Contributions to the neue freie presse 26 страница

I hope you will have formed an impression that, when we know all that we now only suspect and when we have carried out all the improvements in technique to which deeper observation of our patients is bound to lead us, our medical procedure will reach a degree of precision and certainty of success which is not to be found in every specialized field of medicine.1 (2) I have said that we had much to expect from the increase in authority which must accrue to us as time goes on. I need not say much to you about the importance of authority. Only very few civilized people are capable of existing without reliance on others or are even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the intensity of people’s inner lack of resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in neuroses since the power of religions has waned may give you a measure of it. The impoverishment of the ego due to the large expenditure of energy on repression demanded of every individual by civilization may be one of the principal causes of this state of things.

Hitherto, this authority, with its enormous weight of suggestion, has been against us. All our therapeutic successes have been achieved in the face of this suggestion: it is surprising that any successes at all could be gained in such circumstances. I must not let myself be led into describing my agreeable experiences during the period when I alone represented psycho-analysis. I can only say that when I assured my patients that I knew how to relieve them permanently of their sufferings they looked round my modest abode, reflected on my lack of fame and title, and regarded me like the possessor of an infallible system at a gambling-resort, of whom people say that if he could do what he professes he would look very different himself. Nor was it really pleasant to carry out a psychical operation while the colleagues whose duty it should have been to assist took particular pleasure in spitting into the field of operation, and while at the first signs of blood or restlessness in the patient his relatives began threatening the operating surgeon. An operation is surely entitled to produce reactions; in surgery we became accustomed to that long ago. People simply did not believe me, just as even to-day people do not much believe any of us. Under such conditions not a few attempts were bound to fail. To estimate the increase in our therapeutic prospects when we have received general recognition, you should think of the position of a gynaecologist in Turkey and in the West. In Turkey, all he may do is to feel the pulse of all arm stretched out to him through a hole in the wall: and his medical achievements are in proportion to the inaccessibility of their object. Our opponents in the West wish to allow us much the same degree of access to our patient’s minds. But now that the force of social suggestion drives sick women to the gynaecologist, he has become their helper and saviour. I trust you will not say that the fact of the authority of society coming to our aid and increasing our successes so greatly would do nothing to prove the validity of our hypotheses - arguing as you might that, since suggestion is supposed to be able to do anything, our successes would then be successes of suggestion and not of psycho-analysis. Social suggestion is at present favourable to treating nervous patients by hydropathy, dieting and electro-therapy, but that does not enable such measures to get the better of neuroses. Time will show whether psycho-analytic treatment can accomplish more.

Now, however, I must once more damp your expectations. Society will not be in a hurry to grant us authority. It is bound to offer us resistance, for we adopt a critical attitude towards it; we point out to it that it itself plays a great part in causing neuroses. Just as we make an individual our enemy by uncovering what is repressed in him, so society cannot respond with sympathy to a relentless exposure of its injurious effects and deficiencies. Because we destroy illusions we are accused of endangering ideals. It might seem, therefore, as though the condition from which I expect such great advantages for our therapeutic prospects will never be fulfilled. And yet the situation is not so hopeless as one might think at the present time. Powerful though men’s emotions and self-interest may be, yet intellect is a power too - a power which makes itself felt, not, it is true, immediately, but all the more certainly in the end. The harshest truths are heard and recognized at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury. It has always been so, and the unwelcome truths which we psycho-analysts have to tell the world will have the same fate. Only it will not happen very quickly; we must be able to wait.

2 (3) Finally, I have to explain to you what I mean by the ‘general effect’ of our work, and how I come to set hopes on it. What we have here is a very remarkable therapeutic constellation, the like of which is perhaps not to be found anywhere else and which will appear strange to you too at first, until you recognize in it something you have long been familiar with. You know, of course, that the psychoneuroses are substitutive satisfactions of some instinct the presence of which one is obliged to deny to oneself and others. Their capacity to exist depends on this distortion and lack of recognition. When the riddle they present is solved and the solution is accepted by the patients these diseases cease to be able to exist. There is hardly anything like this in medicine, though in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken as soon as you can tell them their name - the name which they have kept secret.

