Contributions to the neue freie presse 25 страница

In 1883 an attempt was made by J. P. Richter to prove from these documents that it was really a fact that Leonardo had made these observations while travelling in the service of the Sultan of Egypt, and had even adopted the Mohammedan religion when in the East. On this view his visit there took place in the period before 1483 - that is, before he took up residence at the court of the Duke of Milan. But the acumen of other authors has had no difficulty in recognizing the evidences of Leonardo’s supposed Eastern journey for what they are - imaginary productions of the youthful artist, which he created for his own amusement and in which he may have found expression for a wish to see the world and meet with adventures.

Another probable example of a creation of his imagination is to be found in the ‘Academia Vinciana’ which has been postulated from the existence of five or six emblems, intertwined patterns of extreme intricacy, which contain the Academy’s name. Vasari mentions these designs but not the Academy.² Müntz, who put one of these ornaments on the cover of his large work on Leonardo, is among the few who believe in the reality of an ‘Academia Vinciana’.

It is probable that Leonardo’s play-instinct vanished in his maturer years, and that it too found its way into the activity of research which represented the latest and highest expansion of his personality. But its long duration can teach us how slowly anyone tears himself from his childhood if in his childhood days he has enjoyed the highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained.

¹ For these letters and the various questions connected with them see Müntz (1899, 82 ff.); the actual texts and other related notes will be found in Herzfeld (1906, 223 ff.).

² ‘Besides, he lost some time by even making a drawing of knots of cords, in which it was possible to trace the thread from one end to the other until it formed a completely circular figure. A very complex and beautiful design of this sort is engraved on copper; in the middle can be read the words "Leonardus Vinci Academia".’ Schorn (1843, 8).

VI

It would be futile to blind ourselves to the fact that readers to-day find all pathography unpalatable. They clothe their aversion in the complaint that a pathographical review of a great man never results in an understanding of his importance and his achievements, and that it is therefore a piece of useless impertinence to make a study of things in him that could just as easily be found in the first person one came across. But this criticism is so manifestly unjust that it is only understandable when taken as a pretext and a disguise.(Pathography does not in the least aim at making the great man’s achievements intelligible; and surely no one should be blamed for not carrying out something he has never promised to do. The real motives for the opposition are different. We can discover them if we bear in mind that biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because - for reasons of their personal emotional life - they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models - at reviving in him, perhaps, the child’s idea of his father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature.¹

Leonardo himself, with his love of truth and his thirst for knowledge, would not have discouraged an attempt to take the trivial peculiarities and riddles in his nature as a starting-point, for discovering what determined his mental and intellectual development. We do homage to him by learning from him. It does not detract from his greatness if we make a study of the sacrifices which his development from childhood must have entailed, and if we bring together the factors which have stamped him with the tragic mark of failure.

¹ This criticism applies quite generally and is not to be taken as being aimed at Leonardo’s biographers in particular.0

We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a ‘nerve case’, as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so much as daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of pathology is still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be taken as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms are structures which are substitutes for certain achievements of repression that we have to carry out in the course of our development from a child to a civilized human being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and that it is only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the practical concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional inferiority. From the slight indications we have about Leonardo’s personality we should be inclined to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as ‘obsessional’; and we may compare his researches to the ‘obsessive brooding’ of neurotics, and his inhibitions to what are known as their ‘abulias’.

The aim of our work has been to explain the inhibitions in Leonardo’s sexual life and in his artistic activity. With this in view we may be allowed to summarize what we have been able to discover about the course of his psychical development.

We have no information about the circumstances of his heredity; on the other hand we have seen that the accidental conditions of his childhood had a profound and disturbing effect on him. His illegitimate birth deprived him of his father’s influence until perhaps his fifth year, and left him open to the tender seductions of a mother whose only solace he was. After being kissed by her into precocious sexual maturity, he must no doubt have embarked on a phase of infantile sexual activity of which only one single manifestation is definitely attested - the intensity of his infantile sexual researches. The instinct to look and the instinct to know were those most strongly excited by the impressions of his early childhood; the erotogenic zone of the mouth was given an emphasis which it never afterwards surrendered. From his later behaviour in the contrary direction, such as his exaggerated sympathy for animals, we can conclude that there was no lack of strong sadistic traits in this period of his childhood.

