The significance of psychoanalysis for the mental sciences

Front matter

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Preface

In the following pages, which take up the applicability and significance of psychoanalysis for the mental sciences, the subject can be treated in only the briefest form : neither its evolution nor the extensive body of facts on which its conclusive force rests, can be considered. The degree, however, in which the particular mental sciences are treated by us bears no relation whatever to the cultural importance of these but only to the number of points of contact with psychoanalysis which have thus far been demonstrated. This is determined on the one hand by the share which the unconscious has in the mental products of humanity, on the other hand, by the comparative youth of our science and further by external and accidental influences.

Thus, our attention was directed principally to the outlook for the future in which the question of method which will be applicable to the stating and solution of the problems seemed the most important. In the endeavor to carry out this principal object, we sought to supplement our study of the individual problems, the elaboration of which we have striven to further in the magazine Imago edited by us under the direction of Professor Freud.

Instead of interrupting the text by particular citations and references to the literature, we refer here once and for all to the fundamental writings of Freud (ten volumes have appeared from F. Deuticke in Vienna and S. Karger in Berlin) as well as to the compilations and periodicals edited under his direction, in which the articles belonging to our subject and the other psychoanalytic literature are to be found.

The Authors

Vienna,

Easter, 1913

Table Of Contents

I. The Unconscious and its Forms of Expression I

II. Investigation of Myths and Legends 27

III. Theory of Religion 67

CHAPTER I The Unconscious and its Forms of Expression

The foundation on which the whole of psychoanalysis rests is the theory of the unconscious. Under this, however, is not to be understood a term derived from abstract thought nor merely an hypothesis created with the aim of establishing a philosophic system ; with the significance, for example, which Eduard von Hartmann has given the word, psychoanalysis possesses no connection at all. The negative peculiarity of the phenomenon appearing in the term, namely, the absence of the quality of consciousness, is indeed the most essential and most characteristic one, but not, however, the only one. We are already familiar with a whole series of positive distinguishing features which differentiate the unconscious psychic material from the rest, the conscious and foreconscious.

An idea which at a given moment belongs to the content of consciousness of an individual, can in the next moment have disappeared; others, emerging later, have appeared in its place. Nevertheless, the idea still retains a permanent relation to the conscious mental life, for it can be brought back again by some kind of connected association chain without the necessity of a new sense perception ; that is to say, in the interim, the idea was removed from the conscious mental life but still remained accessible to the mental processes. Such ideas, which indeed lack the quality of consciousness, the latter being every time recoverable however, we call the foreconscious and distinguish this most explicitly from the real unconscious.

The real unconscious ideas are not, like the foreconscious ideas, temporarily separated from the conscious mental life, but are permanently excluded from it ; the power to reenter consciousness, or stated more exactly, the normal waking consciousness of the subject, these ideas lack completely. As the state of consciousness changes, so also does its condition of receptivity.

After such transformations as are brought about, for example, by the condition known to neurologists as "condition seconde" and also by hypnosis and to a certain extent also by sleep, there becomes accessible to the subject a flood of psychic material, phantasies, memories, wishes, etc., which was until that moment unknown to him. That these products are occasioned by the change in consciousness is with some of these, for example memories, excluded a priori. With others, the conclusion may be reached from observing their effects that they must have been previously present in the unconscious.

In everything which comes to view from the unconscious on such occasions, experience has shown the constant repetition of certain common characteristics. To these characteristics, belong in the first place a world of affect of uncommonly high intensity and further a persistent attempt to encroach on the conscious mental life; this encroachment is explained by the principle that every affect and the idea invested by it has a natural tendency to appropriate as great a part of the mental life as possible as a consequence of those affective forces. If to every state of consciousness, there corresponds a definite condition for the admission or rejection of ideas, then this condition can be imposed and executed by nothing else than an energy acting in psychic affairs which excludes from consciousness the ideas which displease it or represses those ideas already there. The effect of a force is counteracted only by another equally strong or superior force opposed to it ; the psychic processes which we can observe are thus the results of dynamic relations which are to be inferred from them. We have before us the picture of a strict gate- / keeper who slams the door in the faces of uninvited guests. Since an affect which is present exercises not a momentary but a lasting activity, it is also not destroyed by a single repulse. Rather, there must be established a perpetual frontier guard; that is, in other words, a permanent interaction of forces, as a result of which, a certain psychic tension becomes inseparable from our mental life. That energy, the function of which is to protect consciousness from the invasion of the unconscious, we call, according as it appears in aggressive or defensive form, repression or resistance.

We have witnessed a conflict between two psychic forces and must now ask ourselves whence the hostility between these forces arises. To what peculiarities, do the unconscious ideas owe the fact that the quality of consciousness is withheld from them with such stubbornness? Wherein rests their incompatibility with the other psychic forces?

It might at first be open to question whether there are such general characteristics. The exclusion from conscious mental life depends, as we have seen, upon the attitude of consciousness present in such a case and as this attitude varies, the unconscious must likewise change too, quite apart from the individual difference of the content of consciousness conditioned upon differences of experience. On the contrary, we may refer to the fact that the fundamental tendencies belonging to the conscious mental life are as a whole constant and change only slowly and unnoticeably from epoch to epoch. In their conception of the external world, the members of a civilized society hold the essentials in common, no matter whether this conception ultimately centers in a religious, moral or philosophical view of the world. In spite of all the progress in the control of nature, the human race has developed so little in regard to mind during thousands of years that we may consider the whole of civilized humanity and also that of antiquity as a great unit. The important transformations we will become acquainted with in the individual investigations; in the collective picture, these transformations recede, especially if we compare the picture with that of those who stand outside of civilized society. The position of primitive man, of the socalled savage, toward the external world is fundamentally different from ours ; further, in the relation between conscious and unconscious which exists in his mental life, important deviations may be conjectured.

