Part 13

It remains to be seen whether this construction will turn out to be serviceable. Although it arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psychoanalysis, it goes far beyond psychoanalysis. I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct in psychoanalysis. But this reproach is based upon a complete misconception of the facts. Clear fundamental concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a department of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clearcut general concepts are superfluous and indeed impossible. Zoology and Botany did not start from correct and adequate definitions of an animal and a plant; to this very day Biology has been unable to give any certain meaning to the concept of life. Physics itself, indeed, would never have made any advance if it had had to wait until its concepts of matter, force, gravitation, and so on, had reached the desirable degree of clarity and precision. The fundamental concepts or most general ideas in any of the disciplines of science are always left indeterminate at first and are only explained to begin with by reference to the realm of phenomena from which they were derived; it is only by means of a progressive analysis of the material of observation that they can be made clear and can find a significant and consistent meaning.

I had already made attempts at earlier stages of my work to arrive at some more general points of view, starting from the observations of psychoanalysis. In a short essay, “Formulations regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,”[19] published in 1911, I drew attention (and there was, of course, nothing original in this), to the domination of the “pleasure-pain principle” in mental life and to its displacement by the so-called “reality principle.” Later on (1915–17), I made an attempt to produce a “Metapsychology.” By this I meant a method of approach according to which every mental process is considered in relation to three coördinates, which I described as _dynamic_, _topographical_, and _economic_ respectively; and this seemed to me to represent the farthest goal that psychology could attain. The attempt remained no more than a torso; after writing two or three papers—“Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” “Repression,” “The Unconscious,” “Mourning and Melancholia,” etc[20]—I broke off, wisely perhaps, since the time for theoretical predictions of this kind had not yet come. In my latest speculative works I have set about the task of dissecting our mental apparatus on the basis of the analytic view of pathological facts and have divided it into an _ego_, and _id_, and a _super-ego_.[21] The super-ego is the heir of the Œdipus complex and represents the ethical standards of mankind.

I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation. I have, on the contrary, always remained in the closest touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly facilitated by constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many important points. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis, was, for a long time, avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed.

The neuroses were the first subject of analysis and for a long time they were the only one. No analyst could doubt that medical practice was wrong in separating those disorders from the psychoses and in attaching them to the organic nervous diseases. The theory of the neuroses belongs to psychiatry and is indispensable as an introduction to it. It would seem, however, that the analytical study of the psychoses is impracticable owing to its lack of therapeutic results. Mental patients are, as a rule, without the capacity for forming a positive transference, so that the principal instrument of analytic technique is inapplicable to them. There are, nevertheless, a number of methods of approach to be found. Transference is often not so completely absent but that it can be used to a certain extent; and analysis has achieved undoubted successes with cyclical depressions, light paranoic modifications and partial schizophrenias. It has at least been a benefit to science that in many cases the diagnosis can oscillate for quite a long time between assuming the presence of a psychoneurosis or of a dementia præcox; for therapeutic attempts initiated in such cases have resulted in valuable discoveries before they have had to be broken off. But the chief consideration in this connection is that so many things that, in the neuroses, have to be laboriously fetched up from the depths, are found in the psychoses upon the surface, visible to every eye. So that the best subjects for the demonstration of many of the assertions of analysis are provided by the psychiatric clinic. It was thus bound to happen before long that analysis would find its way to the objects of psychiatric observation. At a very early date (1896) I was able to establish, in a case of paranoid dementia, the presence of the same ætiological factors and the same emotional complexes as in the neuroses. Jung explained some most puzzling stereotypes in dements by bringing them into relation with the patients’ life histories; Bleuler demonstrated the existence in various psychoses of mechanisms like those which analysis had discovered in neurotics. Since then analysts have never relaxed their efforts to come to an understanding of the psychoses. Especially since it has been possible to work with the concept of narcissism, they have managed, now in this place and now in that, to get a glimpse beyond the wall. Most of all, no doubt, was achieved by Abraham in his elucidation of melancholia. It is true that in this sphere all our knowledge is not yet converted into therapeutic power; but the mere theoretical gain is not to be despised, and we may be content to wait for its practical application. In the long run even the psychiatrists have been unable to resist the convincing force of their own clinical material. At the present time German psychiatry is undergoing a kind of “peaceful penetration” by analytic views. While they continually declare that they will never be psychoanalysts, that they do not belong to the “orthodox” school or agree with its exaggerations, and in particular that they do not believe in the predominance of the sexual factor, nevertheless the majority of the younger workers take over one piece or another of analytic theory and apply it in their own fashion to the material. All the signs point to the proximity of further developments in the same direction.