A powerful wave of repression brought this childhood excess to an end, and established the dispositions which were to become manifest in the years of puberty. The most obvious result of the transformation was the avoidance of every crudely sensual activity; Leonardo was enabled to live in abstinence and to give the impression of being an asexual human being. When the excitations of puberty came in their flood upon the boy they did not, however, make him ill by forcing him to develop substitutive structures of a costly and harmful kind. Owing to his very early inclination towards sexual curiosity the greater portion of the needs of his sexual instinct could be sublimated into a general urge to know, and thus evaded repression. A much smaller portion of his libido continued to be devoted to sexual aims and represented a stunted adult sexual life. Because his love for his mother had been repressed, this portion was driven to take up a homosexual attitude and manifested itself in ideal love for boys. The fixation on his mother and on the blissful memories of his relations with her continued to be preserved in the unconscious, but for the time being it remained in an inactive state. In this way repression, fixation and sublimation all played their part in disposing of the contributions which the sexual instinct made to Leonardo’s mental life.

Leonardo emerges from the obscurity of his boyhood as an artist, a painter and a sculptor, owing to a specific talent which may have been reinforced by the precocious awakening in the first years of childhood of his scopophilic instinct. We should be most glad to give an account of the way in which artistic activity derives from the primal instincts of the mind if it were not just here that our capacities fail us. We must be content to emphasize the fact - which it is hardly any longer possible to doubt - that what an artist creates provides at the same time an outlet for his sexual desire; and in Leonardo’s case we can point to the information which comes from Vasari, that heads of laughing women and beautiful boys - in other words, representations of his sexual objects - were notable among his first artistic endeavours. In the bloom of his youth Leonardo appears at first to have worked without inhibition. Just as he modelled himself on his father in the outward conduct of his life, so too he passed through a period of masculine creative power and artistic productiveness in Milan, where a kindly fate enabled him to find a father substitute in the duke Lodovico Moro. But soon we and confirmation of our experience that the almost total repression of a real sexual life does not provide the most favourable conditions for the exercise of sublimated sexual trends. The pattern imposed by sexual life made itself felt. His activity and his ability to form quick decisions began to fail; his tendency towards deliberation and delay was already noticeable as a disturbing element in the ‘Last Supper’, and by influencing his technique it had a decisive effect on the fate of that great painting. Slowly there occurred in him a process which can only be compared to the regressions in neurotics. The development that turned him into an artist at puberty was overtaken by the process which led him to be an investigator, and which had its determinants in early infancy. The second sublimation of his erotic instinct gave place to the original sublimation for which the way had been prepared on the occasion of the first repression. He became an investigator, at first still in the service of his art, but later independently of it and away from it. With the loss of his patron, the substitute for his father, and with the increasingly sombre colours which his life took on, this regressive shift assumed larger and larger proportions. He became ‘impacientissimo al pennello’,¹ as we are told by a correspondent of the Countess Isabella d’Este, who was extremely eager to possess a painting from his hand. His infantile past had gained control over him. But the research which now took the place of artistic creation seems to have contained some of the features which distinguish the activity of unconscious instincts - insatiability, unyielding rigidity and the lack of an ability to adapt to real circumstances.

¹ [‘Very impatient of painting.’] Von Seidlitz (1909, 2, 271).2

At the summit of his life, when he was in his early fifties - a time when in women the sexual characters have already under gone involution and when in men the libido not infrequently makes a further energetic advance - a new transformation came over him. Still deeper layers of the contents of his mind became active once more: but this further regression was to the benefit of his art, which was in the process of becoming stunted. He met the woman who awakened his memory of his mother’s happy smile of sensual rapture; and, influenced by this revived memory, he recovered the stimulus that guided him at the beginning of his artistic endeavours, at the time when he modelled the smiling women. He painted the Mona Lisa, the ‘St. Anne with Two Others’ and the series of mysterious pictures which are characterized by the enigmatic smile. With the help of the oldest of all his erotic impulses he enjoyed the triumph of once more conquering the inhibition in his art. This final development is obscured from our eyes in the shadows of approaching age. Before this his intellect had soared upwards to the highest realizations of a conception of the world that left his epoch far behind it.