In place of a single sick person let us put society - suffering as a whole from neuroses, though composed of sick and healthy members; and in place of individual acceptance in the one case let us put general recognition in the other. A little reflection will then show you that this substitution cannot in any way alter the outcome. The success which the treatment can have with the individual must occur equally with the community. Sick people will not be able to let their various neuroses become known - their anxious over-tenderness which is meant to conceal their hatred, their agoraphobia which tells of disappointed ambition, their obsessive actions which represent self-reproaches for evil intentions and precautions against them - if all their relatives and every stranger from whom they wish to conceal their mental processes know the general meaning of such symptoms, and if they themselves know that in the manifestations of their illness they are producing nothing that other people cannot instantly interpret. The effect, however, will not be limited to the concealment of the symptoms which, incidentally, it is often impossible to carry out; for this necessity for concealment destroys the use of being ill. Disclosure of the secret will have attacked, at its most sensitive point, the ‘aetiological equation’ from which neuroses arise - it will have made the gain from the illness illusory; and consequently the final outcome of the changed situation brought about by the physician’s indiscretion can only be that the production of the illness will be brought to a stop.

If this hope seems Utopian to you, you may remember that neurotic phenomena have actually been dispelled already by this means, although only in quite isolated instances. Think how common hallucinations of the Virgin Mary used to be among peasant girls in former times. So long as such a phenomenon brought a flock of believers and might lead to a chapel being built on the sacred spot, the visionary state of these girls was inaccessible to influence. To-day even our clergy have changed their attitude to such things; they allow police and doctors to examine the visionary, and now the Virgin makes only very rare appearances.

Or let me examine these developments, which I have been describing as taking place in the future, in an analogous situation which is on a smaller scale and consequently easier to take in. Suppose a number of ladies and gentlemen in good society have planned to have a picnic one day at an inn in the country. The ladies have arranged among themselves that if one of them wants to relieve a natural need she will announce that she is going to pick flowers. Some malicious person, however, has got wind of this secret and has had printed on the programme which is sent round to the whole party: ‘Ladies who wish to retire are requested to announce that they are going to pick flowers.’ After this, of course, no lady will think of availing herself of this flowery pretext, and, in the same way, other similar formulas, which may be freshly agreed upon, will be seriously compromised. What will be the result? The ladies will admit their natural needs without shame and none of the men will object.

Let us return to our more serious case. A certain number of people, faced in their lives by conflicts which they have found too difficult to solve, have taken flight into neurosis and in this way won an unmistakable, although in the long run too costly, gain from illness. What will these people have to do if their flight into illness is barred by the indiscreet revelations of psycho-analysis? They will have to be honest, confess to the instincts that are at work in them, face the conflict, fight for what they want, or go without it; and the tolerance of society, which is bound to ensue as a result of psycho-analytic enlightenment, will help them in their task.

Let us remember, however, that our attitude to life ought not to be that of a fanatic for hygiene or therapy. We must admit that the ideal prevention of neurotic illnesses which we have in mind would not be of advantage to every individual. A good number of those who now take flight into illness would not, under the conditions we have assumed, support the conflict but would rapidly succumb or would cause a mischief greater than their own neurotic illness. Neuroses have in fact their biological function as a protective contrivance and they have their social justification: the ‘gain from illness’ they provide is not always a purely subjective one. Is there one of you who has not at some time looked into the causation of a neurosis and had to allow that it was the mildest possible outcome of the situation? And should such heavy sacrifices be made in order to eradicate the neuroses in particular, when the world is full of other unavoidable misery?

Are we, then, to abandon our efforts to explain the hidden meaning of neurosis as being in the last resort dangerous to the individual and harmful to the workings of society? Are we to give up drawing the practical conclusion from a piece of scientific insight? No; I think that in spite of this our duty lies in the other direction. The gain from illness provided by the neuroses is nevertheless on the whole and in the end detrimental to individuals as well as to society. The unhappiness that our work of enlightenment may cause will after all only affect some individuals. The change-over to a more realistic and creditable attitude on the part of society will not be bought too dearly by these sacrifices. But above all, all the energies which are to-day consumed in the production of neurotic symptoms serving the purposes of a world of phantasy isolated from reality, will, even if they cannot at once be put to uses in life, help to strengthen the clamour for the changes in our civilization through which alone we can look for the well-being of future generations.

