IN DISCUSSING the second aspect of the basic conflict— the tendency to “move against” people—we shall proceed as before, examining here the type in whom aggressive trends predominate.
Just as the compliant type clings to the belief that people are “nice,” and is continually baffled by evidence to the contrary, so the aggressive type takes it for granted that everyone is hostile, and refuses to admit that they are not. To him life is a struggle of all against all, and the devil take the hindmost. Such exceptions as he allows are made reluctantly and with reservation. His attitude is sometimes quite apparent, but more often it is covered over with a veneer of suave politeness, fair-mindedness and good fellowship. This “front” can represent a Machiavellian concession to expediency. As a rule, however, it is a composite of pretenses, genuine feelings, and neurotic needs. A desire to make others believe he is a good fellow may be combined with a certain amount of actual benevolence as long as there is no question in anybody’s mind that he himself is in command. There may be elements of a neurotic need for affection and approval, put to the service of aggressive goals. No such “front” is necessary to the compliant type because his values coincide anyway with approved-of social or Christian virtues.
To appreciate the fact that the needs of the aggressive type are just as compulsive as those of the compliant, we must realize that they are as much prompted by basic anxiety as his. This must be emphasized, because the component of fear, so evident in the latter, is never admitted or displayed by the type we are now considering. In him everything is geared toward being, becoming, or at least appearing tough.
His needs stem fundamentally from his feeling that the world is an arena where, in the Darwinian sense, only the fittest survive and the strong annihilate the weak. What contributes most to survival depends largely on the civilization in which the person lives; but in any case, a callous pursuit of self-interest is the paramount law. Hence his primary need becomes one of control over others. Variations in the means of control are infinite. There may be an outright exercise of power, there may be indirect manipulation through oversolicitousness or putting people under obligation. He may prefer to be the power behind the throne. The approach may be by way of the intellect, implying a belief that by reasoning or foresight everything can be managed. His particular form of control depends partly on his natural endowments. Partly, it represents a fusion of conflicting trends. If, for instance, the person inclines at the same time toward detachment he will shun any direct domination because it brings him into too close contact with others. Indirect methods will also be preferred if there is much hidden need for affection. If his wish is to be the power behind the throne, the presence of sadistic trends is indicated, since it implies using others for the attainment of one’s goals.1
Concomitantly he needs to excel, to achieve success, prestige, or recognition in any form. Strivings in this direction are partly oriented toward power, inasmuch as success and prestige lend power in a competitive society. But they also make for a subjective feeling of strength through outside affirmation, outside acclaim, and the fact of supremacy. Here as in the compliant type the center of gravity lies outside the person himself; only the kind of affirmation wanted from others differs. Factually the one is as futile as the other. When people wonder why success has failed to make them feel any less insecure, they only show their psychological ignorance, but the fact that they do so indicates the extent to which success and prestige are commonly regarded as yardsticks.
A strong need to exploit others, to outsmart them, to make them of use to himself, is part of the picture. Any situation or relationship is looked at from the standpoint of “What can I get out of it?”—whether it has to do with money, prestige, contacts, or ideas. The person himself is consciously or semiconsciously convinced that everyone acts this way, and so what counts is to do it more efficiently than the rest. The qualities he develops are almost diametrically opposed to those of the compliant type. He becomes hard and tough, or gives that appearance. He regards all feelings, his own as well as others’, as “sloppy sentimentality.” Love, for him, plays a negligible role. Not that he is never “in love” or never has an affair or marries, but what is of prime concern is to have a mate who is eminently desirable, one through whose attractiveness, social prestige, or wealth he can enhance his own position. He sees no reason to be considerate of others. “Why should I care—let others take care of themselves.” In terms of the old ethical problem of two persons on a raft only one of whom could survive, he would say that of course he’d try to save his own skin—not to would be stupid and hypocritical. He hates to admit fear of any kind and will find drastic ways of bringing it under control. He might, for instance, force himself to stay in an empty house although he is terrified of burglars; he might insist on riding horseback until he has overcome his fear of horses; he might intentionally walk through swamps where there are known to be snakes in order to rid himself of his terror of them.
