On the occasion of the opening of the Hebrew University 4 страница

For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned; abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals. In my paper ‘On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ I mentioned as an instance of the attitude adopted by psychiatric circles in Vienna a conversation with an assistant at the clinic, who had written a book against my theories but had never read my Interpretation of Dreams. He had been told at the clinic that it was not worth while. The man in question, who has since become a professor, has gone so far as to repudiate my report of the conversation and to throw doubts in general upon the accuracy of my recollection. I can only say that I stand by every word of the account I then gave.

As soon as I realized the inevitable nature of what I had come up against, my sensitiveness greatly diminished. Moreover my isolation gradually came to an end. To begin with, a small circle of pupils gathered round me in Vienna; and then, after 1906, came the news that the psychiatrists at Zurich, E. Bleuler, his assistant C. G. Jung, and others, were taking a lively interest in psycho-analysis. We got into personal touch with one another, and at Easter 1908 the friends of the young science met at Salzburg, agreed upon the regular repetition of similar informal congresses and arranged for the publication of a journal which was edited by Jung and was given the title of Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. It was brought out under the direction of Bleuler and myself and ceased publication at the beginning of the World War. At the same time that the Swiss psychiatrists joined the movement, interest in psycho-analysis began to be aroused all over Germany as well; it became the subject of a large number of written comments and of lively discussions at scientific congresses. But its reception was nowhere friendly or even benevolently non-committal. After the briefest acquaintance with psycho-analysis German science was united in rejecting it.

Even to-day it is of course impossible for me to foresee the final judgment of posterity upon the value of psycho-analysis for psychiatry, psychology, and the mental sciences in general. But I fancy that, when the history of the phase we have lived through comes to be written, German science will not have cause to be proud of those who represented it. I am not thinking of the fact that they rejected psycho-analysis or of the decisive way in which they did so; both of these things were easily intelligible, they were only to be expected and at any rate they threw no discredit on the character of the opponents of analysis. But for the degree of arrogance which they displayed, for their conscienceless contempt of logic, and for the coarseness and bad taste of their attacks there could be no excuse. It may be said that it is childish of me to give free rein to such feelings as these now, after fifteen years have passed; nor would I do so unless I had something more to add. Years later, during the World War, when a chorus of enemies were bringing against the German nation the charge of barbarism, a charge which sums up all that I have written above, it none the less hurt deeply to feel that my own experience would not allow me to contradict it.

One of my opponents boasted of silencing his patients as soon as they began to talk of anything sexual and evidently thought that this technique gave him a right to judge the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses. Apart from emotional resistances, which were so easily explicable by the psycho-analytic theory that it was impossible to be misled by them, it seemed to me that the main obstacle to agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded psycho-analysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which had gone to its making. Since in their opinion analysis had nothing to do with observation or experience, they believed that they themselves were justified in rejecting it without experience. Others again, who did not feel so strongly convinced of this, repeated in their resistance the classical manoeuvre of not looking through the microscope so as to avoid seeing what they had denied. It is remarkable, indeed, how incorrectly most people act when they are obliged to form a judgement of their own on some new subject. For years I have been told by ‘benevolent’ critics - and I hear the same thing even to-day - that psycho-analysis is right up to such-and-such a point but that there it begins to exaggerate and to generalize without justification. And I know that, though nothing is more difficult than to decide where such a point lies, these critics had been completely ignorant of the whole subject only a few weeks or days earlier.

