The psychical disorders of male potency 18 страница

We have now completed our interpretation of Michelangelo’s statue, though it can still be asked what motives prompted the sculptor to select the figure of Moses, and a so greatly altered Moses, as an adornment for the tomb of Julius II. In the opinion of many these motives are to be found in the character of the Pope and in Michelangelo’s relations with him. Julius II was akin to Michelangelo in this, that he attempted to realize great and mighty ends, and especially designs on a grand scale. He was a man of action and he had a definite purpose, which was to unite Italy under the Papal supremacy. He desired to bring about single-handed what was not to happen for several centuries, and then only through the conjunction of many alien forces; and he worked alone, with impatience, in the short span of sovereignty allowed him, and used violent means. He could appreciate Michelangelo as a man of his own kind, but he often made him smart under his sudden anger and his utter lack of consideration for others. The artist felt the same violent force of will in himself, and, as the more introspective thinker, may have had a premonition of the failure to which they were both doomed. And so he carved his Moses on the Pope’s tomb, not without a reproach against the dead pontiff, as a warning to himself, thus, in self-criticism, rising superior to his own nature.

IV

In 1863 an Englishman, Watkiss Lloyd, devoted a little book to the Moses of Michelangelo. I succeeded in getting hold of this short essay of forty-six pages, and read it with mixed feelings. I once more had an opportunity of experiencing in myself what unworthy and puerile motives enter into our thoughts and acts even in a serious cause. My first feeling was one of regret that the author should have anticipated so much of my thought, which seemed precious to me because it was the result of my own efforts; and it was only in the second instance that I was able to get pleasure from its unexpected confirmation of my opinion. Our views, however, diverge on one very important point.

Lloyd remarks in the first place that the usual descriptions of the figure are incorrect, and that Moses is not in the act of rising¹ - that the right hand is not grasping the beard, but that the index-finger alone is resting upon it.² Lloyd also recognizes, and this is much more important, that the attitude portrayed can only be explained by postulating a foregoing one, which is not represented, and that the drawing of the left lock of the beard across to the right signifies that the right hand and the left side of the beard have at a previous stage been in closer and more natural contact. But he suggests another way of reconstructing the earlier contact which must necessarily be assumed. According to him, it was not the hand which had been plunged into the beard, but the beard which had been where the hand now is. We must, he says, imagine that just before the sudden interruption the head of the statue was turned far round to its right over the hand which, then as now, was holding the Tables of the Law. The pressure (of the Tables) against the palm of the hand caused the fingers to open naturally beneath the flowing locks of the beard, and the sudden turn of the head to the other side resulted in a part of the beard being detained for an instant by the motionless hand and forming the loop of hair which is to be looked on as a mark of the course it has taken - its ‘wake’, to use Lloyd’s own word.

¹ ‘But he is not rising or preparing to rise; the bust is fully upright, not thrown forward for the alteration of balance preparatory for such a movement....’ (LIoyd, 1863, 10).

² ‘Such a description is altogether erroneous; the fillets of the beard are detained by the right hand but they are not held, nor grasped, enclosed or taken hold of. They are even detained but momentarily - momentarily engaged, they are on the point of being free for disengagement’ (ibid., 11).

In rejecting the other possibility, that of the right hand having previously been in contact with the left side of the beard, Lloyd has allowed himself to be influenced by a consideration which shows how near he came to our interpretation. He says that it was not possible for the prophet, even in very great agitation, to have put out his hand to draw his beard across to the right. For in that case his fingers would have been in an entirely different position; and, moreover, such a movement would have allowed the Tables to slip down, since they are only supported by the pressure of the right arm - unless, in Moses’ endeavour to save them at the last moment, we think of them as being ‘clutched by a gesture so awkward that to imagine it is profanation’.

It is easy to see what the writer has overlooked. He has correctly interpreted the anomalies of the beard as indicating a preceding movement, but he has omitted to apply the same explanation to the no less unnatural details in the position of the Tables. He examines only the data connected with the beard and not those connected with the Tables, whose position he assumes to be the original one. In this way he closes the door to a conception like ours which, by examining certain insignificant details, has arrived at an unexpected interpretation of the meaning and aim of the figure as a whole.

