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GENERAL FIELD THEORY
By
[Editor's note: This fragmentary outline survives in MS.]
I. 1. A living organism may be regarded as a field which is the resultant of various forces.
2. In order to function, the organism must be able to resolve these forces in terms of directed activity.
3. In non-intelligent organisms, the resolving factor is instinct. Instinct is the inherited ability to cope with the environment without much forethought. Instinct is the regulator of:
a. Automatic life processes. b. Aggressive reaction to hunger, sex, and danger. c. Recessive reaction to danger. d. Protective reaction to young (sometimes). e. Recessive reaction to sex (sometimes).
4. Intellect probably arises as an adjunct to instinct in learning process. Improvement of instinctive functions with experience is noted in many species.
5. In homo sapiens, intellect has grown to the point where it is equal to or even more powerful than instinct in regulating certain basic forces.
6. Since neither one of these controls is completely dominant in man, a conflict exists in certain areas. When this conflict cannot be dealt with by either intellectual or instinctive means, it is projected as a symbol. Religion arises as a means of dealing with such symbols.
II. To further illustrate this process, I will proceed to a field analysis of groups.
1. A colony, or culture, may be regarded as the resultant of various individual organisms existing interdependently. Among the most simple are bacteria and molds. Ants and bees are intermediate. With certain species of fish and birds following. Among the more highly evolved are dog and wolf packs. Certain hoofed species, apes and man. Individuality and self-determination appear to increase with the degree of evolution, but interdependency remains strong in all those cultures.
2. The principle of a resultant or directive force concentrated in one individual appears to be operative in certain of these cultures, particularly the more evolved. This may be noted in the case of Queen ants and Queen bees, but appears certain in the case of birds, wolf, and ape leaders. This principle appears to operate instinctively in the form of the strongest and most capable animal, who is more or less automatically rejected or destroyed when his strength and capacity begin to fail.
3. A principle of numerical limitation appears to operate in the case of colony cultures other than man. This may be based upon ecological and logistical factors, and possibly also upon other functional limitations. Even in the case of man, the community, tribal or family unit may be the true measure of the limits of the culture.
4. It often appears to operate that individuals who unsuccessfully challenge the group leader withdraw, sometimes with other individuals accompanying, to form the nucleus of a new group.
5. Although the leadership of such cultures is usually composed of males, the early training and leadership of individuals is done mostly by females. Consequently stronger types of females assume considerable importance in certain aspects of group leadership.
III. Prototypes of the male deity, the dying god, the Hero, and the mother goddess in religious mythology may be seen in cases 2, 4, and 5 respectively, above.
It is now possible to proceed with a field analysis of human culture in terms of the bipolar conflict between instinct and intellect.
1. As intellect proceeds to rationalization, the authority of the male leader will seem good to those members who depend on him, but evil to the incipient hero type whose function will be to kill and replace him, or to lead a tribal secession. To the chief, the hero will appear as a criminal to be controlled or destroyed at all cost. Likewise the female, who is the source of all goodness to her young, may appear as a danger of inhibition to the hero, and also as a possible threat to the authority of the chief.
2. As previously stated, when conflicts of this type are irresolvable, they are projected as symbols. Personalities involved may be projected as demons, spirits and ghosts of the dead, as witches, dragons, monsters, and gods and goddesses, all or which will contain the bipolar element of the conflict. These become the property of the tribe, and also of individuals, and to them the irresolvable problems are referred.
3. Since it is impossible, except in the case of civilized individuals, to continually refer problems to symbols which do not in fact exist, the magician-priest arises as a representative and personification of these symbols, that is, as a mediator between the real problem and its projection. Then, by processes which are part symbolic and part actual, the conflicts are resolved to the general satisfaction of the tribe. This is the basic nature and function of religion.
4. In the case of dynamic cultures, conflicts will be continually breaking out in new forms. This requires a fusion of the personalities of priest and hero in individuals who, often at dire risk, develop new methods of resolution.
5. It should be observed that individual conflicts are similar to tribal conflicts. They have the same origins, are projected in the same manner, and take the same symbolic forms. Thus it is more or less automatic that the individual who struggles with and resolves his own problems will be in a position to do the same thing for the tribe.
6. Since the prototype of each type exists in its opposite, another bipolar conflict between love and hate arises, which in some aspects becomes suicidal in trend. The peculiar malignity, as well as the excessive beneficences, of certain projections are an outgrowth of this conflict.
IV. We may now proceed to an examination of the methods used in various cultures to resolve these conflicts. They are quite simple and fundamental. and remarkably similar the world over. Breaking the conflict problems into fundamentals, we have:
A. The Chief and the Hero (father & son, superego & ego, castration complex, God and devil, society (masculine) and rebel, (etc.). Redeemer. B. The Woman & the Man (mother-son, husband-wife, father-daughter, brother-sister, society (fem[inine]) & rebel, witch, goddess. C. Secondary conflicts such as individual-social, inter-tribal, etc. appear as harmonics to the fundamental.
Even present negativistic aspects of the conflict may be broken down as follows.
A. The chief may abuse his authority, & his unchecked aggressive components will endanger the tribe—or—the same effect through weakness & indecision. B. The hero may go too far in revolt—or—through weakness the revolt will be a fiasco. C. The woman will dominate her young too thoroughly or too long—or—injure them by indifference or carelessness.
These considerations lead to doubts in areas where doubt may be fatal, and thus require finite projections.
[Editor's note: Two additional manuscript pages follow but are crossed out by Parsons and here omitted.]
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