I should therefore like to let you go with an assurance that in treating your patients psycho-analytically you are doing your duty in more senses than one. You are not merely working in the service of science, by making use of the one and only opportunity for discovering the secrets of the neuroses; you are not only giving your patients the most efficacious remedy for their sufferings that is available to-day; you are contributing your share to the enlightenment of the community from which we expect to achieve the most radical prophylaxis against neurotic disorders along the indirect path of social authority.

THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS (1910)

In my Interpretation of Dreams I made a statement about one of the findings of my analytic work which I did not then understand. I will repeat it here by way of preface to this review:

‘The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. "No" seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’¹

The dream-interpreters of antiquity seem to have made the most extensive use of the notion that a thing in a dream can mean its opposite. This possibility has also occasionally been recognized by modern students of dreams, in so far as they concede at all that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted.² Nor do I think that I shall be contradicted if I assume that all who have followed me in interpreting dreams on scientific lines have found confirmation of the statement quoted above.

I did not succeed in understanding the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation and to employ the same means of representation for expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by the philologist Karl Abel, which was published in 1884 as a separate pamphlet and included in the following year in the author’s Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen [Philological Essays]. The subject is of sufficient interest to justify my quoting here the full text of the crucial passages in Abel’s paper (omitting, however, most of the examples). We obtain from them the astonishing information that the behaviour of the dream-work which I have just described is identical with a peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p.787

² Cf. G. H. von Schubert (1814, Chapter II).9

After stressing the antiquity of the Egyptian language which must have been developed a very long time before the first hieroglyphic inscriptions, Abel goes on (1884, 4):

‘Now in the Egyptian language, this sole relic of a primitive world, there are a fair number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact opposite of the other. Let us suppose, if such an obvious piece of nonsense can be imagined, that in German the word "strong" meant both "strong" and "weak"; that in Berlin the noun "light" was used to mean both "light" and "darkness"; that one Munich citizen called beer "beer", while another used the same word to speak of water: this is what the astonishing practice amounts to which the ancient Egyptians regularly followed in their language. How could anyone be blamed for shaking his head in disbelief?...’ (Examples omitted.)

(Ibid., 7): ‘In view of these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning (see the Appendix) it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there was a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite. However astonishing it may be, we are faced with the fact and have to reckon with it.’

The author goes on to reject an explanation of these circumstances which suggests that two words might happen by chance to have the same sound, and is equally firm in repudiating an attempt to refer it to the low stage of mental development in Egypt:

(Ibid., 9): ‘But Egypt was anything but a home of nonsense. On the contrary, it was one of the cradles of the development of human reason.... It recognized a pure and dignified morality and formulated a great part of the Ten Commandments at a time when the peoples in whose hands civilization rests to-day were in the habit of slaughtering human victims as a sacrifice to bloodthirsty idols. A people that kindled the torch of justice and culture in so dark an age cannot surely have been completely stupid in everyday speech and thought.... Men who were able to make glass and raise and move huge blocks by machinery must at least have possessed sufficient sense not to regard a thing as being simultaneously both itself and its opposite. How are we then to reconcile this with the fact that the Egyptians allowed themselves such a strangely contradictory language?... that they used to give one and the same phonetic vehicle to the most mutually inimical thoughts, and used to bind together in a kind of indissoluble union things that were in the strongest opposition to each other?’

Before any explanation is attempted, mention must also be made of a further stage in this unintelligible behaviour of the Egyptian language. ‘Of all the eccentricities of the Egyptian vocabulary perhaps the most extraordinary feature is that, quite apart from the words that combine antithetical meanings, it possesses other compound words in which two vocables of antithetical meanings are united so as to form a compound which bears the meaning of only one of its two constituents. Thus in this extraordinary language there are not only words meaning equally "strong" or "weak", and "command" or "obey"; but there are also compounds like "old-young", "far-near", "bind-sever", "outside-inside"... which, in spite of combining the extremes of difference, mean only "young", "near", "bind" and "inside" respectively So that in these compound words contradictory concepts have been quite intentionally combined, not in order to produce a third concept, as occasionally happens in Chinese, but only in order to use the compound to express the meaning of one of its contradictory parts - a part which would have had the same meaning by itself...’