But what if both of us have strayed on to a wrong path? What if we have taken too serious and profound a view of details which were nothing to the artist, details which he had introduced quite arbitrarily or for some purely formal reasons with no hidden intention behind? What if we have shared the fate of so many interpreters who have thought they saw quite clearly things which the artist did not intend either consciously or unconsciously? I cannot tell. I cannot say whether it is reasonable to credit Michelangelo - an artist in whose works there is so much thought striving for expression - with such an elementary want of precision, and especially whether this can be assumed in regard to the striking and singular features of the statue under discussion. And finally we may be allowed to point out, in all modesty, that the artist is no less responsible than his interpreters for the obscurity which surrounds his work. In his creations Michelangelo has often enough gone to the utmost limit of what is expressible in art; and perhaps in his statue of Moses he has not completely succeeded, if his purpose was to make the passage of a violent gust of passion visible in the signs left behind it in the ensuing calm.

7 8

POSTSCRIPT

(1927)

Several years after the publication of my paper on the Moses of Michelangelo, which appeared anonymously in Imago in 1914, Dr. Ernest Jones very kindly sent me a copy of the April number of the Burlington Magazine of 1921 (Vol. XXXVIII), which could not fail to turn my interest once more to the interpretation of the statue which I had originally suggested. This number contains (pp. 157-66) a short article by H. P. Mitchell on two bronzes of the twelfth century, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, which are attributed to an outstanding artist of that day, Nicholas of Verdun. We possess other works by the same hand in Tournay, Arras and Klosterneuburg, near Vienna; his masterpiece is considered to be the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne.

One of the two statuettes described by Mitchell, which is just over 9 inches high, is identifiable beyond all doubt as a Moses, because of the two Tables of the Law which he holds in his hand. This Moses, too, is represented as seated, enveloped in a flowing robe. His face is expressive of strong passion, mixed, perhaps, with grief; and his hand grasps his long beard and presses its strands between palm and thumb as in a vice. He is, that is to say, making the very gesture which I postulated in Fig. 2 of my former paper as a preliminary stage of the attitude into which Michelangelo has cast him.

A glance at the accompanying illustration will show the main difference between the two compositions, which are separated from each other by an interval of more than three centuries. The Moses of the Lorraine artist is holding the Tables by their top edge with his left hand, resting them on his knee. If we were to transfer them to the other side of his body and put them under his right arm we should have established the preliminary posture of Michelangelo’s Moses. If my view of the thrusting of the hand into the beard is right, then the Moses of the year 1180 shows us an instant during his storm of feeling, whilst the statue in S. Pietro in Vincoli depicts the calm when the storm is over.

In my opinion this new piece of evidence increases the probability that the interpretation which I attempted in 1914 was a correct one. Perhaps some connoisseur of art will be able to bridge the gulf in time between the Moses of Nicholas of Verdun and the Moses of the Master of the Italian Renaissance by telling us where examples of representations of Moses belonging to the intervening period are to be found.9

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SCHOOLBOY PSYCHOLOGY (1914)

It gives you a queer feeling if, late in life, you are ordered once again to write a school essay. But you obey automatically, like the old soldier who, at the word ‘Attention!’, cannot help dropping whatever he may have in his hands and who finds his little fingers pressed along the seams of his trousers. It is strange how readily you obey the orders, as though nothing in particular had happened in the last half-century. But in fact you have grown old in the interval, you are on the eve of your sixtieth birthday, and your physical feelings, as well as your mirror, show unmistakably how far your life’s candle is burnt down.

As little as ten years ago, perhaps, you may have had moments at which you suddenly felt quite young again. As you walked through the streets of Vienna - already a grey-beard, and weighed down by all the cares of family life - you might come unexpectedly on some well-preserved, elderly gentleman and would greet him humbly almost, because you had recognized him as one of your former schoolmasters. But afterwards you would stop and reflect: ‘Was that really he? or only some one deceptively like him? How youthful he looks! And how old you yourself have grown! How old can he be to-day? Can it be possible that the men who used to stand for us as types of adulthood were really so little older than we were?’

At such moments as these, I used to find, the present time seemed to sink into obscurity and the years between ten and eighteen would rise from the corners of my memory, with all their guesses and illusions, their painful distortions and heartening successes - my first glimpses of an extinct civilization (which in my case was to bring me as much consolation as anything else in the struggles of life), my first contacts with the sciences, among which it seemed open to me to choose to which of them I should dedicate what were no doubt my inestimable services. And I seem to remember that through the whole of this time there ran a premonition of a task ahead, till it found open expression in my school-leaving essay as a wish that I might during the course of my life contribute something to our human knowledge.

