Freud - Complete Works (767 page)

   But you may raise the question of
why these people - both the ones who write books and the
conversationalists - behave so badly; and you may incline to the
view that the responsibility for this lies not only on them but
also on psycho-analysis. I think so too. What you come upon as
prejudice in literature and society is an after-effect of an
earlier judgement - the judgement, namely, that was formed upon the
young psycho-analysis by the representatives of official science. I
once complained of this in a historical account I wrote, and I
shall not do so again - perhaps that once was too often - but it is
a fact that there was no violation of logic, and no violation of
propriety and good taste, to which the scientific opponents of
psycho-analysis did not give way at that time. The situation
recalled what was actually put in practice in the Middle Ages when
an evil-doer, or even a mere political opponent, was put in the
pillory and given over to maltreatment by the mob. You may not
realize clearly, perhaps, how far upwards in our society
mob-characteristics extend, and what misconduct people will be
guilty of when they feel themselves part of a crowd and relieved of
personal responsibility. At the beginning of that time I was more
or less alone and I soon saw that there was no future in polemics
but that it was equally senseless to lament and to invoke the help
of kindlier spirits, for there were not courts to which such
appeals could be made. So I took another road. I made a first
application of psycho-analysis by explaining to myself that this
behaviour of the crowd was a manifestation of the same resistance
which I had to struggle against in individual patients. I refrained
from polemics myself and influenced my adherents, when little by
little they appeared, in the same direction. This procedure was the
right one. The interdict which lay upon psycho-analysis in those
days has been lifted since then. But, just as an abandoned faith
survives as a superstition, just as a theory which has been given
up by science continues to exist as a popular belief, so the
original outlawing of psycho-analysis by scientific circles
persists to-day in the facetious contempt of the laymen who write
books or make conversation. So this will no longer surprise
you.

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   But you must not expect to hear
the glad tidings that the struggle about analysis is over and has
ended in its recognition as a science and its admission as a
subject for instruction at universities. There is no question of
that. The struggle continues, though in more polite forms. What is
also new is that a sort of buffer-layer has formed in scientific
society between analysis and its opponents. This consists of people
who allow the validity of some portions of analysis and admit as
much, subject to the most entertaining qualifications, but who on
the other hand reject other portions of it, a fact which they
cannot proclaim too loudly. It is not easy to divine what
determines their choice in this. It seems to depend on personal
sympathies. One person will take objection to sexuality, another to
the unconscious; what seems particularly unpopular is the fact of
symbolism. Though the structure of psycho-analysis is unfinished,
it nevertheless presents, even to-day, a unity from which elements
cannot be broken off at the caprice of whoever comes along: but
these eclectics seem to disregard this. I have never had the
impression that these half- or quarter-adherents based their
rejection on an examination of the facts. Some distinguished men,
too, are included in this category. They, to be sure, are excused
by the fact that their time and their interest belong to other
things - to those things, namely, in mastering which they have
achieved so much. But in that case would they not do better to
suspend their judgement instead of taking sides so decisively? With
one of these great men I once succeeded in effecting a rapid
conversion. He was a world-famous critic, who had followed the
spiritual currents of the time with benevolent understanding and
prophetic penetration. I only came to know him when he was past his
eightieth year; but he was still enchanting in his talk. You will
easily guess whom I mean. Nor was it I who introduced the subject
of psycho-analysis. It was he who did so, by comparing himself with
me in the most modest fashion. ‘I am only a literary
man,’ he said, ‘but you are a natural scientist and
discoverer. However, there is one thing I must say to you: I have
never had sexual feelings towards my mother.’ ‘But
there is no need at all for you to have known them,’ was my
reply; ‘to grown-up people those are unconscious
feelings.’ ‘Oh! so
that’s
what you
think!’ he said with relief, and pressed my hand. We went on
talking together on the best of terms for another few hours. I
heard later that in the few remaining years of his life he often
spoke of analysis in a friendly way and was pleased at being able
to use a word that was new to him - ‘repression’.