In the preceding chapters I have shown what justification can be found for giving this picture of Leonardo’s course of development - for proposing these subdivisions of his life and for explaining his vacillation between art and science in this way. If in making these statements I have provoked the criticism, even from friends of psycho-analysis and from those who are expert in it, that I have merely written a psycho-analytic novel, I shall reply that I am far from over-estimating the certainty of these results. Like others I have succumbed to the attraction of this great and mysterious man, in whose nature one seems to detect powerful instinctual passions which can nevertheless only express themselves in so remarkably subdued a manner.

But whatever the truth about Leonardo’s life may be, we cannot desist from our endeavour to find a psycho-analytic explanation for it until we have completed another task. We must stake out in a quite general way the limits which are set to what psycho-analysis can achieve in the field of biography: otherwise every explanation that is not forthcoming will be held up to us as a failure. The material at the disposal of a psycho-analytic enquiry consists of the data of a person’s life history: on the one hand the chance circumstances of events and background influences, and, on the other hand, the subject’s reported reactions. Supported by its knowledge of psychical mechanisms it then endeavours to establish a dynamic basis for his nature on the strength of his reactions, and to disclose the original motive forces of his mind, as well as their later transformations and developments. If this is successful the behaviour of a personality in the course of his life is explained in terms of the combined operation of constitution and fate, of internal forces and external powers. Where such an undertaking does not provide any certain results - and this is perhaps so in Leonardo’s case - the blame rests not with the faulty or inadequate methods of psycho-analysis, but with the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available. It is therefore only the author who is to be held responsible for the failure, by having forced psycho-analysis to pronounce an expert opinion on the basis of such insufficient material.

But even if the historical material at our disposal were very abundant, and if the psychical mechanisms could be dealt with with the greatest assurance, there are two important points at which a psycho-analytic enquiry would not be able to make us understand how inevitable it was that the person concerned should have turned out in the way he did and in no other way. In Leonardo’s case we have had to maintain the view that the accident of his illegitimate birth and the excessive tenderness of his mother had the most decisive influence on the formation of his character and on his later fortune, since the sexual repression which set in after this phase of childhood caused him to sublimate his libido into the urge to know, and established his sexual inactivity for the whole of his later life. But this repression after the first erotic satisfactions of childhood need not necessarily have taken place; in someone else it might perhaps not have taken place or might have assumed much less extensive proportions. We must recognize here a degree of freedom which cannot be resolved any further by psycho-analytic means. Equally, one has no right to claim that the consequence of this wave of repression was the only possible one. It is probable that another person would not have succeeded in withdrawing the major portion of his libido from repression by sublimating it into a craving for knowledge; under the same influences he would have sustained a permanent injury to his intellectual activity or have acquired an insurmountable disposition to obsessional neurosis. We are left, then, with these two characteristics of Leonardo which are inexplicable by the efforts of psycho-analysis: his quite special tendency towards instinctual repressions, and his extraordinary capacity for sublimating the primitive instincts.

Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psycho-analysis. From that point it gives place to biological research. We are obliged to look for the source of the tendency to repression and the capacity for sublimation in the organic foundations of character on which the mental structure is only afterwards erected. Since artistic talent and capacity are intimately connected with sublimation we must admit that the nature of the artistic function is also inaccessible to us along psycho-analytic lines. The tendency of biological research to-day is to explain the chief features in a person’s organic constitution as being the result of the blending of male and female dispositions, based on substances. Leonardo’s physical beauty and his left-handedness might be quoted in support of this view. We will not, however, leave the ground of purely psychological research. Our aim remains that of demonstrating the connection along the path of instinctual activity between a person’s external experiences and his reactions. Even if psycho-analysis does not throw light on the fact of Leonardo’s artistic power, it at least renders its manifestations and its limitations intelligible to us. It seems at any rate as if only a man who had had Leonardo’s childhood experiences could have painted the Mona Lisa and the St. Anne, have secured so melancholy a fate for his works and have embarked on such an astonishing career as a natural scientist, as if the key to all his achievements and misfortunes lay hidden in the childhood phantasy of the vulture.