Later I became a physician - or a psychologist, rather - and was able to create a new psychological discipline, something that is known as ‘psycho-analysis’, which is followed to-day with excited interest, and is greeted with praise and blame, by physicians and enquirers in neighbouring, and in distant, foreign lands - but least of all, of course, in our own country.

As a psycho-analyst I am bound to be concerned more with emotional than intellectual processes, with unconscious than with conscious mental life. My emotion at meeting my old schoolmaster warns me to make a first admission: it is hard to decide whether what affected us more and was of greater importance to us was our concern with the sciences that we were taught or with the personalities of our teachers. It is true, at least, that this second concern was a perpetual undercurrent in all of us, and that in many of us the path to the sciences led only through our teachers. Some of us stopped half-way along that path, and for a few - why not admit as much? - it was on that account blocked for good and all.

We courted them or turned our backs on them, we imagined sympathies and antipathies in them which probably had no existence, we studied their characters and on theirs we formed or misformed our own. They called up our fiercest opposition and forced us to complete submission; we peered into their little weaknesses, and took pride in their excellences, their knowledge and their justice. At bottom we felt a great affection for them if they gave us any ground for it, though I cannot tell how many of them were aware of this. But it cannot be denied that our position in regard to them was a quite remarkable one and one which may well have had its inconvenience for those concerned. We were from the very first equally inclined to love and to hate them, to criticize and respect them. Psycho-analysis has given the name of ‘ambivalence’ to this readiness to contradictory attitudes, and it has no difficulty in pointing to the source of ambivalent feelings of such a kind.

For psycho-analysis has taught us that the individual’s emotional attitudes to other people, which are of such extreme importance to his later behaviour, are already established at an unexpectedly early age. The nature and quality of the human child’s relations to people of his own and the opposite sex have already been laid down in the first six years of his life. He may afterwards develop and transform them in certain directions but he can no longer get rid of them. The people to whom he is in this way fixed are his parents and his brothers and sisters. All those whom he gets to know later become substitute figures for these first objects of his feelings. (We should perhaps add to his parents any other people, such as nurses, who cared for him in his infancy.) These substitute figures can be classified from his point of view according as they are derived from what we call the ‘imagos’ of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, and so on. His later acquaintances are thus obliged to take over a kind of emotional heritage; they encounter sympathies and antipathies to the production of which they themselves have contributed little. All of his later choices of friendship and love follow upon the basis of the memory-traces left behind by these first prototypes.

Of all the imagos of a childhood which, as a rule, is no longer remembered, none is more important for a youth or a man than that of his father. Organic necessity introduces into a man’s relation to his father an emotional ambivalence which we have found most strikingly expressed in the Greek myth of King Oedipus. A little boy is bound to love and admire his father, who seems to him the most powerful, the kindest and the wisest creature in the world. God himself is after all only an exaltation of this picture of a father as he is represented in the mind of early childhood. But soon the other side of this emotional relationship emerges. One’s father is recognized as the paramount disturber of one’s instinctual life; he becomes a model not only to imitate but also to get rid of, in order to take his place. Thenceforward affectionate and hostile impulses towards him persist side by side, often to the end of one’s life, without either of them being able to do away with the other. It is in this existence of contrary feelings side by side that lies the essential character of what we call emotional ambivalence.

In the second half of childhood a change sets in in the boy’s relation to his father - a change whose importance cannot be exaggerated. From his nursery the boy begins to cast his eyes upon the world outside. And he cannot fail now to make discoveries which undermine his original high opinion of his father and which expedite his detachment from his first ideal. He finds that his father is no longer the mightiest, wisest and richest of beings; he grows dissatisfied with him, he learns to criticize him and to estimate his place in society; and then, as a rule, he makes him pay heavily for the disappointment that has been caused by him. Everything that is hopeful, as well as everything that is unwelcome, in the new generation is determined by this detachment from the father.

It is in this phase of a youth’s development that he comes into contact with his teachers. So that we can now understand our relation to our schoolmasters. These men, not all of whom were in fact fathers themselves, became our substitute fathers. That was why, even though they were still quite young, they struck us as so mature and so unattainably adult. We transferred on to them the respect and expectations attaching to the omniscient father of our childhood, and we then began to treat them as we treated our fathers at home. We confronted them with the ambivalence that we had acquired in our own families and with its help we struggled with them as we had been in the habit of struggling with our fathers in the flesh. Unless we take into account our nurseries and our family homes, our behaviour to our schoolmasters would be not only incomprehensible but inexcusable.

