Shaw would not have been able to say that except for the first nine
months of its existence no human being manages its affairs as well as
a plant.

The chief difficulty in adapting the psychoanalytic scheme to
political thought arises in this connection. The Freudians are
concerned with the maladjustment of distinct individuals to other
individuals and to concrete circumstances. They have assumed that if
internal derangements could be straightened out, there would be little
or no confusion about what is the obviously normal relationship. But
public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and
there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public
opinions refer are known only as opinions. The psychoanalyst, on the
other hand, almost always assumes that the environment is knowable,
and if not knowable then at least bearable, to any unclouded
intelligence. This assumption of his is the problem of public opinion.
Instead of taking for granted an environment that is readily known,
the social analyst is most concerned in studying how the larger
political environment is conceived, and how it can be conceived more
successfully. The psychoanalyst examines the adjustment to an X,
called by him the environment; the social analyst examines the X,
called by him the pseudo-environment.

He is, of course, permanently and constantly in debt to the new
psychology, not only because when rightly applied it so greatly helps
people to stand on their own feet, come what may, but because the
study of dreams, fantasy and rationalization has thrown light on how
the pseudo-environment is put together. But he cannot assume as his
criterion either what is called a "normal biological career"
[Footnote: Edward J. Kempf, _Psychopathology_, p. 116.] within