But may one not take objection to the findings of an enquiry which ascribes to accidental circumstances of his parental constellation so decisive an influence on a person’s fate - which, for example, makes Leonardo’s fate depend on his illegitimate birth and on the barrenness of his first stepmother Donna Albiera? I think one has no right to do so. If one considers chance to be unworthy of determining our fate, it is simply a relapse into the pious view of the Universe which Leonardo himself was on the way to overcoming when he wrote that the sun does not move. We naturally feel hurt that a just God and a kindly providence do not protect us better from such influences during the most defenceless period of our lives. At the same time we are all too ready to forget that in fact everything to do with our life is chance, from our origin out of the meeting of spermatozoon and ovum onwards - chance which nevertheless has a share in the law and necessity of nature, and which merely lacks any connection with our wishes and illusions. The apportioning of the determining factors of our life between the ‘necessities’ of our constitution and the ‘chances’ of our childhood may still be uncertain in detail; but in general it is no longer possible to doubt the importance precisely of the first years of our childhood. We all still show too little respect for Nature which (in the obscure words of Leonardo which recall Hamlet’s lines) ‘is full of countless causes [‘ragioni’] that never enter experience’.¹

Every one of us human beings corresponds to one of the countless experiments in which these ‘ragioni’ of nature force their way into experience.

¹ ‘La natura è piena d’infinite ragioni che non furono mai in isperienza’ (Herzfeld, 1906, 11). 5

THE FUTURE PROSPECTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYTIC THERAPY (1910)

GENTLEMEN,

Since the objects for which we are assembled here to-day are mainly practical, I shall choose a practical theme for my introductory address and appeal to your medical, not to your scientific, interest. I can imagine your probable views on the results of our therapy, and I assume that most of you have already passed through the two stages which all beginners go through, the stage of enthusiasm at the unexpected increase in our therapeutic achievements, and the stage of depression at the magnitude of the difficulties which stand in the way of our efforts. At whatever point in this development, however, each of you may happen to be, my intention to-day is to show you that we have by no means come to the end of our resources for combating the neuroses, and that we may expect a substantial improvement in our therapeutic prospects before long.

This reinforcement will come, I think, from three directions:

(1) from internal progress,

(2) from increased authority, and

(3) from the general effect of our work.

(1) Under ‘internal progress’ I include advances (a) in our analytic knowledge, (b) in our technique.

(a) Advances in our knowledge. We are, of course, still a long way from knowing all that is required for an understanding of the unconscious in our patients. It is clear that every advance in our knowledge means an increase in our therapeutic power. As long as we have understood nothing, we have accomplished nothing; the more we understand, the more we shall achieve. At its beginning psycho-analytic treatment was inexorable and exhausting. The patient had to say everything himself, and the physician’s activity consisted of urging him on incessantly. To-day things have a more friendly air. The treatment is made up of two parts - what the physician infers and tells the patient, and the patient’s working-over of what he has heard. The mechanism of our assistance is easy to understand: we give the patient the conscious anticipatory idea and he then finds the repressed unconscious idea in himself on the basis of its similarity to the anticipatory one. This is the intellectual help which makes it easier for him to overcome the resistances between conscious and unconscious. Incidentally, I may remark that it is not the only mechanism made use of in analytic treatment; you all know the far more powerful one which lies in the use of the ‘transference’. It is my intention in the near future to deal with these various factors, which are so important for an understanding of the treatment, in an Allgemeine Methodik der Psychoanalyse. And further, in speaking to you I need not rebut the objection that the evidential value in support of the correctness of our hypotheses is obscured in our treatment as we practise it to-day; you will not forget that this evidence is to be found elsewhere, and that a therapeutic procedure cannot be carried out in the same way as a theoretical investigation.

Let me now touch upon one or two fields in which we have new things to learn and do in fact discover new things every day. Above all, there is the field of symbolism in dreams and in the unconscious - a fiercely contested subject, as you know. It is no small merit in our colleague, Wilhelm Stekel, that, untroubled by all the objections raised by our opponents, he has undertaken a study of dream-symbols. There is indeed still much to learn here; my Interpretation of Dreams, which was written in 1899, awaits important amplification from researches into symbolism.

