Freudianism

“ I refer to the argument or rather the insistence that those who oppose the spread of the Freudian ideas are themselves unconscious illustrations of the truth and accuracy and general applicability of the Freudian dicta. In this argument they accuse their opponents of unconsciously indulging in or being victims of a defense mechanism, as a means of self-justification and self-rationalization, based on repression, sexuality, etc., in order that their hidden, unconscious, repressed, forgotten desires, tendencies and inclinations may not be brought to the surface and consciously acknowledged. ”

“ It would not be very glorious for the scientific men of our day. But I will add at once that it has never occurred to me to rail against the opponents of psychoanalysis merely because they were opponents, not counting a few unworthy individuals, fortune hunters and plunderers such as in time of war are always found on both sides. For I knew how to account for the behavior of these opponents and had besides discovered that psychoanalysis brings to light the worst in every man. ”

“ There is another type of mind which is constitutionally sensitive to the infinite significance of minimal things. Of such, very typical in our day are Freud and the Freudians grouped around him. There is nothing so small that for Freud it is not packed with endless meaning. Every slightest twitch of the muscles, every fleeting fancy of the brain, is unconsciously designed to reveal the deepest impulse of the soul. Every detail of the wildest dream of the night is merely a hieroglyph which may be interpreted. Every symptom of disease is a symbol of the heart's desire. ”

“ If wishes and impulses have the full value of fact for primitive man, it is for us to follow such a conception intelligently instead of correcting it according to our standard. But in that case we must scrutinize more closely the prototype of the neurosis itself which is responsible for having raised this doubt. It is not true that compulsion neurotics, who to-day are under the pressure of over-morality, defend themselves only against the psychic reality of temptations and punish themselves for impulses which they have only felt. ”

“ But it may be expected that when we penetrate deeper into the psychology of the psychoses its significance will be discovered to be far greater. Let us reflect that the ego now appears in the relation of an object to the ego ideal—which has been developed out of it, and that all the interplay between an outer object and the ego as a whole, with which our study of the neuroses has made us acquainted, may possibly be repeated upon this new scene of action inside the ego. ”

“ Dreams, according [128] to Freud, are the dramatisation of suppressed desires; but what, asks “Æ,” is the means by which desires, suppressed or otherwise, dramatise themselves? “A mood or desire may attract its affinities”; in other words, there may be a congruity between the desire and the dream which serves the Freudian purpose of interpretation; but desire can hardly be said “to create what it attracts.” Between anger, for instance, and a definite vision of conflict, such as the dream may represent, there is a gulf which the theory of Freud does not enable us to cross. ”

“ In reading a plea for Freud in our association of normalists, I am a vox clamantis in deserto and can evoke no response, and even the incursions of psychoanalysis into the domain of biography, myth, religion and dreams, have not evoked a single attempt at appreciation or criticism worthy of mention by any American psychologist of the normal. ”

“ But the deeper the Freudians delve into the underground regions of instinct, the further they travel from anything resembling conscious desire, and the less possible it becomes to believe that only positive self-deception conceals from us that we really wish for things which are abhorrent to our explicit life.
In the cases in question we have a conflict between the outside observer and the patient's consciousness. The whole tendency of psycho-analysis is to trust the outside observer rather than the testimony of introspection. ”

“ There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions. ”

“ His insight into the motivation of his trip is obstructed in service of the delusion; his relation to science, which ought, in such a place, to stir all his interest, is upset. So our author shows his hero, after flight from love, in a sort of crisis, in an utterly confused and unsettled condition, in a derangement such as usually appears at the climax of illness if neither of the two struggling forces is so much stronger than the other, that the difference could establish a strict, psychic régime. ”

“ The author of "Affectivity" (1906) must not be surprised if the influence of a work is not determined by the value of its argument but by the tone of its affect. Another part of this influence—the one on the followers of psychoanalysis—Bleuler himself destroyed later on by bringing into prominence in 1913, in his "Criticism of the Freudian School," the obverse side of his attitude to psychoanalysis. Therein he takes away so much from the structure of the psychoanalytic principles that our opponents may well be satisfied with the assistance of this defender. ”

“ The value of public or literary discussions seemed to me very doubtful under the particular conditions in which the fight over psychoanalysis took place. The value of majorities at congresses or society meetings was certainly doubtful, and my confidence in the honesty and distinction of my opponents was always slight. Observation shows that only very few persons are capable of remaining polite, not to speak of objective, in any scientific dispute, and the impression gained from a scientific quarrel was always a horror to me. ”

“ By thus bringing into prominence the unconscious in psychic life, we have raised the most evil spirits of criticism against psychoanalysis. Do not be surprised at this, and do not believe that the opposition is directed only against the difficulties offered by the conception of the unconscious or against the relative inaccessibility of the experiences which represent it. I believe it comes from another source. Humanity, in the course of time, has had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages against its naive self-love. ”

