Freud - Complete Works (516 page)

   But you will have a right to ask
another question. If there is no objective verification of
psycho-analysis, and no possibility of demonstrating it, how can
one learn psycho-analysis at all, and convince oneself of the truth
of its assertions? It is true that psycho-analysis cannot easily be
learnt and there are not many people who have learnt it properly.
But of course there is a practicable method none the less. One
learns psycho-analysis on oneself, by studying one’s own
personality. This is not quite the same thing as what is called
self-observation, but it can, if necessary, be subsumed under it.
There are a whole number of very common and generally familiar
mental phenomena which, after a little instruction in technique,
can be made the subject of analysis upon oneself. In that way one
acquires the desired sense of conviction of the reality of the
processes described by analysis and of the correctness of its
views. Nevertheless, there are definite limits to progress by this
method. One advances much further if one is analysed oneself by a
practised analyst and experiences the effects of analysis on
one’s own self, making use of the opportunity of picking up
the subtler technique of the process from one’s analyst. This
excellent method is, of course, applicable only to a single person
and never to a whole lecture room of students together.

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   Psycho-analysis is not to be
blamed for a second difficulty in your relation to it; I must make
you yourselves responsible for it, Ladies and Gentlemen, at least
in so far as you have been students of medicine. Your earlier
education has given a particular direction to your thinking, which
leads far away from psycho-analysis. You have been trained to find
an anatomical basis for the functions of the organism and their
disorders, to explain them chemically and physically and to view
them biologically. But no portion of your interest has been
directed to psychical life, in which, after all, the achievement of
this marvellously complex organism reaches its peak. For that
reason psychological modes of thought have remained foreign to you.
You have grown accustomed to regarding them with suspicion, to
denying them the attribute of being scientific, and to handing them
over to laymen, poets, natural philosophers and mystics. This
limitation is without doubt detrimental to your medical activity,
since, as is the rule in all human relationships, your patients
will begin by presenting you with their mental
façade
, and I fear that you will be obliged as a
punishment to leave a part of the therapeutic influence you are
seeking to the lay practitioners, nature curers and mystics whom
you so much despise.

   I am not unaware of the excuse
that we have to accept for this defect in your education. No
philosophical auxiliary science exists which could be made of
service for your medical purposes. Neither speculative philosophy,
nor descriptive psychology, nor what is called experimental
psychology (which is closely allied to the physiology of the
sense-organs), as they are taught in the Universities, are in a
position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between
body and mind or to provide you with the key to an understanding of
possible disturbances of the mental functions. It is true that
psychiatry, as a part of medicine, sets about describing the mental
disorders it observes and collecting them into clinical entities;
but at favourable moments the psychiatrists themselves have doubts
of whether their purely descriptive hypotheses deserve the name of
a science. Nothing is known of the origin, the mechanism or the
mutual relations of the symptoms of which these clinical entities
are composed; there are either no observable changes in the
anatomical organ of the mind to correspond to them, or changes
which throw no light upon them. These mental disorders are only
accessible to therapeutic influence when they can be recognized as
subsidiary effects of what is otherwise an organic illness.

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   This is the gap which
psycho-analysis seeks to fill. It tries to give psychiatry its
missing psychological foundation. It hopes to discover the common
ground on the basis of which the convergence of physical and mental
disorder will become intelligible. With this aim in view,
psycho-analysis must keep itself free from any hypothesis that is
alien to it, whether of an anatomical, chemical or physiological
kind, and must operate entirely with purely psychological auxiliary
ideas; and for that very reason, I fear, it will seem strange to
you to begin with.

   I shall not hold you, your
education or your attitude of mind responsible for the next
difficulty. Two of the hypotheses of psycho-analysis are an insult
to the entire world and have earned its dislike. One of them
offends against an intellectual prejudice, the other against an
aesthetic and moral one. We must not be too contemptuous of these
prejudices; they are powerful things, precipitates of human
developments that were useful and indeed essential. They are kept
in existence by emotional forces and the struggle against them is
hard.

   The first of these unpopular
assertions made by psycho-analysis declares that mental processes
are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is
only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious. You
know that on the contrary we are in the habit of identifying what
is psychical with what is conscious. We look upon consciousness as
nothing more nor less than the
defining
characteristic of
the psychical, and psychology as the study of the contents of
consciousness. Indeed it seems to us so much a matter of course to
equate them in this way that any contradiction of the idea strikes
us as obvious nonsense. Yet psycho-analysis cannot avoid raising
this contradiction; it cannot accept the identity of the conscious
and the mental. It defines what is mental as processes such as
feeling, thinking and willing, and it is obliged to maintain that
there is unconscious thinking and unapprehended willing. In saying
this it has from the start frivolously forfeited the sympathy of
every friend of sober scientific thought, and laid itself open to
the suspicion of being a fantastic esoteric doctrine eager to make
mysteries and fish in troubled waters. But you, Ladies and
Gentlemen, naturally cannot understand as yet what right I have to
describe as a prejudice a statement of so abstract a nature as
‘what is mental is conscious’. Nor can you guess what
development can have led to a denial of the unconscious - should
such a thing exist - and what advantage there may have been in that
denial. The question whether we are to make the psychical coincide
with the conscious or make it extend further sounds like an empty
dispute about words; yet I can assure you that the hypothesis of
there being unconscious mental processes paves the way to a
decisive new orientation in the world and in science.