While the compliant type tends to appease, the aggressive type does everything he can to be a good fighter. He is alert and keen in an argument and will go out of his way to launch one for the sake of proving he is right. He may be at his best when his back is to the wall and there is no alternative but to fight. In contrast to the compliant type who is afraid to win a game, he is a bad loser and undeniably wants victory. He is just as ready to accuse others as the former is to take blame on himself. In neither case does the consideration of guilt play a role. The compliant type when he pleads guilty is by no means convinced that he is so, but is driven to appease. The aggressive type similarly is not convinced that the other fellow is wrong; he just assumes he is right because he needs this ground of subjective certainty in much the same way as an army needs a safe point from which to launch an attack. To admit an error when it is not absolutely necessary seems to him an unforgivable display of weakness, if not arrant foolishness.
It is consistent with his attitude of having to fight against a malevolent world that he should develop a keen sense of realism—of its kind. He will never be so ‘‘naïve” as to overlook in others any manifestation of ambition, greed, ignorance, or anything else that might obstruct his own goals. Since in a competitive civilization attributes like these are much more common than real decency, he feels justified in regarding himself as only realistic. Actually, of course, he is just as one-sided as the compliant type. Another facet of his realism is his emphasis on planning and foresight. Like any good strategist, in every situation he is careful to appraise his own chances, the forces of his adversaries, and the possible pitfalls.
Because he is driven always to assert himself as the strongest, shrewdest, or most sought after, he tries to develop the efficiency and resourcefulness necessary to being so. The zest and intelligence he puts into his work may make him a highly esteemed employee or a success in a business of his own. However, the impression he gives of having an absorbing interest in his work will in a sense be misleading, because for him work is only a means to an end. He has no love for what he is doing and takes no real pleasure in it—a fact consistent with his attempt to exclude feelings from his life altogether. This choking off of all feeling has a two-edged effect. On the one hand it is undoubtedly expedient from the standpoint of success in that it enables him to function like a well-oiled machine, untiringly producing the goods that will bring him ever more power and prestige. Here feelings might interfere. They could conceivably lead him into a line of work with fewer opportunistic advantages; they might cause him to shy away from the techniques so often employed on the road to success; they might tempt him away from his work to the enjoyment of nature or art, or to the companionship of friends instead of persons merely useful to his purpose. On the other hand the emotional barrenness that results from a throttling of feeling will do something to the quality of his work; certainly it is bound to detract from his creativity.
The aggressive type looks like an exquisitely uninhibited person. He can assert his wishes, he can give orders, express anger, defend himself. But actually he has no fewer inhibitions than the compliant type. It is not greatly to the credit of our civilization that his particular inhibitions do not, offhand, strike us as such. They lie in the emotional area and concern his capacity for friendship, love, affection, sympathetic understanding, disinterested enjoyment. The last he would set down as a waste of time.
His feeling about himself is that he is strong, honest, and realistic, all of which is true if you look at things his way. According to his premises his estimate of himself is strictly logical, since to him ruthlessness is strength, lack of consideration for others, honesty, and a callous pursuit of one’s own ends, realism. His attitude on the score of his honesty comes partly from a shrewd debunking of current hypocrisies. Enthusiasm for a cause, philanthropic sentiments, and the like he sees as sheer pretense, and it is not hard for him to expose gestures of social consciousness or Christian virtue for what they so often are. His set of values is built around the philosophy of the jungle. Might makes right. Away with humaneness and mercy. Homo homini lupus. Here we have values not very different from those with which the nazis have made us so familiar.
There is subjective logic in the tendency of the aggressive type to reject real sympathy and friendliness as well as their counterfeits, compliance and appeasement. But it would be a mistake to assume that he cannot tell the difference. When he meets with an indubitably friendly spirit coupled with strength he is well able to recognize and respect it. The point is that he believes it to be against his interest to be too discriminating in this respect. Both attitudes strike him as liabilities in the battle for survival.