The result of the official anathema against psycho-analysis was that the analysts began to come closer together. At the second Congress, held at Nuremberg in 1910, they formed themselves, on the proposal of Ferenczi, into an ‘International Psycho-Analytical Association’ divided into a number of local societies but under a common President. The Association survived the Great War and still exists, consisting to-day of branch societies in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Great Britain, Holland, Russia, and India, as well as two in the United States. I arranged that C. G. Jung should be appointed as the first President, which turned out later to have been a most unfortunate step. At the same time a second journal devoted to psycho-analysis was started, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, edited by Adler and Stekel, and a little later a third, Imago, edited by two non-medical analysts, H. Sachs and O. Rank, and intended to deal with the application of analysis to the mental sciences. Soon afterwards Bleuler published a paper in defence of psycho-analysis. Though it was a relief to find honesty and straightforward logic for once taking part in the dispute, yet I could not feel completely satisfied by Bleuler’s essay. He strove too eagerly after an appearance of impartiality; nor is it a matter of chance that it is to him that our science owes the valuable concept of ambivalence. In later papers Bleuler adopted such a critical attitude towards the theoretical structure of analysis and rejected or threw doubts upon such essential parts of it that I could not help asking myself in astonishment what could be left of it for him to admire. Yet not only has he subsequently uttered the strongest pleas in favour of ‘depth psychology’ but he based his comprehensive study of schizophrenia upon it. Nevertheless Bleuler did not for long remain a member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association; he resigned from it as a result of misunderstandings with Jung, and the Burghölzli was lost to analysis.

Official disapproval could not hinder the spread of psycho-analysis either in Germany or in other countries. I have elsewhere followed the stages of its growth and given the names of those who were its first representatives. In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to Clark University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was President, and to spend a week giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that body’s foundation. Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had introduced psycho-analysis into his courses several years earlier; there was a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them. We also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist, who in spite of his age was an enthusiastic supporter of psycho-analysis and threw the whole weight of a personality that was universally respected into the defence of the cultural value of analysis and the purity of its aims. He was an estimable man, in whom, as a reaction against a predisposition to obsessional neurosis, an ethical bias predominated; and the only thing in him that was disquieting was his inclination to attach psycho-analysis to a particular philosophical system and to make it the servant of moral aims. Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

At that time I was only fifty-three. I felt young and healthy, and my short visit to the new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it is extremely popular among the lay public and is recognized by a number of official psychiatrists as an important element in medical training. Unfortunately, however, it has suffered a great deal from being watered down. Moreover, many abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name, and there are few opportunities for any thorough training in technique or theory. In America, too, it has come in conflict with Behaviourism, a theory which is naïve enough to boast that it has put the whole problem of psychology completely out of court.

In Europe during the years 1911-13 two secessionist movements from psycho-analysis took place, led by men who had previously played a considerable part in the young science, Alfred Adler and C. G. Jung. Both movements seemed most threatening and quickly obtained a large following. But their strength lay, not in their own content, but in the temptation which they offered of being freed from what were felt as the repellent findings of psycho-analysis even though its actual material was no longer rejected. Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the importance of infantile sexuality and of the Oedipus complex as well as the necessity for any analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psycho-analysis; he entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men’s desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiorities, and threw all the psychological discoveries of psycho-analysis to the winds. But what he had rejected forced its way back into his closed system under other names; his ‘masculine protest’ is nothing else than repression unjustifiably sexualized. The criticism with which the two heretics were met was a mild one; I only insisted that both Adler and Jung should cease to describe their theories as ‘psycho-analysis’. After a lapse of ten years it can be asserted that both of these attempts against psycho-analysis have blown over without doing any harm.

If a community is based on agreement upon a few cardinal points, it is obvious that people who have abandoned that common ground will cease to belong to it. Yet the secession of former pupils has often been brought up against me as a sign of my intolerance or has been regarded as evidence of some special fatality that hangs over me. It is a sufficient answer to point out that in contrast to those who have left me, like Jung, Adler, Stekel, and a few besides, there are a great number of men, like Abraham, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Rank, Jones, Brill, Sachs, Pfister, van Emden, Reik, and others, who have worked with me for some fifteen years in loyal collaboration and for the most part in uninterrupted friendship. I have only mentioned the oldest of my pupils, who have already made a distinguished name for themselves in the literature of psycho-analysis; if I have passed over others, that is not to be taken as a slight, and indeed among those who are young and have joined me lately talents are to be found on which great hopes may be set. But I think I can say in my defence that an intolerant man, dominated by an arrogant belief in his own infallibility, would never have been able to maintain his hold upon so large a number of intellectually eminent people, especially if he had at his command as few practical attractions as I had.