As schoolboys we had other and scarcely less important experiences with the successors of our brothers and sisters - our schoolfellows - but these must be described elsewhere. In a commemoration of the jubilee of our school it is on the masters that our thoughts must rest.5

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT (1914)

Fluctuat nec mergitur ¹

(On the coat of arms of the City of Paris)I

No one need be surprised at the subjective character of the contribution I propose to make here to the history of the psycho-analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation; for ten years I was the only person who concerned himself with it, and all the dissatisfaction which the new phenomenon aroused in my contemporaries has been poured out in the form of criticisms on my head. Although it is a long time now since I was the only psycho-analyst, I consider myself justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name. In thus repudiating what seems to me a cool act of usurpation, I am indirectly informing the readers of this Jahrbuch the events that have led to the changes in its editorship and format.

¹ [ ’It is tossed by the waves, but does not sink’.]8 In 1909, in the lecture-room of an American university, I had my first opportunity of speaking in public about psycho-analysis.¹ The occasion was a momentous one for my work, and moved by this thought I then declared that it was not I who had brought psycho-analysis into existence: the credit for this was due to someone else, to Josef Breuer, whose work had been done at a time when I was still a student engaged in passing my examinations (1880-2). Since I gave those lectures, however, some well-disposed friends have suggested to me a doubt whether my gratitude was not expressed too extravagantly on that occasion. In their view I ought to have done as I had previously been accustomed to do: treated Breuer’s ‘cathartic procedure’ as a preliminary stage of psycho-analysis, and represented psycho-analysis itself as beginning with my discarding the hypnotic technique and introducing free associations. It is of no great importance in any case whether the history of psycho-analysis is reckoned as beginning with the cathartic method or with my modification of it; I refer to this uninteresting point merely because certain opponents of psycho-analysis have a habit of occasionally recollecting that after all the art of psycho-analysis was not invented by me, but by Breuer. This only happens, of course, if their views allow them to find something in it deserving attention; if they set no such limits to their rejection of it, psycho-analysis is always without question my work alone. I have never heard that Breuer’s great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse. As I have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I have come to the conclusion that I must be the true originator of all that is particularly characteristic in it. I am happy to be able to add that none of the efforts to minimize my part in creating this much-abused analysis have ever come from Breuer himself or could claim any support from him.

Breuer’s discoveries have so often been described that I can dispense with discussing them in detail here. These were the fundamental fact that the symptoms of hysterical patients are founded upon scenes in their past lives which have made a great impression on them but have been forgotten (traumas); the therapy founded upon this, which consisted in causing them to remember and reproduce these experiences in a state of hypnosis (catharsis); and the fragment of theory inferred from it, which was that these symptoms represented an abnormal employment of amounts of excitation which had not been disposed of (conversion). Whenever Breuer, in his theoretical contribution to the Studies on Hysteria (1895), referred to this process of conversion, he always added my name in brackets after it, as though the priority for this first attempt at theoretical evaluation belonged to me. I believe that actually this distinction relates only to the name, and that the conception came to us simultaneously and together.

¹ In my ‘Five Lectures’ (1910a), delivered at Clark University.9

It is well known, too, that after Breuer made his first discovery of the cathartic method he let it rest for a number of years, and only took it up again at my instigation, on my return from my studies under Charcot. He had a large consulting practice in medicine which made great claims on him; I myself had only unwillingly taken up the profession of medicine, but I had at that time a strong motive for helping people suffering from nervous affections or at least for wishing to understand something about their states. I had embarked upon physical therapy, and had felt absolutely helpless after the disappointing results from my study of Erb’s Elektrotherapie, which put forward such a number of indications and recommendations. If I did not at the time arrive on my own account at the conclusion which Möbius established later, that the successes of electrical treatment in nervous patients are the effects of suggestion, there is no doubt that only the total absence of these promised successes was to blame. Treatment by suggestion during deep hypnosis, which I learned from Liébeault’s and Bernheim’s highly impressive demonstrations, then seemed to offer a satisfactory substitute for the failure of electrical treatment. But the practice of investigating patients in a state of hypnosis, with which Breuer made me acquainted - a practice which combined an automatic mode of operation with the satisfaction of scientific curiosity - was bound to be incomparably more attractive than the monotonous, forcible prohibitions used in treatment by suggestion, prohibitions which stood in the way of all research.