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   There is a common saying that we
should learn from our enemies. I confess I have never succeeded in
doing so; but I thought all the same that it might be instructive
for you if I undertook a review of all the reproaches and
objections which the opponents of psycho-analysis have raised
against it, and if I went on to point out the injustices and
offences against logic which could so easily be revealed in them.
But ‘on second thoughts’ I told myself that it would
not be at all interesting but would become tedious and distressing
and would be precisely what I have been so carefully avoiding all
these years. So you must forgive me if I pursue this path no
further and if I spare you the judgements of our so-called
scientific opponents. After all it is nearly always a question of
people whose one qualification is the impartiality which they have
preserved by keeping at a distance from the experiences of
psycho-analysis. But I know there are other cases in which you will
not let me off so lightly. ‘Nevertheless’, you will
tell me, ‘there are such a number of people to whom your last
remark does not apply. They have not evaded analytic experience,
they have analysed patients and have perhaps been analysed
themselves; for a time they have even been your collaborators. Yet
they have arrived at other views and theories on the basis of which
they have seceded from you and founded independent schools of
psycho-analysis. You ought to throw some light for us on the
possibility and significance of these secessionist movements which
have been so frequent in the history of analysis.’

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   Well, I will try to do so; but
only in brief, since they contribute less to an understanding of
analysis than you might expect. I feel sure you will be thinking in
the first place of Adler’s ‘Individual
Psychology’, which, in America for instance, is regarded as a
line of thought collateral with our psycho-analysis and on a par
with it and which is regularly mentioned alongside of it. Actually,
Individual Psychology has very little to do with psycho-analysis
but, as a result of certain historical circumstances, leads a kind
of parasitic existence at its expense. The determinants which we
have attributed to this group of opponents apply to the founders of
Individual Psychology only to a limited extent. Its very name is
inappropriate and seems to have been the product of embarrassment.
We cannot allow the legitimate use of the term as an antithesis to
‘group psychology’ to be interfered with; moreover, our
own activity is concerned for the most part and primarily with the
psychology of human individuals. I shall not enter to-day upon an
objective criticism of Adler’s Individual Psychology; there
is no place for it in the plan of these introductory lectures.
Besides, I have already attempted it once, and feel no temptation
to change anything in what I said then. I will, however, illustrate
the impression his views produce by a small episode dating from the
years before analysis.

   In the neighbourhood of the
little Moravian town in which I was born, and which I left when I
was a three-year-old child, there is a modest health-resort,
prettily situated in the woods. During my schooldays I went there
several times in the holidays. Some twenty years later the illness
of a near relative was the occasion for my visiting the place
again. In the course of a conversation with the physician attached
to the spa, who had attended my relative, I enquired among other
things about his relations with the peasants - Slovaks, I believe -
who constituted his whole
clientèle
during the
winter. He told me that his medical practice proceeded as follows.
In his consulting hours the patients came into his room and stood
in a row. One after another stepped forward and described his
complaint: he had backache or pains in his stomach or had tired
legs, and so on. The doctor then examined him and, after satisfying
himself as to what was the matter, called out the diagnosis, which
was the same in every case. He translated the word to me; it meant
approximately ‘bewitched’. I asked in astonishment
whether the peasants made no objection to his verdict being the
same with every patient. ‘Oh, no!’ he replied,
‘they are very pleased with it: it is what they expected.
Each of them, as he went back to his place in the row, showed the
others by looks and gestures that I was a fellow who understood
things.’ Little did I guess at the time in what circumstances
I should come across an analogous situation once again.

