Dynamic Unconscious Discussed by Huxley

Opening with a discussion of the "dynamic unconscious," Aldous Huxley ranged over a wide variety of topics before an overflow audience at M.I.T.'s Kresge Hall last night.

Huxley, in the second of seven lectures on "What a Piece of Work Is Man," contrasted the positions of Freud and F.W.H. Myers. The latter, he said, dealt with the positive, creative side of the unconscious, while Freud, having a medical background, was concerned more with disease and the negative subconscious.

Briefly commenting on several subjects, Huxley claimed that genius involves a "particularly active and good positive unconscious." He defined neurosis as behavior relevant "not to the present but to conditioning induced in a period of lowered resistance."

Touching on politics, Huxley called democracy a more "biologically sensitive" from of government than dictatorship because the wide differences in individual physiologies requires some freedom of choice.