Discussion of Martin Grotjahn's Article, The New Technology and Our Ageless Unconscious

Martin Grotjahn's paper, although written in a light vein and in an amusing, aperculike fashion, deals with the matter of greatest importance in the present human situation and of deep disturbance to all people who care about the physical as well as the spiritual future of mankind. We are constantly reading about the unsavory influence of the machines on our culture, and hearing lamentations about the loss of spiritual values due to the second technical revolution. One cannot escape the impression that these are voices crying in the wilderness; the machine age progresses irresistably and the West and the great Eastern powers get more and more drunk with their technical success. Their competitive struggle for superiority and “firsts” in both constructive as well as destructive uses, keeps all of us in breathtaking suspense of expected triumph and anxiety of annihilation.

This nervewracking anguish, all man-made, should make us aware how irrational, nonsensical, nay utterly foolish the machines have made us. However, we have to realize that our own unconscious irrationality stares into our face when we are awed by the uncanny threat of the machines. It is the destructive urges within ourselves which have been externalized and taken material shape and power in the form of our technical creations.

Here the psychoanalyst feels called upon to raise his voice. He is familiar with the irrational in man, equipped to understand it and cognizant of its powerful, often overpowering influence on man's behavior. But, alas, this very familiarity makes him feel that his also will be but another cry in the wilderness. However, some hope lies in bringing the

irrational under conscious control by recognizing its motor forces which ascend from repressed infantile sources and thus making it accessible to the rationality of intellect and reason.

Grotjahn tries to uncover some of the unconscious dynamic motivations for our inebriation with our technical creations. I find his interpretation