However, the riddle is easier to solve than it appears to be. Our concepts owe their existence to comparisons. ‘If it were always light we should not be able to distinguish light from dark, and consequently we should not be able to have either the concept of light or the word for it...’ ‘It is clear that everything on this planet is relative and has an independent existence only in so far as it is differentiated in respect of its relations to other things...’ ‘Since every concept is in this way the twin of its contrary, how could it be first thought of and how could it be communicated to other people who were trying to conceive it, other than by being measured against its contrary...’ (Ibid., 15): ‘Since the concept of strength could not be formed except as a contrary to weakness, the word denoting "strong" contained a simultaneous recollection of "weak", as the thing by means of which it first came into existence. In reality this word denoted neither "strong" nor "weak", but the relation and difference between the two, which created both of them equally...’ ‘Man was not in fact able to acquire his oldest and simplest concepts except as contraries to their contraries, and only learnt by degrees to separate the two sides of an antithesis and think of one without conscious comparison with the other.’

Since language serves not only to express one’s own thoughts but essentially to communicate them to others the question may be raised how it was that the ‘primal Egyptian’ made his neighbour understand ‘which side of the twin concept he meant on any particular occasion’. In the written language this was done with the help of the so-called ‘determinative’ signs which, placed after the alphabetical ones, assign their meaning to them and are not themselves intended to be spoken. (Ibid., 18): ‘If the Egyptian word "ken" is to mean "strong", its sound, which is written alphabetically, is followed by the picture of an upright armed man; if the same word has to express "weak", the letters which represent the sound are followed by the picture of a squatting, limp figure. The majority of other words with two meanings are similarly accompanied by explanatory pictures.’ Abel thinks that in speech the desired meaning of the spoken word was indicated by gesture.

According to Abel it is in the ‘oldest roots’ that antithetical double meanings are found to occur. In the subsequent course of the language’s development this ambiguity disappeared and, in Ancient Egyptian at any rate, all the intermediate stages can be followed, down to the unambiguousness of modern vocabularies. ‘A word that originally bore two meanings separates in the later language into two words with single meanings, in a process whereby each of the two opposed meanings takes over a particular phonetic "reduction" (modification) of the original root.’ Thus, for example, in hieroglyphics the word ‘ken’, ‘strong-weak’, already divides into ‘

ken’, ‘strong’ and ‘kan’, ‘weak’. ‘In other words, the concepts which could only be arrived at by means of an antithesis became in course of time sufficiently familiar to men’s minds to make an independent existence possible for each of their two parts and accordingly to enable a separate phonetic representative to be formed for each part.

Proof of the existence of contradictory primal meanings, which is easily established in Egyptian, extends, according to Abel, to the Semitic and Indo-European languages as well. ‘How far this may happen in other language-groups remains to be seen; for although antithesis must have been present originally to the thinking minds of every race, it need not necessarily have become recognizable or have been retained everywhere in the meanings of words.’

Abel further calls attention to the fact that the philosopher Bain, apparently without knowledge that the phenomenon actually existed, claimed this double meaning of words on purely theoretical grounds as a logical necessity. The passage in question¹ begins with these sentences:

‘The essential relativity of all knowledge, thought or consciousness cannot but show itself in language. If everything that we can know is viewed as a transition from something else, every experience must have two sides; and either every name must have a double meaning, or else for every meaning there must be two names.’

From the ‘Appendix of Examples of Egyptian, Indo-Germanic and Arabic Antithetical Meanings’ I select a few instances which may impress even those of us who are not experts in philology. In Latin ‘altus’ means ‘high’ and ‘deep’, ‘sacer’ ‘sacred’ and ‘accursed’; here accordingly we have the complete antithesis in meaning without any modification of the sound of the word. Phonetic alteration to distinguish contraries is illustrated by examples like ‘clamare’ (‘to cry’) - ‘clam’ (‘softly’, ‘secretly’); ‘siccus’ (‘dry’) - ‘succus’ (‘juice’). In German ‘Boden’ [‘garret’ or ‘ground’] still means the highest as well as the lowest thing in the house. Our ‘bös’ (‘bad’) is matched by a word ‘bass’ (‘good’); in Old Saxon ‘bat’ (‘good’) corresponds to the English ‘bad’, and the English ‘to lock’ to the German ‘Lücke’,’Loch’ [‘hole’]. We can compare the German ‘kleben’ [‘to stick’] with the English ‘to cleave’ (‘to split’); the German words ‘stumm’ [‘dumb’] and ‘Stimme’ [‘voice’], and so on. In this way perhaps even the much derided derivation lucus a non lucendo² would have some sense in it.