Why, though, does he reject the softer human sentiments with such violence? Why is he likely to feel nauseated at the sight of affectionate behavior in others? Why is he so contemptuous when someone shows sympathy at what he considers the wrong moment? He acts like the man who chased beggars from his door because they were breaking his heart. He may indeed literally be abusive to beggars; he may refuse the simplest request with a vehemence quite out of proportion. Reactions like these are typical of him and can readily be observed as the aggressive trends become less rigid during analysis. Actually, his feelings on the score of ‘‘softness” in others are mixed. He despises it in them, it is true, but he welcomes it as well, because it leaves him all the freer to pursue his own goals. Why else should he so often feel drawn toward the compliant type—just as the latter is so often drawn toward him? The reason his reaction is so extreme is that it is prompted by his need to fight all softer feelings within himself. Nietzsche gives us a good illustration of these dynamics when he has his superman see any form of sympathy as a sort of fifth column, an enemy operating from within. “Softness” to this kind of person means not only genuine affection, pity, and the like but everything implicit in the needs, feelings, and standards of the compliant type. In the case of the beggar, for instance, he would have stirrings of real sympathy, a need to comply with the request, a feeling that he ought to be helpful. But there is a still greater need to push all this away from him, with the result that he not only refuses but abuses.
The hope of fusing his divergent drives, which the compliant type places in love, is sought by the aggressive in recognition. To be recognized promises him not only the affirmation of himself he requires but holds out the additional lure of being liked by others and of being able in turn to like them. Since recognition thus appears to offer solution of his conflicts, it becomes the saving mirage he pursues.
The inner logic of his struggle is in principle identical with that presented in the case of the compliant type and therefore need only be briefly indicated here. For the aggressive type any feeling of sympathy, or obligation to be “good,” or attitude of compliance would be incompatible with the whole structure of living he has built up and would shake its foundations. Moreover, the emergence of these opposing tendencies would confront him with his basic conflict and so destroy the organization he has carefully nurtured—the organization for unity. The consequence will be that repression of the softer tendencies will reinforce the aggressive ones, making them all the more compulsive.
If the two types we have discussed are now vivid in our minds we can see that they represent polar extremes. What is desirable to one is abhorrent to the other. The one has to like everyone, the other to regard all as potential enemies. The one seeks to avoid fight at all costs, the other finds it is his natural element. The one clings to fear and helplessness, the other tries to dismiss them. The one moves, however neurotically, toward humane ideals, the other toward the philosophy of the jungle. But all the while neither of these patterns is freely chosen: each is compulsive and inflexible, determined by inner necessities. There is no middle ground on which they can meet.
We are ready now to take the step our presentation of types has led up to, and for the sake of which we have discussed them. We set out to discover just what the basic conflict involved, and so far have seen two aspects of it operating as predominant trends in two distinct types. The step we must now take is to picture a person in whom these two opposite sets of attitudes and values are equally at work. Is it not clear that such a person would be so inexorably driven in two diametrically opposite directions that he would hardly be able to function at all? The fact of the matter is that he would be split and paralyzed beyond all power to act. It is his effort to eliminate one set that puts him into one or the other of the categories we have described; it is one of the ways he attempts to solve his conflicts.
To speak as Jung does, in such a case, of a one-sided development appears thoroughly inadequate. It is at best a formalistically correct statement. But since it is based on a misconception of the dynamics, the implications are wrong. When Jung, starting from the concept of one-sidedness, continues to say that in therapy the patient must be helped to accept his opposite side, we say: How is that possible? The patient cannot accept it, he can only recognize it. If Jung expects this step to make him a whole person, we should reply that certainly this step is necessary to eventual integration, but of itself it merely means a facing of his conflicts, which hitherto he has avoided. What Jung has not properly evaluated is the compulsive nature of neurotic trends. Between moving toward people and moving against people there is not simply the difference between weakness and strength—or, as Jung would say, between femininity and masculinity. We all have potentialities both for compliance and aggression. And if a person not compulsively driven struggles hard enough, he can arrive at some integration. When the two patterns are neurotic however, both are harmful to our growth. Two undesirables added together do not make a desirable whole, nor can two incompatibles make a harmonious entity.
1 Cf. Chapter 12, Sadistic Trends.