We have recently received a piece of advice, purporting to represent one of the latest developments of psycho-analysis, to the effect that the current conflict and the exciting cause of illness are to be brought into the foreground in analysis. Now this is exactly what Breuer and I used to do at the beginning of our work with the cathartic method. We led the patient’s attention directly to the traumatic scene in which the symptom had arisen, and we endeavoured to discover the mental conflict in that scene and to release the suppressed affect in it. In the course of this we discovered the mental process, characteristic of the neuroses, which I later named ‘regression’. The patient’s associations moved back from the scene which we were trying to elucidate to earlier experiences, and compelled the analysis, which was supposed to correct the present, to occupy itself with the past. This regression led constantly further backwards; at first it seemed regularly to bring us to puberty; later on, failures and points which still eluded explanation drew the analytic work still further back into years of childhood which had hitherto been inaccessible to any kind of exploration. This regressive direction became an important characteristic of analysis. It appeared that psycho-analysis could explain nothing belonging to the present without referring back to something past; indeed, that every pathogenic experience implied a previous experience which, though not in itself pathogenic, had yet endowed the later one with its pathogenic quality. The temptation to confine one’s attention to the known present exciting cause was so strong, however, that even in later analyses I gave way to it. In the analysis of the patient I named ‘Dora’, carried out in 1899, I had knowledge of the scene which occasioned the outbreak of the current illness. I tried innumerable times to submit this experience to analysis, but even direct demands always failed to produce from her anything more than the same meagre and incomplete description of it. Not until a long détour, leading back over her earliest childhood, had been made, did a dream present itself which on analysis brought to her mind the hitherto forgotten details of this scene, so that a comprehension and a solution of the current conflict became possible.

This one example shows how very misleading is the advice referred to above, and what a degree of scientific regression is represented by the neglect of regression in analytic technique which is thus recommended to us.1

The first difference between Breuer and myself came to light on a question concerning the finer psychical mechanism of hysteria. He gave preference to a theory which was still to some extent physiological, as one might say; he tried to explain the mental splitting in hysterical patients by the absence of communication between various mental states (‘states of consciousness’, as we called them at that time), and he therefore constructed the theory of ‘hypnoid states’, the products of which were supposed to penetrate into ‘waking consciousness’ like unassimilated foreign bodies. I had taken the matter less scientifically; everywhere I seemed to discern motives and tendencies analogous to those of everyday life, and I looked upon psychical splitting itself as an effect of a process of repelling which at that time I called ‘defence’, and later, ‘repression’. I made a short-lived attempt to allow the two mechanisms a separate existence side by side, but as observation showed me always and only one thing, it was not long before my ‘defence’ theory took up its stand opposite his ‘hypnoid’ one.

I am quite sure, however, that this opposition between our views had nothing to do with the breach in our relations which followed shortly after. This had deeper causes, but it came about in such a way that at first I did not understand it; it was only later that I learnt from many clear indications how to interpret it. It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very rich clinical picture of the case. I have always wondered why the critics did not more often cite this assertion of Breuer’s as an argument against my contention of a sexual aetiology in the neuroses, and even to-day I do not know whether I ought to regard the omission as evidence of tact or of carelessness on their part. Anyone who reads the history of Breuer’s case now in the light of the knowledge gained in the last twenty years will at once perceive the symbolism in it - the snakes, the stiffening, the paralysis of the arm - and, on taking into account the situation at the bedside of the young woman’s sick father, will easily guess the real interpretation of her symptoms; his opinion of the part played by sexuality in her mental life will therefore be very different from that of her doctor. In his treatment of her case, Breuer was able to make use of a very intense suggestive rapport with the patient, which may serve us as a complete prototype of what we call ‘transference’ to-day. Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an ‘untoward event’,¹ he broke off all further investigation. He never said this to me in so many words, but he told me enough at different times to justify this reconstruction of what happened. When I later began more and more resolutely to put forward the significance of sexuality in the aetiology of neuroses, he was the first to show the reaction of distaste and repudiation which was later to become so familiar to me, but which at that time I had not yet learnt to recognize as my inevitable fate.

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