On the occasion of the opening of the Hebrew University 5 страница

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

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

A number of suggestions came to me out of the Oedipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so too did the overwhelming effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero’s sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the unconscious nature of his criminal tendencies. From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character - Hamlet, which had been admired for three hundred years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have come to grief, like his numberless fellows in the real world, over the Oedipus complex. For Hamlet was faced with the task of taking vengeance on another for the two deeds which are the subject of the Oedipus desires; and before that task his arm was paralysed by his own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet very soon after his father’s death.¹ The suggestions made by me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of material made by dramatists. In his large volume on the incest theme (Rank, 1912) he was able to show how often imaginative writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Oedipus situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the way in which the material has been transformed, modified, and softened.

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) This is a construction which I should like explicitly to withdraw. I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works which have so long been attributed to him. Since the publication of J. T. Looney’s volume ‘Shakespeare’ Identified, I am almost convinced that in fact Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is concealed behind this pseudonym.8

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

I was able to show from a short story by W. Jensen called Gradiva, which has no particular merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar to us in the ‘dream-work’ are thus also operative in the processes of imaginative writing. My book on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious was a side-issue directly derived from The Interpretation of Dreams. The only friend of mine who was at that time interested in my work remarked to me that my interpretations of dreams often impressed him as being like jokes. In order to throw some light on this impression, I began to investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means used in the ‘dream-work’ - that is to say, condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its opposite or by something very small, and so on. This led to an economic enquiry into the origin of the high degree of pleasure obtained from hearing a joke. And to this the answer was that it was due to the momentary suspension of the expenditure of energy upon maintaining repression, owing to the attraction exercised by the offer of a bonus of pleasure (

fore-pleasure).

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

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

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

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

Theodor Reik and G. Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought which I developed in Totem and Taboo and, in a series of important works, have extended it, deepened it, or corrected it. I myself have since returned to it more than once, in the course of my investigations into the ‘unconscious sense of guilt’ (which also plays such an important part among the motives of neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer connection between social psychology and the psychology of the individual.¹ I have moreover made use of the idea of an archaic heritage from the ‘primal horde’ epoch of mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to hypnosis.

¹ The Ego and the Id and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.2

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

I myself have contributed nothing to the application of analysis to education. It was natural, however, that the analytic discoveries about the sexual life and mental development of children should attract the attention of educators and make them see their problems in a new light. Dr. Oskar Pfister, a protestant pastor at Zurich, led the way as a tireless pioneer along these lines, nor did he find the practice of analysis incompatible with the retention of his religion, though it is true that this was of a sublimated kind. Among the many others who worked alongside of him I may mention Frau Dr. Hug-Hellmuth and Dr. S. Bernfeld, both of Vienna.¹ The application of analysis to the prophylactic upbringing of healthy children and to the correcting of those who, though not actually neurotic, have deviated from the normal course of development has led to one consequence which is of practical importance. It is no longer possible to restrict the practice of psycho-analysis to doctors and to exclude laymen from it. In fact, a doctor who has not been through a special training is, in spite of his diploma, a layman in analysis, and a non-doctor who has been suitably trained can, with occasional reference to a doctor, carry out the analytic treatment not only of children but also of neurotics.

¹ (Footnote added 1935:) Since these words were written child analysis in particular has gained a powerful momentum owing to the work of Mrs. Melanie Klein and of my daughter, Anna Freud.3

By a process of development against which it would have been useless to struggle, the word ‘psycho-analysis’ has itself become ambiguous. While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method, it has now also become the name of a science - the science of unconscious mental processes. By itself this science is seldom able to deal with a problem completely, but it seems destined to give valuable contributory help in the most varied regions of knowledge. The sphere of application of psycho-analysis extends as far as that of psychology, to which it forms a complement of the greatest moment.

Looking back, then, over the patchwork of my life’s labours, I can say that I have made many beginnings and thrown out many suggestions. Something will come of them in the future, though I cannot myself tell whether it will be much or little. I can, however, express a hope that I have opened up a pathway for an important advance in our knowledge.4

POSTSCRIPT

(1935)

The editor of this series of autobiographical studies did not, so far as I know, consider the possibility that after a certain lapse of time a sequel might be written to any of them; and it may be that such an event has occurred only in the present instance. I am undertaking the task since my American publisher desires to issue the little work in a new edition. It first appeared in America in 1927 (published by Brentano) under the title of An Autobiographical Study, but it was injudiciously brought out in the same volume as another essay of mine which gave its title, The Problem of Lay-Analyses, to the whole book and so obscured the present work.

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psycho-analysis. They are intimately interwoven. This Autobiographical Study shows how psycho-analysis came to be the whole content of my life and rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any interest in comparison to my relations with that science.

