AN EXPERIMENT AT FONTAINEBLEAU

A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE1.

BY JAMES CARRUTHERS YOUNG.

I do not doubt that there are many and varied opinions about the nature and significance of the Institute founded in 1922 at Fontainebleau by George Gurdjieff, a man of Greek or Georgian nationality (I never knew which for certain).

I have been asked to give an account of "what it was all about," and I do so willingly, with the modest reservation, of course, that it is only my account of "what it was all about." I shall do my best to relate as much as possible of what I have to say to the common interest in modern psychological problems. It will be necessary to recall the motives which led me to take a plunge into the dubious sea of occultism. At the outset I would point out that every form of occultism, 'spookish,' as the significance of the word has come to be, implies its own particular psychology, 'spookish' or otherwise. Also, I think it may be said that every form of occultism aims at self-development through deepening or expanding [the limits of] self-consciousness, or however you like to express it. Now it is obvious that this laudable object cannot be attained merely by embracing the ideas of a system, however rapturously. The all-important factor of the exercise and proper application of will must enter, if anything is to be achieved. If it does not, then the ideas, however beautiful and intriguing, in the end become merely 'dope.' I need not remind you how many people make the classical Adlerian 'escape' into occultism, and how difficult it often is to cure them of this 'dope habit.' Such people constitute the pseudo-occultists of our time and of all time. So it may be said that 'pseudo-occultism' only exists by reason of the 'pseudo-occultists.' I even venture to think that the term occultism will tend to disappear altogether with the realization that the essentials of its matter (in so far as it contains true psychology -and ruling out speculative theory) are implicit in the interpretations and findings of modern psychology.

However that may be, I said above that the all-important factor in self-development by any system whatever was necessarily the will. The insistence, in the Ouspensky-Gurdjieff doctrine, on the need for 1 A paper read before the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society.

development of the will through ceaseless application to the 'work,' in the specific sense, impressed me deeply. I was not so overwhelmingly satisfied with the results of my analytical therapy that I could afford to ignore any ideas or theories bearing on the question of will, because it seemed to me that 'failure of will' was the 'bête noire' in neuroses. Roughly, the neurotic symptom from the Freudian standpoint is the disguised expression of an affect which is too painful to be faced. From the Adlerian standpoint, it is an 'incomparable arrangement,' by which the patient avoids facing a certain aspect of what we call reality. In the broadest sense in both systems, it is a question of failure to face up to reality. Now it by no means follows that, when it is made clear to the patient by analysis what aspect of reality he has been unconsciously avoiding, he will at once be able to cope with it. This is particularly evident in the case of obsessionists, as I have proved to my own satisfaction again and again. A washing obsessionist, for example, cheerfully subscribes to the theory of origin of her washing, but when called upon to make the slightest new adaptation, always falls back on her washing. In effect she says: "I cannot marry, or do this, that or the other, because, you see, I wash." To put the matter in a nutshell, analytical knowledge is not necessarily effective knowledge.

Now I think it will be generally agreed that what I have called 'failure of will' is often bound up with an endocrine deficiency or dyscrasia, sometimes acquired and sometimes apparently so fundamental as to justify the term 'primary plasmic insufficiency,' which corresponds to Adler's organic inferiority. Unfortunately, the science of endocrinology was not, and is not yet, so far advanced as to enable us to remedy such dyscrasias with anything approaching to certainty or precision, even granted that our powers of diagnosis may be able to divine the true nature of such complicated conditions. My problem, then, was how to overcome the difficulty of 'failure of will' by means of a definite psychological method. What I learnt in the early stages of my acquaintance with the system which was afterwards tried out at Fontainebleau gave me reason to hope that here was something which I had been seeking. It must not, however, be supposed that I embarked on this adventure chiefly, or even mainly, to improve and expand my psychological and therapeutic technique. I cannot lay claim to such a purely impersonal motive. It may be that I was a little discouraged by the less consistent and more ambiguous results of analytical therapy in contrast with the precise and concrete results of surgery, which I had practised a good deal, both before and during the war. This state of mind was helped

neither by the paeans of joy and jubilation which issued from the ranks of those who acclaimed the successes of a cut-and-dried technique, nor by the acrimonious discussions which seemed to centre round the maintenance of a dogmatic standpoint rather than round the need to cure patients. This vital point for physicians seemed often to be lost sight of, so that I was inclined to sympathize with the sceptic who changed the old quip, “the operation was successful, but the patient died," into "the analysis was successful, but the patient committed suicide." I was ever mindful at that time of Jung's story of the patient who came to him from another doctor, and, speaking of the latter, said: "Of course, he never understood my dreams, but he took so much trouble with them.” In brief, psychopathology seemed to me to be claiming too much for itself as a science, thereby stultifying itself, and too little for itself as an art, thereby impoverishing itself. Perhaps I was stale. This is just the condition in which one is ripe for a spiritual adventure. So I went on it.