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   For, whether a man is a
homosexual or a necrophilic, a hysteric suffering from anxiety, an
obsessional neurotic cut off from society, or a raving lunatic, the
‘Individual Psychologist’ of the Adlerian school will
declare that the impelling motive of his condition is that he
wishes to assert himself, to overcompensate for his inferiority, to
remain ‘on top’, to pass from the feminine to the
masculine line. In my young student days we used to hear something
very much the same in the out-patients’ department when a
case of hysteria was introduced: hysterical patients, we were told,
produce their symptoms to make themselves interesting, to draw
attention to themselves. It is a remarkable thing how these ancient
pieces of wisdom keep on cropping up. But even at that time this
fragment of psychology did not seem to cover the riddle of
hysteria. It left unexplained, for instance, why the patients used
no other methods for attaining their purpose. There must, of
course, be
something
correct in this theory of the
‘Individual Psychologists’: a small particle is taken
for the whole. The self-preservative instinct will try to profit by
every situation; the ego will seek to turn even illness to its
advantage. In psycho-analysis this is known as the ‘secondary
gain from illness’. Though, indeed, when we think of the
facts of masochism, of the unconscious need for punishment and of
neurotic self-injury, which make plausible the hypothesis of there
being instinctual impulses that run contrary to self-preservation,
we even feel shaken in our belief in the general validity of the
commonplace truth on which the theoretical structure of Individual
Psychology is erected. But a theory such as this is bound to be
very welcome to the great mass of the people, a theory which
recognizes no complications, which introduces no new concepts that
are hard to grasp, which knows nothing of the unconscious, which
gets rid at a single blow of the universally oppressive problem of
sexuality and which restricts itself to the discovery of the
artifices by which people seek to make life easy. For the mass of
the people themselves take things easily: they call for no more
than a single reason by way of explanation, they do not thank
science for its diffuseness, they want to have simple solutions and
to know that problems are solved. When we consider how very far
Individual Psychology goes in meeting these demands, we cannot
suppress the recollection of a sentence in
Wallenstein
:

                                               
Wär’ der Gedank’ nicht so verwünscht
gescheidt,

                                               
Man wär’ versucht, ihn herzlich dumm zu
nennen.

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   Criticism from specialist
circles, which is so relentless against psycho-analysis, has in
general handled Individual Psychology with kid gloves. It is true
that in America one of the most highly respected psychiatrists
published a paper against Adler under the title
‘Enough’, in which he gave energetic expression to his
boredom at the ‘compulsion to repeat’ of Individual
Psychology. If others have treated it far more amiably, no doubt
their antagonism to analysis has had much to do with it.

   I need not say much about other
schools which have branched off from our psycho-analysis. The fact
that they have done so cannot be used either for or against the
validity of psycho-analytic theories. You have only to think of the
strong emotional factors that make it hard for many people to fit
themselves in with others or to subordinate themselves, and of the
still greater difficulty justly insisted on by the dictum
‘Quot capita tot sensus’. When the differences of
opinion had gone beyond a certain point, the most sensible thing
was to part and thereafter to proceed along our different ways -
especially when the theoretical divergence involved a change in
practical procedure. Suppose, for instance, that an analyst
attaches little value to the influence of the patient’s
personal past and looks for the causation of neuroses exclusively
in present-day motives and in expectations of the future. In that
case he will also neglect the analysis of childhood; he will have
to adopt an entirely different technique and will have to make up
for the omission of the events from the analysis of childhood by
increasing his didactic influence and by directly indicating
certain particular aims in life. We for our part will then say:
‘This may be a school of wisdom; but it is no longer
analysis.’ Or someone else may arrive at the view that the
experience of anxiety at birth sows the seed of all later neurotic
disturbances. It may thereupon seem to him legitimate to restrict
analysis to the consequences of this single impression and to
promise therapeutic success from a treatment lasting from three to
four months. As you will observe, I have chosen two examples which
start from diametrically opposite premisses. It is an almost
universal characteristic of these ‘secessionist
movements’ that each of them takes hold of one fragment out
of the wealth of themes in psycho-analysis and makes itself
independent on the basis of this seizure - selecting the instinct
for mastery, for instance, or ethical conflict, or the mother, or
genitality, and so on. If it appears to you that secessions of this
sort are already more numerous to-day in the history of
psycho-analysis than in other intellectual movements, I am not sure
that I should agree with you. If it is the case, the responsibility
must be laid on the intimate relations which exist in
psycho-analysis between theoretical views and therapeutic
treatment. Mere differences of opinion would be tolerable for far
longer. People like accusing us psycho-analysts of intolerance. The
only manifestation of this ugly characteristic has been precisely
our parting from those who think differently from us. No other harm
has been done to them. On the contrary, they have fallen on their
feet, and are better off than they were before. For by their
separation they have usually freed themselves of one of the burdens
which weigh us down - the odium of infantile sexuality, perhaps, or
the absurdity of symbolism - and are regarded by their environment
as passably respectable, which is still not true of those of us who
are left behind. Moreover, apart from one notable exception, it was
they who excluded themselves.