Lecture: Know to Sex Scale: The Mind and the Tone Scale (1954)

[A]fter he [Freud] worked there on mystery for a long time, why he got up into sex. And then he stressed sex very heavily, and before he had gone too long with his libido theory, he discovered himself into the eatingness band. And the, he parked psychiatry right there as of 1924.

For instance, William Allen White once said to me, “Well I don’t think that this sexual fixation which Freud had was entirely embracive of everything, because it’s obvious that if you put somebody down at the table who was very hungry. A man, let’s say, we put him at a table. He’s very hungry. And we stand a naked woman in front of him. And we put a plate of food before him, that he would eat the food. And maybe he, after he has eaten the food, why he will become interested in the woman. But he will not become interested in the woman until he’s eaten the food. So it’s very obvious that eating has more to do with the problem than sex.”

Well that was William Allen White, he’s a very brilliant man. He was the director of St. Elizabeths. But; that’s the government institution. He nevertheless though, they just stopped right there. They had observations, and the big argument was whether or not eating or sex formed the basic line. And the funny part of it was, is they never looked back at mystery again. Neither did Freud. He fooled around with his oedipus complexes and so forth, and didn’t realize he would be in far more of a mystery than anybody could possibly assimilate.

[…]

We look over their own histories, all the people engaged in that. Jung, Adler, Freud himself, and so forth. And we don’t find any of these men anything like sympathetic toward activity. They, they, by the way, you see, I knew, I knew people, and the people who were trained by these people. And, if there was anything they were in awe of, it was somebody who engaged in sports. So this fellow was phenomenal to them. They knew this was very good somehow or another, but they couldn’t quite put their finger on it.

And to this day it is enough to tell a psychiatrist that, and prove to him, that you are very energetic and engaged in sports, to have him dismiss you immediately as being completely sane. Only that’s just, bing. He just says, “Well, I…” He just goes into apathy right at that point. That’s the truth.

The…it was an interesting thing, for instance, to William Allen White. And Commander Thompson. Both of them, where I was concerned, that I wasn’t very interested in sitting around figuring about this stuff, and didn’t seem to be terribly interested in the insane. And I still wanted to know something about the human mind and how it worked.

You see, a mind mis-working was their level of acceptance. And just knowing how a mind worked, as a piece of information, was quite different. This was a different look. An entirely different look. And they decided that I could never possibly have been serious, or never at any time was really serious about it, most of the time because I spoke jokingly, rather facetiously about some of these things.

And particularly because I was always tearing around the countryside doing something in the field of sports. If I was to be located anyplace it’d be down on the golf links, at least. And they couldn’t be found down on the golf links themselves.¹

Notes