VI

I now watch from a distance the symptomatic reactions that are accompanying the introduction of psychoanalysis into the France which was for so long refractory. It seems like a reproduction of something I have lived through before, and yet it has peculiarities of its own. Objections of incredible simplicity are raised, such as that French sensitiveness is offended by the pedantry and crudity of psychoanalytical terminology. (One cannot help being reminded of Lessing’s immortal Chevalier Riccaut de la Marlinière.[22]) Another comment has a more serious ring (a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne did not think it beneath him): the whole method of thought of psychoanalysis is inconsistent with the _génie latin_. Here the Anglo-Saxon allies of France, who count as supporters of analysis, are explicitly thrown over. Anyone hearing such words would suppose that psychoanalysis had been the favourite child of the _génie teutonique_ and had been clasped to its heart from the moment of birth.

In France the interest in psychoanalysis began among the men of letters. To understand this, it must be borne in mind that from the time of the writing of _The Interpretation of Dreams_, psychoanalysis ceased to be a purely medical subject. Between its appearance in Germany and in France lies the history of its numerous applications to departments of literature and of æsthetics, to the history of religions and to pre-history, to my theology, to folk-lore, to education, and so on. None of these things have much to do with medicine; in fact it is only through psychoanalysis that they are connected with it. I have no business, therefore, to go into them in detail in these pages.[23] I cannot pass them over completely in silence, however, for, on the one hand, they are essential to a correct appreciation of the nature and value of psychoanalysis, and, on the other hand, I have, after all, undertaken to give an account of my lifework. The beginnings of the majority of these applications of psychoanalysis will be found in my works. Here and there I have gone a little way along the path in order to gratify my non-medical interests. Later on, others (not only doctors, but specialists in the various fields as well) have followed in my tracks and penetrated far into the different subjects. But since my programme limits me to a mention of my own share in these applications of psychoanalysis, I can only give a quite inadequate picture of their extent and importance.

A number of suggestions came to me out of the Œdipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so, too, did the overwhelming effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the _unconscious_ nature of his criminal tendencies. From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character—_Hamlet_, which had been admired for 300 years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have broken down, like his numberless fellows in the real world, at the Œdipus complex; for Hamlet was faced with the task of taking vengeance upon another for the two deeds which are the subject of the Œdipus desires, and before that task his arm was paralysed by his own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote _Hamlet_ very soon after his father’s death. The suggestions made by me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of material made by dramatists. In his large volume upon the incest theme[24] he was able to show how often imaginative writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Œdipus situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the way in which the material has been transformed, modified and softened.

It was tempting to go on from there to an attempt at an analysis of poetic and artistic creation in general. The realm of imagination was evidently a “sanctuary” made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for the gratification of instincts which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination, but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art, were the imaginary gratifications of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them, they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were obliged to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the asocial, narcissistic products of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse interest in other people and were able to evoke and to gratify the same unconscious wishes in them too. Besides this, they have made use of the perceptual pleasure of formal beauty as what I have called an “incitement-premium.” What psychoanalysis was able to do was to take the inter-relations between the impressions of the artist’s life, his chance experiences and his works, and from them to construct his constitution and the impulses at work in it—that is to say, that part of him which he shared with all men. With this aim in view, for instance, I made Leonardo da Vinci the subject of a study which is based upon a single memory of childhood related by him and which aims chiefly at explaining his picture of “St. Anne with the Virgin and Child.” It does not appear that the enjoyment of a work of art is spoiled by the knowledge gained from such an analysis. The layman may perhaps expect too much from analysis in this field, for it must be admitted that it throws no light upon the two problems which probably interest him the most. It can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works—artistic technique.

I was able to show from a short story by W. Jensen called _Gradiva_, which has no particular merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar to us in the “dream-work” are thus also operative in the processes of imaginative writing.

My book upon _Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious_[25] was a side-issue, indirectly derived from _The Interpretation of Dreams_. The only friend of mine who was at that time interested in my work remarked to me that my interpretations of dreams often impressed him as being like jokes. In order to throw some light on this impression, I began to investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means used in the “dream-work”—that is to say, condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its opposite or by a triviality, and so on. This led to an economic enquiry as to the origin of the high degree of pleasure obtained from hearing a joke. And to this the answer was that it was due to the momentary suspension of the energy expended upon maintaining repression owing to the attraction exercised by the offer of a premium of pleasure (“fore-pleasure”).

