The Changing Image of Mental Health and Mental Illness

IN the latter half of the 19th century, Ernst Haeckel and others¹ recognized that ontogenesis repeated phylogenesis, and that this applied not only to human anatomy and physiology, but also to human behavior. This premise, sometimes called Von Baer's or Bastian's Law, continues to affect our changing concept of man. It maintains that every evolutionary change involves some use and incorporation of the past and never absolute rejection of it. If we accept this, then we can see that the differences between the acting, feeling and thinking patterns of successive generations become both the bases and the resultants of wholesome friction and conflict.

Such wholesome conflict improves and strengthens our structure and function, refines all adaptive capacities, and sharpens our wits and faculties. It increases our awareness of the inner and outer world. It differentiates the self from the non-self, helps our individual uniqueness to evolve and enables us to become what we really are. Essentially, it was this beneficial formative conflict that Justice Holmes was alluding to and exalting when he said: “Pray, not for comfort, but for combat,”² and Edmund Burke when he said: “Our antagonist is our helper.”³

Viewing evolutionary growth in this light dispels the belief that the inevitable conflict between father and son is instinctively and immutably destructive in nature, and invalidates the theory of an innate Oedipus complex. Such destructive conflict is acquired, anxiety-driven and compulsive, with each generation only out to prove and advance itself, and not out to improve and advance the state and growth of man. It is these acquired destructive conflicts occurring between rigidly held old and new philosophies, that give rise to unconstructive changes in our concepts and images.

When we ask what determines our images, we will remember that poets said: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”⁴ and “The world looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.”⁵

Each of us has his own image of ment