The World War, which broke up so many other organizations, could do nothing against our ‘International’. The first meeting after the war took place in 1920, at The Hague, on neutral ground. It was moving to see how hospitably the Dutch welcomed the starving and impoverished subjects of the Central European states; and I believe this was the first occasion in a ruined world on which Englishmen and Germans sat at the same table for the friendly discussion of scientific interests. Both in Germany and in the countries of Western Europe the war had actually stimulated interest in psycho-analysis. The observation of war neuroses had at last opened the eyes of the medical profession to the importance of psychogenesis in neurotic disturbances, and some of our psychological conceptions, such as the ‘gain from illness’ and the ‘flight into illness’, quickly became popular. The last Congress before the German collapse, which was held at Budapest in 1918, was attended by official representatives of the allied governments of the Central European powers, and they agreed to the establishment of psycho-analytic Centres for the treatment of war neuroses. But this point was never reached. Similarly too the comprehensive plans made by one of our leading members, Dr. Anton von Freund, for establishing in Budapest a centre for analytic study and treatment came to grief as a result of the political upheavals that followed soon afterwards and of the premature death of their irreplaceable author. At a later date some of his ideas were put into execution by Max Eitingon, who in 1920 founded a psycho-analytical clinic in Berlin. During the brief period of Bolshevik rule in Hungary, Ferenczi was still able to carry on a successful course of instruction as the official representative of psycho-analysis at the University of Budapest. After the war our opponents were pleased to announce that events had produced a conclusive argument against the validity of the theses of analysis. The war neuroses, they said, had proved that sexual factors were unnecessary to the aetiology of neurotic disorders. But their triumph was frivolous and premature. For on the one hand no one had been able to carry out a thorough analysis of a case of war neurosis, so that in fact nothing whatever was known for certain as to their motivation and no conclusions could be drawn from this uncertainty; while on the other hand psycho-analysis had long before arrived at the concept of narcissism and of narcissistic neuroses, in which the subject’s libido is attached to his own ego instead of to an object. Though on other occasions, therefore, the charge was brought against psycho-analysis of having made an unjustifiable extension of the concept of sexuality, yet, when it became convenient for controversial ends, this crime was forgotten and we were once more held down to the narrowest meaning of the word.

0 If the preliminary cathartic period is left on one side, the history of psycho-analysis falls from my point of view into two phases. In the first of these I stood alone and had to do all the work myself: this was from 1895-6 until 1906 or 1907. In the second phase, lasting from then until the present time, the contributions of my pupils and collaborators have been growing more and more in importance, so that to-day, when a grave illness warns me of the approaching end, I can think with a quiet mind of the cessation of my own labours. For that very reason, however, it is impossible for me in this Autobiographical Study to deal as fully with the progress of psycho-analysis during the second phase as I did with its gradual rise during the first phase, which was concerned with my own activity alone. I feel that I should only be justified in mentioning here those new discoveries in which I still played a prominent part, in particular, therefore, those made in the sphere of narcissism, of the theory of the instincts, and of the application of psycho-analysis to the psychoses.

I must begin by adding that increasing experience showed more and more plainly that the Oedipus complex was the nucleus of the neurosis. It was at once the climax of infantile sexual life and the point of junction from which all of its later developments proceeded. But if so, it was no longer possible to expect analysis to discover a factor that was specific in the aetiology of the neuroses. It must be true, as Jung expressed it so well in the early days when he was still an analyst, that neuroses have no peculiar content which belongs exclusively to them but that neurotics break down at the same difficulties that are successfully overcome by normal people. This discovery was very far from being a disappointment. It was in complete harmony with another one: that the depth-psychology revealed by psycho-analysis was in fact the psychology of the normal mind. Our path had been like that of chemistry: the great qualitative differences between substances were traced back to quantitative variations in the proportions in which the same elements were combined.