   You cannot have any notion,
either, of what an intimate connection there is between this first
piece of audacity on the part of psycho-analysis and the second
one, which I must now tell you of. This second thesis, which
psycho-analysis puts forward as one of its findings, is an
assertion that instinctual impulses which can only be described as
sexual, both in the narrower and wider sense of the word, play an
extremely large and never hitherto appreciated part in the
causation of nervous and mental diseases. It asserts further that
these same sexual impulses also make contributions that must not be
underestimated to the highest cultural, artistic and social
creations of the human spirit.

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   In my experience antipathy to
this outcome of psycho-analytic research is the most important
source of resistance which it has met with. Would you like to hear
how we explain that fact? We believe that civilization has been
created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of
satisfaction of the instincts;(and we believe that civilization is
to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each
individual who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this
sacrifice of instinctual satisfaction for the benefit of the whole
community. Among the instinctual forces which are put to this use
the sexual impulses play an important part; in this process they
are sublimated - that is to say, they are diverted from their
sexual aims and directed to others that are socially higher and no
longer sexual. But this arrangement is unstable; the sexual
instincts are imperfectly tamed, and, in the case of every
individual who is supposed to join in the work of civilization,
there is a risk that his sexual instincts may refuse to be put to
that use. Society believes that no greater threat to its
civilization could arise than if the sexual instincts were to be
liberated and returned to their original aims. For this reason
society does not wish to be reminded of this precarious portion of
its foundations. It has no interest in the recognition of the
strength of the sexual instincts or in the demonstration of the
importance of sexual life to the individual. On the contrary, with
an educational aim in view, it has set about diverting attention
from that whole field of ideas. That is why it will not tolerate
this outcome of psycho-analytic research and far prefers to stamp
it as something aesthetically repulsive and morally reprehensible,
or as something dangerous. But objections of this sort are
ineffective against what claims to be an objective outcome of a
piece of scientific work; if the contradiction is to come into the
open it must be restated in intellectual terms. Now it is inherent
in human nature to have an inclination to consider a thing untrue
if one does not like it, and after that it is easy to find
arguments against it. Thus society makes what is disagreeable into
what is untrue. It disputes the truths of psycho-analysis with
logical and factual arguments; but these arise from emotional
sources and it maintains these objections as prejudices, against
every attempt to counter them.

   We, however, Ladies and
Gentlemen, can claim that in asserting this controversial thesis we
have had no tendentious aim in view. We have merely wished to give
expression to a matter of fact which we believe we have established
by our painstaking labours. We claim, too, the right to reject
without qualification any interference by practical considerations
in scientific work, even before we have enquired whether the fear
which seeks to impose these considerations on us is justified or
not.

   Such, then, are a few of the
difficulties that stand in the way of your interest in
psycho-analysis. They are perhaps more than enough for a start. But
if you are able to overcome the impression they make on you, we
will proceed.

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3136

LECTURE II

PARAPRAXES

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - We will not start with postulates but with an
investigation. Let us choose as its subject certain phenomena which
are very common and very familiar but which have been very little
examined, and which, since they can be observed in any healthy
person, have nothing to do with illnesses. They are what are known
as ‘parapraxes’, to which everyone is liable. It may
happen, for instance, that a person who intends to say something
may use another word instead (a
slip of the tongue
[
Versprechen
]), or he may do the same thing in writing, and
may or may not notice what he has done. Or a person may read
something, whether in print or manuscript, different from what is
actually before his eyes (a
misreading
[
Verlesen
]),
or he may hear wrongly something that has been said to him (a
mishearing
[
Verhören
]) - on the assumption, of
course, that there is no organic disturbance of his powers of
hearing. Another group of these phenomena has as its basis
forgetting
[
Vergessen
] - not, however, a permanent
forgetting but only a temporary one. Thus a person may be unable to
get hold of a
name
which he nevertheless knows and which he
recognizes at once, or he may forget to carry out an
intention
, though he remembers it later and has thus only
forgotten it at that particular moment. In a third group the
temporary character is absent - for instance in the case of
mislaying
[
Verlegen
], when a person has put something
somewhere and cannot find it again or in the precisely analogous
case of
losing
[
Verlieren
]. Here we have a forgetting
which we treat differently from other kinds of forgetting, one at
which we are surprised or annoyed instead of finding it
understandable. In addition to all this there are particular sorts
of
errors
[
Irrtümer
], in which the temporary
character is present once more; for in their instance we believe
for a time that something is the case which both before and
afterwards we know is not so. And there are a number of other
similar phenomena known by various names.

   All these are occurrences whose
internal affinity with one another is expressed in the fact that
[in German] they begin with the syllable ‘
ver
’.
They are almost all of an unimportant kind, most of them are very
transitory, and they are without much significance in human life.
Only rarely does one of them, such as losing an object, attain some
degree of practical importance. For that reason, too, they attract
little attention, give rise to no more than feeble emotions, and so
on.