I will say a few words about one of the symbols that has newly been recognized. A little time ago I heard that a psychologist whose views are somewhat different from ours had remarked to one of us that, when all was said and done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate the hidden sexual significance of dreams: his own commonest dream was of going upstairs, and surely there could not be anything sexual in that. We were put on the alert by this objection, and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps, staircases and ladders in dreams and were soon in a position to show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs. Nor must we omit to bring in the evidence of linguistic usage. It shows us that ‘mounting’ [German ‘steigen’] is used as a direct equivalent for the sexual act. We speak of a man as a ‘Steiger’ [a ‘mounter’] and of ‘nachsteigen’ [‘to run after’, literally ‘to climb after’]. In French the steps on a staircase are called ‘marches’ and ‘un vieux marcheur’ has the same meaning as our ‘ein alter Steiger’ [‘an old rake’]. The dream-material from which these newly recognized symbols are derived will in due time be put before you by the committee we are about to form for a collective study of symbolism. You will find some remarks on another interesting symbol, on ‘rescue’ and its changes in significance, in the second volume of our Jahrbuch. But I must break off here or I shall not get to my other points.

Every one of you will know from his own experience what a very different attitude he has towards a new case of illness when once he has thoroughly grasped the structure of a few typical cases. Imagine that we had arrived at a succinct formula of the factors regularly concerned in constructing the various forms of neuroses, as we have so far succeeded in doing for the construction of hysterical symptoms, and consider how firmly it would establish our prognostic judgement! Just as an obstetrician can tell by examining the placenta whether it has been completely expelled or whether noxious fragments of it still remain, so should we, independently of the outcome and of the patient’s condition at the moment, be able to say whether our work had been definitely successful or whether we had to expect relapses and fresh onsets of illness.

(b) I will hasten on to the innovations in the field of technique, where indeed nearly everything still awaits final settlement, and much is only now beginning to become clear. There are now two aims in psycho-analytic technique: to save the physician effort and to give the patient the most unrestricted access to his unconscious. As you know, our technique has undergone a fundamental transformation. At the time of the cathartic treatment what we aimed at was the elucidation of the symptoms; we then turned away from the symptoms and devoted ourselves instead to uncovering the ‘complexes’, to use a word which Jung has made indispensable; now, however, our work is aimed directly at finding out and overcoming the ‘resistances’, and we can justifiably rely on the complexes coming to light without difficulty as soon as the resistances have been recognized and removed. Some of you have since felt a need to be able to make a survey of these resistances and classify them. I will ask you to examine your material and see whether you can confirm the generalized statement that in male patients the most important resistances in the treatment seem to be derived from the father-complex and to express themselves in fear of the father, in defiance of the father and in disbelief of the father.

Other innovations in technique relate to the physician himself. We have become aware of the ‘counter-transference’, which arises in him as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings, and we are almost inclined to insist that he shall recognize this counter-transference in himself and overcome it. Now that a considerable number of people are practising psycho-analysis and exchanging their observations with one another, we have noticed that no psycho-analyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit; and we consequently require that he shall begin his activity with a self-analysis and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients. Anyone who fails to produce results in a self-analysis of this kind may at once give up any idea of being able to treat patients by analysis.

We are also now coming to the opinion that analytic technique must be modified in certain ways according to the nature of the disease and the dominant instinctual trends in the patient. We started out from the treatment of conversion hysteria; in anxiety hysteria (phobias) we must to some extent alter our procedure. For these patient cannot bring out the material necessary for resolving their phobia so long as they feel protected by obeying the condition which it lays down. One cannot, of course, succeed in getting them to give up their protective measures and work under the influence of anxiety from the beginning of the treatment. One must therefore help them by interpreting their unconscious to them until they can make up their minds to do without the protection of their phobia and expose themselves to a now greatly mitigated anxiety. Only after they have done so does the material become accessible, which, when it has been mastered, leads to a solution of the phobia. Other modifications of technique, which seem to me not yet ripe for discussion, will be required in the treatment of obsessional neurosis. In this connection very important questions arise, which have not hitherto been elucidated: how far the instincts which the patient is combating are to be allowed some satisfaction during the treatment, and what difference it makes whether these impulses are active (sadistic) or passive (masochistic) in their nature.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23