Shortly before I wrote this study it seemed as though my life would soon be brought to an end by the recurrence of a malignant disease; but surgical skill saved me in 1923 and I was able to continue my life and my work, though no longer in freedom from pain. In the period of more than ten years that has passed since then, I have never ceased my analytic work nor my writing - as is proved by the completion of the twelfth volume of the German edition of my collected works. But I myself find that a significant change has come about. Threads which in the course of my development had become intertangled have now begun to separate; interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones become prominent once more. It is true that in this last decade I have carried out some important pieces of analytic work, such as the revision of the problem of anxiety in my book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d) or the simple explanation of sexual ‘fetishism’ which I was able to make a year later (1927e). Nevertheless it would be true to say that, since I put forward my hypothesis of the existence of two classes of instinct (Eros and the death instinct) and since I proposed a division of the mental personality into an ego, a super-ego, and an id (1923b), I have made no further decisive contributions to psycho-analysis: what I have written on the subject since then has been either unessential or would soon have been supplied by someone else. This circumstance is connected with an alteration in myself, with what might be described as a phase of regressive development. My interest, after making a lifelong détour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking. At the very climax of my psycho-analytic work, in 1912, I had already attempted in Totem and Taboo to make use of the newly discovered findings of analysis in order to investigate the origins of religion and morality. I now carried this work a stage further in two later essays, The Future of an Illusion (1927c) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930a). I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psycho-analysis studies in the individual - are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage. In The Future of an Illusion I expressed an essentially negative valuation of religion. Later, I found a formula which did better justice to it: while granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains, I showed that that truth was not a material but a historical truth.

These studies, which, though they originate in psycho-analysis, stretch far beyond it, have perhaps awakened more public sympathy than psycho-analysis itself. They may have played a part in creating the short-lived illusion that I was among the writers to whom a great nation like Germany was ready to listen. It was in 1929 that, with words no less pregnant than friendly, Thomas Mann, one of the acknowledged spokesmen of the German people, found a place for me in the history of modern thought. A little later my daughter Anna, acting as my proxy, was given a civic reception in the Rathaus at Frankfort-on-Main on the occasion of my being awarded the Goethe Prize for 1930. This was the climax of my life as a citizen. Soon afterwards the boundaries of our country narrowed and the nation would know no more of us.

And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes. The public has no claim to learn any more of my personal affairs - of my struggles, my disappointments, and my successes. I have in any case been more open and frank in some of my writings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it, and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example.

I must add a few more words on the history of psycho-analysis during the last decade. There can no longer be any doubt that it will continue; it has proved its capacity to survive and to develop both as a branch of knowledge and as a therapeutic method. The number of its supporters (organized into the International Psycho-Analytical Association) has considerably increased. In addition to the older local groups (in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Holland, Switzerland, and Russia), societies have since been formed in Paris and Calcutta, two in Japan, several in the United States, and quite recently one each in Jerusalem and South Africa and two in Scandinavia. Out of their own funds these local societies support (or are in process of forming) training institutes, in which instruction in the practice of psycho-analysis is given according to a uniform plan, and out-patient clinics in which experienced analysts as well as students give free treatment to patients of limited means. Every other year the members of the International Psycho-Analytical Association hold a Congress at which scientific papers are read and questions of organization decided. The thirteenth of these congresses (which I myself can no longer attend) took place at Lucerne in 1934. From a core of interests that are common to all members of the Association, their work radiates in many different directions. Some lay most stress upon clarifying and deepening our knowledge of psychology, while others are concerned with keeping in contact with medicine and psychiatry. From the practical point of view, some analysts have set themselves the task of bringing about the recognition of psycho-analysis at the universities and its inclusion in the medical curriculum, whereas others are content to remain outside these institutions and will not allow that psycho-analysis is less important in the field of education than in that of medicine. It happens from time to time that an analytic worker may find himself isolated in an attempt to emphasize some single one of the findings or views of psycho-analysis at the expense of all the rest. Nevertheless, the whole impression is a satisfactory one - of serious scientific work carried on at a high level.

INHIBITIONS, SYMPTOMS AND ANXIETY (1926)

In the description of pathological phenomena, linguistic usage enables us to distinguish symptoms from inhibitions, without, however, attaching much importance to the distinction. Indeed, we might hardly think it worth while to differentiate exactly between the two, were it not for the fact that we meet with illnesses in which we observe the presence of inhibitions but not of symptoms and are curious to know the reason for this.

The two concepts are not upon the same plane. Inhibition has a special relation to function. It does not necessarily have a pathological implication. One can quite well call a normal restriction of a function an inhibition of it. A symptom, on the other hand, actually denotes the presence of some pathological process. Thus, an inhibition may be a symptom as well. Linguistic usage, then, employs the word inhibition when there is a simple lowering of function, and symptom when a function has undergone some unusual change or when a new phenomenon has arisen out of it. Very often it seems to be quite an arbitrary matter whether we emphasize the positive side of a pathological process and call its outcome a symptom, or its negative side and call its outcome an inhibition. But all this is really of little interest; and the problem as we have stated it does not carry us very far.

Since the concept of inhibition is so intimately associated with that of function, it might be helpful to examine the various functions of the ego with a view to discovering the forms which any disturbance of those functions assumes in each of the different neurotic affections. Let us pick out for a comparative study of this kind the sexual function and those of eating, of locomotion and of professional work.9 (a) The sexual function is liable to a great number of disturbances, most of which exhibit the characteristics of simple inhibitions. These are classed together as psychical impotence. The normal performance of the sexual function can only come about as the result of a very complicated process, and disturbances may appear at any point in it. In men the chief stages at which inhibition occurs are shown by: a turning away of the libido at the very beginning of the process (psychical unpleasure); an absence of the physical preparation for it (lack of erection); an abridgement of the sexual act (ejaculatio praecox), an occurrence which might equally well be regarded as a symptom; an arrest of the act before it has reached its natural conclusion (absence of ejaculation); or a non-appearance of the psychical outcome (lack of the feeling of pleasure in orgasm). Other disturbances arise from the sexual function becoming dependent on special conditions of a perverse or fetishist nature.

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