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Norman Weeks
Instinct
Instinct
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We read the texts of modern scientific psychology, but we still can't explain the human being and human behavior. Perhaps we should return to ancient insights about ourselves, that is, to classical myth and art.
In the National Roman Museum, there is a naked idol, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, an incarnation in marble of the total biological beauty and complete gender identity of the two sexes fused into one form. Hermaphrodite presents us with a mystery, namely, the sex instinct.
We speculate about the evolution of life out of the primordial cell, which was to become differentiated into male and female. Instinct is the dynamic of Life Itself.
Then, from biology to history. When Mediterranean paganism succumbed to Christianity, the sex instinct was attacked and replaced by an ideology of celibacy and self-suppression.
Science too, through modern psychoanalysis, has attempted control and suppression of instinct.
Indeed, things are not well with our instinct. Our very child-rearing starts us out all wrong. Aberrations of instinct include perversion, promiscuity, prostitution, and feminism. Hostility toward the female is expressed in obscenity and pornography. Our art and entertainment have become pornographic, nihilistic. Worst of all is the fusion of the erotic to cruelty. Our warp of instinct incapacitates us for love and marriage.
Both religion and science look upon the human animal with a malicious eye. What are we but sinners and monkeys?
Let's consider ourselves, instead, with a bit of tolerant humor. We enjoy a few laughs,--at prudery, at fashion, at shame and exhibitionism, at misunderstandings between the sexes, at our hypocritical morality.
Culture is the enemy of instinct, but we can still experience the flow of instinct within us under the stimuli of Nature. There is a natural tendency toward health. That is eros. Ministering to our need and longing, eros draws us on, to the touch, to intimacy, to human fulfillment.
INSTINCT is volume two of the trilogy, ROMAN RUMINATIONS, "the psychology of the human as an enculturated animal".
In the National Roman Museum, there is a naked idol, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, an incarnation in marble of the total biological beauty and complete gender identity of the two sexes fused into one form. Hermaphrodite presents us with a mystery, namely, the sex instinct.
We speculate about the evolution of life out of the primordial cell, which was to become differentiated into male and female. Instinct is the dynamic of Life Itself.
Then, from biology to history. When Mediterranean paganism succumbed to Christianity, the sex instinct was attacked and replaced by an ideology of celibacy and self-suppression.
Science too, through modern psychoanalysis, has attempted control and suppression of instinct.
Indeed, things are not well with our instinct. Our very child-rearing starts us out all wrong. Aberrations of instinct include perversion, promiscuity, prostitution, and feminism. Hostility toward the female is expressed in obscenity and pornography. Our art and entertainment have become pornographic, nihilistic. Worst of all is the fusion of the erotic to cruelty. Our warp of instinct incapacitates us for love and marriage.
Both religion and science look upon the human animal with a malicious eye. What are we but sinners and monkeys?
Let's consider ourselves, instead, with a bit of tolerant humor. We enjoy a few laughs,--at prudery, at fashion, at shame and exhibitionism, at misunderstandings between the sexes, at our hypocritical morality.
Culture is the enemy of instinct, but we can still experience the flow of instinct within us under the stimuli of Nature. There is a natural tendency toward health. That is eros. Ministering to our need and longing, eros draws us on, to the touch, to intimacy, to human fulfillment.
INSTINCT is volume two of the trilogy, ROMAN RUMINATIONS, "the psychology of the human as an enculturated animal".
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