¹ Bain (1870, 1, 54).

² [‘Lucus’ (Latin for ‘a grove’) is said to be derived from ‘lucere’ (‘to shine’) because it does not shine there. (Attributed to Quintilian.)]3

In his essay on ‘The Origin of Language’ Abel (1885, 305) calls attention to further traces of ancient difficulties in thinking. Even to-day the Englishman in order to express ‘ohne’ says ‘without’ (‘mitohne’ [‘with-without’] in German), and the East Prussian does the same. The word ‘with’ itself, which to-day corresponds to the German ‘mit’, originally meant ‘without’ as well as ‘with’, as can be recognized from ‘withdraw and ‘withhold’. The same transformation can be seen in the German ‘wider’ (‘against’) and ‘wieder’ (‘together with’).

For comparison with the dream-work there is another extremely strange characteristic of the ancient Egyptian language which is significant. ‘In Egyptian, words can - apparently, we will say to begin with - reverse their sound as well as their sense. Let us suppose that the German word "gut" ["good"] was Egyptian: it could then mean "bad" as well as "good", and be pronounced "tug" as well as "gut". Numerous examples of such reversals of sound, which are too frequent to be explained as chance occurrences, can be produced from the Aryan and Semitic languages as well. Confining ourselves in the first instance to Germanic languages we may note: Topf [pot] - pot; boat - tub; wait - täuwen [tarry]; hurry - Ruhe [rest]; care - reck; Balken [beam] - Klobe [log], club. If we take the other Indo-Germanic languages into consideration, the number of relevant instances grows accordingly; for example, capere [Latin for "take"] - packen [German for "seize"]; ren [Latin for "kidney"] - Niere [German for "kidney"]; leaf - folium [Latin for "leaf"]; dum-a [Russian for "thought"], q õìüò [Greek for "spirit", "courage"] - mêdh, mûdha [Sanscrit for "mind"], Mut [German for "courage"]; rauchen [German for "to smoke"] - Kur-ít [Russian for "to smoke"]; kreischen [German for "to shriek"] - to shriek, etc.’

Abel tries to explain the phenomenon of reversal of sound as a doubling or reduplication of the root. Here we should find some difficulty in following the philologist. We remember in this connection how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words and how frequently the dream-work makes use of a reversal of the representational material for various purposes. (Here it is no longer letters but images whose order is reversed.) We should therefore be more inclined to derive reversal of sound from a factor of deeper origin.¹

In the correspondence between the peculiarity of the dream-work mentioned at the beginning of the paper and the practice discovered by philology in the oldest languages, we may see a confirmation of the view we have formed about the regressive, archaic character of the expression of thoughts in dreams. And we psychiatrists cannot escape the suspicion that we should be better at understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about the development of language.²

¹ For the phenomenon of reversal of sound (metathesis), which it perhaps even more intimately related to the dream-work than are contradictory meanings (antithesis), compare also Meyer-Rinteln (1909).

² It is plausible to suppose, too, that the original antithetical meaning of words exhibits the ready-made mechanism which is exploited for various purposes by slips of the tongue that result in the opposite being said..4

A SPECIAL TYPE OF CHOICE OF OBJECT MADE BY MEN (Contributions to the psychology of love I) (1910)

Up till now we have left it to the creative writer to depict for us the ‘necessary conditions for loving’ which govern people’s choice of an object, and the way in which they bring the demands of their imagination into harmony with reality. The writer can indeed draw on certain qualities which fit him to carry out such a task: above all, on a sensitivity that enables him to perceive the hidden impulses in the minds of other people, and the courage to let his own unconscious speak. But there is one circumstance which lessens the evidential value of what he has to say. Writers are under the necessity to produce intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, as well as certain emotional effects. For this reason they cannot reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but must isolate portions of it, remove disturbing associations, tone down the whole and fill in what is missing. These are the privileges of what is known as ‘poetic licence’. Moreover they can show only slight interest in the origin and development of the mental states which they portray in their completed form. In consequence it becomes inevitable that science should concern herself with the same materials whose treatment by artists has given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years, though her touch must be clumsier and the yield of pleasure less. These observations will, it may be hoped, serve to justify us in extending a strictly scientific treatment to the field of human love. Science is, after all, the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.

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