I scented the possibility of a substantial addition to my knowledge of psychological problems by accepting a discipline calculated to force one to experience oneself in a new way or from a different angle. It is an axiom that in experiencing a thing one experiences oneself. If the circumstances of one's life are uniform, one experiences oneself in a uniform way; in other words, one becomes stale. Staleness tends towards a mechanical state, and ultimately to petrification. Of course, one can devise means, if one is ingenious, of experiencing oneself in a new way. An enthusiastic disciple, for example, used to stand on his head, propped up against the wall, and try to think out a problem. He found that he could not at first. But he persisted and succeeded, thereby overcoming mechanism, which only allowed him to think in an ordinary uninverted posture. Whether there is any ultimate value in that particular form of achievement is open to question, but the principle holds good that the soul must experience itself in new ways in order to grow. It is needless to say that the new ways must be significant, and not trivial. As I understand it, this is the sine qua non in any attempt at all-round self-development. The idea of the Institute, then, was to provide an artificial milieu so arranged that the pupil would be forced to experience himself in radically new postures, both physical and psychological. The new postures were to be brought about by 'shocks,' as they were called. Instead of the shock bringing about insanity, as the novelists put it, 'shocks' were to produce sanity! It was to be one more attempt to put into practice the age-old maxim: Know Thyself. 'Shocks' there were in plenty, and by no means always premeditated or arranged by M. Gurdjieff.

The ideas of the system which was to be put into practice were expounded with great skill and consistency in London for a period of about a year before the Institute was begun in France, by M. Ouspensky. The fundamental tenet would be, I suppose, called pessimistic. It is to the effect that the great majority of mankind are machines or mechanisms subject to the caprice of forces which cannot be controlled in any real sense. One way of expressing this is to say that we can do nothing. Everything is done. We are merely passive agents, however much we cling to the illusion that we are active and free agents. As machines, then, we are entirely driven from outside, by external circumstances. We are under 'laws of accident.' So long as we are under these 'laws of accident,' we remain in a dream-state or asleep.' Those who recognize that they literally are in a dream-state may or may not attempt to wake up. This will largely depend on whether their dream is a happy one or not. But it by no means follows that an attempt will be made because the dream is unhappy. There are many people, not only neurotics, who do not want to sacrifice their suffering. They cling to it as if it were their last claim to human consideration. Those who do resolve to wake up from the dream-state must pass out from under the domination of the mechanical laws of accident. These mechanical laws of accident immediately resolve themselves into laws of psychological being. The laws of external Nature remain constant; only our attitude towards them changes. The process of becoming free of these laws may be compared to what happens in the military hierarchy. Laws or rules which apply to the private do not apply to the sergeant, and the sergeant-major is exempted from rules which apply to the sergeant. The commissioned officer is exempt from many of the rules which apply to all three, and so on. But the discipline by which the aspirant is to become free of the burdensome mechanical laws of his own being is more arduous than that existing in the military hierarchy, where promotion comes more or less automatically with the passage of time. Moreover, instead of being imposed from without, it is self-imposed.

The cardinal rules of the system are: (1) Self-remembering; (2) Nonidentifying; (3) Non-considering.

They must be the watchwords of all those who, like the heroes of mythology and religion, would conquer the dragon; that is, shake off the inertia and the sweet poison of the personal, the traditional and the racial past. They are the principles-and the only principles-under whatever other terms they may be formulated, by which the normal man, so-called, as well as the neurotic, can attain to greater stability

and harmony of his being. A man may have learnt, through analysis or otherwise, that he has a 'mother-fixation,' and know all about it; but if he continues to resent in neurotic fashion a supposed slight or slur at the office, because "his mother would not have spoken so to him," then, in terms of the system, he is 'identifying' with the supposed insult. His so-called knowledge is ineffective and has not allied itself with his will. If he ceases to resent the supposed slight, then his knowledge has informed his will and has become effective. He has 'self-remembered' through 'non-identifying.' To 'self-remember,' then, may be said to be to make self-knowledge effective through the will. 'Considering,' in the Ouspensky system, is merely a variety of identification, but it is sometimes easier to explain 'non-considering' than 'non-identification' to a tyro. The man who identifies himself with an ideal of false noblesse oblige and keeps a whole room in an uproar until someone takes a more comfortable chair than himself is a rough example of 'considering.' His extravagance or fussiness is 'mechanical' in the Ouspenskian sense. From the Adlerian standpoint such extravagance always indicates avoidance of a real imperative. It is an 'incomparable arrangement' of the neurotic will to power.' For those who do not use any jargon, it is a form of insincerity. Both 'non-identifying' and 'non-considering' are implicitly contained in the idea of 'self-remembering' and the object of 'self-remembering' is to 'wake up,' to become more conscious. This constitutes the 'work.'

The raison d'être of the Institute at Fontainebleau, as I understood it, was to provide a milieu for the intensive practice of this work of selfobservation in order to develop will. The essential in self-observation is to observe one's mechanisms as objectively as if they were the antics of another fellow, to be constantly taking mental photographs of oneself, as it were. There are pathological states-particularly melancholiain which the sufferer always sees himself doing things and hears himself saying things, almost as if he were watching or listening to another person. This is a form of dis-association. In such a case the observing element is just as 'mechanical' in the Ouspenskian sense as the observed. The difference between the mechanical observation of the dis-associated state and true self-observation lies in the absence of will in the former. 'Work,' then, in the sense of the system consists in self-observation with a view to overcoming 'mechanism.'

A proper or effective recognition of our mechanisms then leads to greater consciousness, to self-consciousness. Four states of consciousness are postulated by the system as follows: