we seek to find a new basis for the love and will which have been its chief casualties.