In the Oedipus complex the libido was seen to be attached to the image of the parental figures. But earlier there was a period in which there were no such objects. There followed from this fact the concept (of fundamental importance for the libido theory) of a state in which the subject’s libido filled his own ego and had that for its object. This state could be called narcissism or self-love. A moment’s reflection showed that this state never completely ceases. All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or sublimated manner, which goes so far as involving a sacrifice of the self. Whereas hitherto in considering the process of repression attention had only been paid to what was repressed, these ideas made it possible to form a correct estimate of the repressing forces too. It had been said that repression was set in action by the instincts of self-preservation operating in the ego (the ‘ego-instincts’) and that it was brought to bear upon the libidinal instincts. But since the instincts of self-preservation were now recognized as also being of a libidinal nature, as being narcissistic libido, the process of repression was seen to be a process occurring within the libido itself; narcissistic libido was opposed to object-libido, the interest of self-preservation was defending itself against the demands of object-love, and therefore against the demands of sexuality in the narrower sense as well.

There is no more urgent need in psychology than for a securely founded theory of the instincts on which it might then be possible to build further. Nothing of the sort exists, however, and psycho-analysis is driven to making tentative efforts towards some such theory. It began by drawing a contrast between the ego-instincts (the instinct of self-preservation, hunger) and the libidinal instincts (love), but later replaced it by a new contrast between narcissistic and object-libido. This was clearly not the last word on the subject; biological considerations seemed to make it impossible to remain content with assuming the existence of only a single class of instincts.

In the works of my later years (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and The Ego and the Id, I have given free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long, to speculation, and I have also contemplated a new solution of the problem of the instincts. I have combined the instincts for self-preservation and for the preservation of the species under the concept of Eros and have contrasted with it an instinct of death or destruction which works in silence. Instinct in general is regarded as a kind of elasticity of living things, an impulsion towards the restoration of a situation which once existed but was brought to an end by some external disturbance. This essentially conservative character of instincts is exemplified by the phenomena of the compulsion to repeat. The picture which life presents to us is the result of the concurrent and mutually opposing action of Eros and the death instinct.

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 psycho-analysis, it goes far beyond psycho-analysis. 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 psycho-analysis. But this reproach rests on a complete misconception of the facts. Clear basic concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a region of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clear-cut 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 basic ideas or most general concepts 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 have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science. This refusal found an expression in the raising of the most obstinate objections. Psycho-analysis was constantly reproached for its incompleteness and insufficiencies; though it is plain that a science based upon observation has no alternative but to work out its findings piecemeal and to solve its problems step by step. Again, when I endeavoured to obtain for the sexual function the recognition which had so long been withheld from it, psycho-analytic theory was branded as ‘pan-sexualism’. And when I laid stress on the hitherto neglected importance of the part played by the accidental impressions of early youth, I was told that psycho-analysis was denying constitutional and hereditary factors - a thing which I had never dreamt of doing. It was a case of contradiction at any price and by any methods.

I had already made attempts at earlier stages of my work to arrive at some more general points of view on the basis of psycho-analytic observation. In a short essay, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, I drew attention (and there was, of course, nothing original in this) to the domination of the pleasure-unpleasure principle in mental life and to its displacement by what is called the reality principle. Later on 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 co-ordinates, which I described as dynamic, topographical, and economic respectively; and this seemed to me to represent the furthest 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. - I broke off, wisely perhaps, since the time for theoretical predications 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, an id, and a super-ego.¹ The super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus 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 psycho-analysis 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 psycho-analysis, 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.

¹ The Ego and the Id. 5

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 analytic 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 praecox; 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 on the surface, visible to every eye. For that reason 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. I was able very early (1896) to establish in a case of paranoid dementia the presence of the same aetiological factors and the same emotional complexes as in the neuroses. Jung explained some most puzzling stereotypies 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 the melancholias. 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 cannot 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 psycho-analysts, 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.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23