“ The exponents of Freudian interpretations today are medical men associated with the practice of so-called "Psychoanalysis;" which means that they are more concerned to apply Freud's ideas for the treatment of nervous ailments than to cultivate pure psychology. An examination of the methods they exemplify in individual practice and in the large literature of the psycho-analytic movement shows sufficient reason, in my view, why the psycho-analytic theory of dreams should still be greeted with skepticism. ”

“ A change in the relations of the fundamental ambivalence can be the only reason why the prohibition no longer appears in the form of a taboo.
In the analytical consideration of taboo phenomena we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be guided by their demonstrable agreements with compulsion neurosis; but as taboo is not a neurosis but a social creation we are also confronted with the task of showing wherein lies the essential difference between the neurosis and a product of culture like the taboo. ”

“ Now, for Freud, it is of just such cast off complexes, each with its own complement of energy, that the lowest level of the unconscious is made up. All the unethical acts and unsocial ways of thought of the child, repugnant to us to-day, still exist in the lowest dark chamber of the soul, not strong enough to break out into action, but alive. ”

“ The new situation revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. The Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life. Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments, does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and sensationalistic aspects of human experience. ”

“ He who approaches the problem of taboo from the field of psychoanalysis, which is concerned with the study of the unconscious part of the individual’s psychic life, needs but a moment’s reflection to realize that these phenomena are by no means foreign to him. He knows people who have individually created such taboo prohibitions for themselves, which they follow as strictly as savages observe the taboos common to their tribe or society. ”

“ In every seeming meaningless lapse of his tongue or his memory a man is unconsciously revealing his most guarded and shameful secret. It is the daring and fantastic attempt, astonishing in the unexpected amount of its success, to work out this Philosophy of the Unconscious which makes the work of the Freudians so fascinating.
They have their defects, both these methods, the far-sighted and the near-sighted. Bacon fell into the ditch, and Freud is obsessed by the vision of a world only seen through the delicate anastomosis of the nerves of sex. ”

“ Our procedure consists of the conscious observation of abnormal psychic processes in others, in order to be able to discover and express their laws. Our author proceeds in another way; he directs his attention to the unconscious in his own psyche, listens to its possibilities of development and grants them artistic expression, instead of suppressing them with conscious critique. Thus he learns from himself what we learn from others, what laws the activity of this unconscious must follow, but he does not need to express these laws, need not even recognize them clearly ”

“ Contemporaneously with this 'devotion' of the ego to the object, which is no longer to be distinguished from a sublimated devotion to an abstract idea, the functions allotted to the ego ideal entirely cease to operate. The criticism exercised by that faculty is silent; everything that the object does and asks for is right and blameless. Conscience has no application to anything that is done for the sake of the object; in the blindness of love remorselessness is carried to the pitch of crime. ”

“ For in the cross fire of mutual maledictions mankind would have perished long ago, not excepting the best and wisest of men as well as the most beautiful and charming women.
As a rule the layman refuses to believe these theories of psychoanalysis. They are rejected as calumnies which can be ignored in the face of the assurances of consciousness, while the few signs through which the unconscious betrays itself to consciousness are cleverly overlooked. ”

“ But if we are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis—say from hysteria—the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by reason of their connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the improvement resulting from exchanging the symptoms for the repressed ideas. Take the patient from whom I got the last dream about the three tickets for one florin fifty kreuzers. Analysis shows that she does not think highly of her husband, that she regrets having married him, that she would be glad to change him for some one else. ”

“ Freud and his followers have always said that they saw no theoretical reason why any other repressed instinct should not form the basis of a neurosis, but that, as a matter of fact, they never had found this to be the case, probably because no other instinct comes into such bitter and persistent conflict with the dictates of society. ”

“ As you know, the reality of this observation has been contested by many, who maintain that crude error, that narrow-minded delusion, misled Freud and his whole school, alike in Europe and in America, so that the Freudians saw things that never existed. They regarded them as people in the grip of an intellectual epidemic. ”

“ The pathogenic psychic material appears as the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to the normal ego. The semblance of a second personality is often most delusively produced. Whether this impression is justified, whether the arrangements of the psychic material resulting after the adjustment is not transferred back into the time of the disease, these are questions which I do not like to consider in this place. ”

“ On another occasion I had opportunity to get a profound insight into the unconscious psychic life of a young man for whom a compulsion-neurosis made life almost unendurable, so that he could not go on the street, because he was harassed by the obsession that he would kill every one he met. ”

“ This transferability of the taboo reflects what is found in the neurosis, namely, the constant tendency of the unconscious impulse to become displaced through associative channels upon new objects. Our attention is thus drawn to the fact that the dangerous magic power of the “mana” corresponds to two real faculties, the capacity of reminding man of his forbidden wishes, and the apparently more important one of tempting him to violate the prohibition in the service of these wishes. ”