I myself set a higher value upon my contributions to the psychology of religion, which began in 1907 with the establishment of a remarkable similarity between obsessive acts and religious practices or ritual. Without as yet understanding the deeper connections, I described the obsessional neurosis as a distorted private religion and religion as a kind of universal obsessional neurosis. Later on, in 1912, the explicit indications of Jung as to the far-reaching analogies between the mental products of neurotics and of primitive peoples, led me to turn my attention to that subject. In four essays, which were collected into a book with the title of _Totem and Taboo_,[26] I showed that the dread of incest was even more marked among primitive than among civilized races and had given rise to very special measures of defence against it; I examined the relations between taboo prohibitions (the earliest form in which moral restrictions make their appearance) and emotional ambivalence; and I discovered under the primitive scheme of the universe, known as animism, the principle of the over-estimation of the importance of psychical reality, the principle of “the omnipotence of thoughts,” which also lies at the root of magic. I developed the comparison with the obsessional neurosis at every point, and showed how many of the postulates of primitive mental life are still in force in that remarkable disorder. Above all, however, I was attracted by totemism, the first system of organization in primitive tribes, a system in which the beginnings of social order are united with a rudimentary religion and the implacable domination of a small number of taboo prohibitions. The being that is honored is ultimately always an animal, from which the clan also claims to be descended. Many indications pointed to the conclusion that every race, even the most highly developed, had once passed through the stage of totemism.

The chief literary sources of my studies in this field were the well known works of J. G. Frazer (_Totemism and Exogamy_ and _The Golden Bough_), a mine of valuable facts and opinions. But Frazer effected little towards elucidating the problems of totemism; he had more than once fundamentally altered his views on the subject, and the other ethnologists and prehistorians seemed in equal uncertainty and disagreement. My starting-point was the striking correspondence between the two taboo-injunctions of totemism (not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same totem-clan) and the two elements of the Œdipus complex (killing the father and taking the mother to wife). I was therefore tempted to equate the totem animal with the father; and, in fact, primitive peoples themselves do this explicitly, by honouring it as the forefather of the clan. There next came to my help two facts from psychoanalysis, a lucky observation of a child made by Ferenczi, which made it possible to speak of an “infantile return of totemism,” and the analysis of early animal-phobias in children, which so often showed that the animal was a substitute for the father, a substitute onto which the fear of the father derived from the Œdipus complex had been displaced. Not much was lacking to enable me to recognize the killing of the father as the nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of religion.

This missing element was supplied when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work, _The Religion of the Semites_. Its author (a man of genius, who was both a physicist and a biblical expert) introduced the so-called totem-feast as an essential part of the totemistic religion. Once a year the totem animal, which was at other times regarded as sacred, was solemnly killed in the presence of all the members of the clan, was devoured and was then mourned over. The mourning was followed by a great festival. When I further took into account Darwin’s conjecture that men originally lived in hordes, each under the domination of a single, powerful, violent and jealous male, there rose before me, out of all these components, the following hypothesis, or, I would rather say, vision. The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy, but also their ideal. After the deed, they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and regret, they learned to come to an agreement among themselves, they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forego the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem-feast was the commemoration of the fearful deed, from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or “original sin”) and which was the beginning at once of social organization, of religion, and of ethical restrictions.

Now, whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex. After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, honoured and envied, became the prototype of God himself. The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought, on the one hand, to atone for the act of parricide, and, on the other, to consolidate the advantages it had brought. This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, it may be added, the ceremony of the totem-feast still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion. I should like explicitly to mention that this last observation was not made by me, but is to be found in the works of Robertson Smith and Frazer.

Theodor Reik and G. Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought which I developed in _Totem and Taboo_, and, in a series of important works, have extended it, amplified it or corrected it. I myself have since returned to it more than once in the course of my investigations into the “unconscious sense of guilt” (which also plays such an important part among the motives of neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer connection between social psychology and the psychology of the individual.[27] I have, moreover, made use of the idea of an archaic inheritance from the “primal horde” epoch of mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to hypnosis.

I have taken but little direct part in certain other applications of psychoanalysis, though they are none the less of general interest. It is only a step from the phantasies of individual neurotics to the imaginative creations of groups and peoples as we find them in myths, legends and fairy tales. Mythology became the special province of Otto Rank; the interpretation of myths, the tracing of them back to the familiar unconscious complexes of infancy, the replacing of astral explanations by a discovery of human motives, all of this is to a large extent due to his analytic efforts. The subject of symbolism has also found many students among my followers. Symbolism has brought psychoanalysis many enemies; many enquirers with unduly prosaic minds have never been able to forgive it the recognition of symbolism, which followed from the interpretation of dreams. But analysis is guiltless of the discovery of symbolism, for it had long been known in other regions of thought (such as folk-lore, legends and myths) and plays even a larger part in them than in the “language of dreams.”