Thus in spite of the great individual variety of the unconscious, it is not arbitrary and lawless but definitely established with regular, constantly recurring characteristics which we must learn to recognize so far as they have already been investigated.

Our first question will naturally concern the origin of the unconscious. Since the unconscious stands completely foreign and unknown to the conscious personality, the first impulse would

V be to deny connection with consciousness in general. This is the manner in which the folk-belief has ever treated it. The bits of the unconscious which were visible in abnormal mental states passed as proof of "being possessed," that is, they were conceived as expressions of a strange individual, of a demon, who had taken possession of the patient. We, who can no longer rely on such supernatural influences, must seek to explain the facts psychologically. The hypothesis that a primary division of the psychic life exists from birth, contradicts the experience of the continual conflict between the two groups of forces, since if the separation were present from the beginning, the danger of a shifting of boundaries would not exist. The only possible assumption, which is further confirmed by experience, is that the separation does not exist a priori but originates only in the course of time. This demarcation of the boundary line must be a process which ends before the complete attainment of the normal level of culture; thus, we may say it begins in earliest childhood and has found a temporary termination about the tjme^of puberty. The unconscious originates in the childhood of man,, which circumstance affords the explanation for most of its pecu-^ k liarities. ty£$($&>kl PX t^JL |vw^«|$&^ ^-V*-^

We recognize in childhood a' forerunner of the age which is ' capable of reason and this of course is a right view in many relations. Besides that part of the mental life which we carry over from childhood into later life, there remains however another part, the real childish, with which we afterwards have nothing more to do and which we therefore forget. Only thus are explained the great discrepancies which every person displays in his childhood memories and these exactly at a time in which he knew quite well how to consider and estimate events. Almost everyone remembers of his earliest years of childhood only isolated details of indifferent scenes while he has totally forgotten those incidents which were the most important at the time. The purely infantile mental powers which are not embodied in the consciousness of the adult cannot however be lost. In psychic affairs as in the physical world, the law of conservation of energy holds good ; the infantile, which was repressed from the conscious mental life, did not disappear but formed the nucleus about which the unconscious mental life crystallized.

In what point does the adult differ so fundamentally from the child that the mental states of those developmental epochs have become quite useless for him? That this point is the sexuality will probably awaken universal contradiction, for sexuality normally begins, we are assured, with puberty and can thus create no typical infantile psychic phenomena.

The fact of normal childish sexuality, among forms of activity of which, only the onanism of the suckling may be mentioned here, is so easily demonstrable by everyone who comes into close contact with children, such as physicians, nurses and parents, that their stubborn denial of this phenomenon cannot be considered as an objective opinion but only as the result of just \ that repression process which will not allow to be brought again | before consciousness the elements of the ego which have become first worthless and then obstructive to its own development. It would be very surprising if so important a source of affect as the instincts belonging to the domain of sexuality, which we class together under the general term " libido," first made their appearance suddenly, upon the attainment of a certain age. As a matter of fact, the libido has been present from the very beginning, only before puberty the phenomena of the instincts belonging to it find outlet neither in the form of sexual expression of the adult nor in a simple unified direction ; rather, each component instinct strives toward its own goal independently of the others ; this aim has no similarity to the later sexual aim, the sexual act.

Also, during childhood, we distinguish different phases of development, but of these, only the most important can be mentioned here. The first phase embraces that period when the child, in its knowledge of the external world, has not yet acquired the conception of its own personality as something differentiated from the world. In this period, the child seeks to gain sexual pleasure on its own body (autoerotism). Besides the genitals, all possible parts of the body are taken into consideration, especially the lip zone, which can be stimulated by "pleasure sucking" and the anal zone which can be stimulated by the retention of fecal masses.

The decisive transition point is formed by a stage which is

O SIGNIFICANCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

normally interposed between the period of autoerotic activity and that of love of an object; out of consideration for the pathological fixation of this transition stage to be observed later, we designate it as " narcissism." Narcissism is characterized by the fact that the libido, which, in contrast to the ego instincts, finds from the very beginning its autoerotic gratification on various parts of the body, having now become unified, has for the time found its object in its own self considered as a whole. In a certain measure, the man is narcissistic even if he has found external objects for his libido; the degree of this attitude is of tremendous significance for the development of the character and personality.

The next phase shows the "love of an object" but this love develops under peculiar conditions. The significance of an exclusively sexual organ comes to the genitals only with the later evolution which concludes with puberty. The exclusive sexual aim of normal, sexually mature persons connected with this sexual evolution does not yet come into consideration ; in its place, there appear according to the instinctive tendencies, various forms of gratification : sexual curiosity and pleasure from undressing, the infliction and endurance of pain, etc. Thus, that condition, which, occuring in unchanged persistence in an adult would constitute a perversion (exhibitionism, peeping, sadism, masochism) forms an expression of the normal sexuality of childhood.

Also, the sexual objects appearing in this second phase of infantilism are essentially different from those of the adult. The relatively minor importance of the genitals for the sexual relation directed toward other persons and the ignorance of the differences in structure and function of the male and female sexual apparatus, render it impossible for the child to take into consideration the distinction of sex in the consummation of his erotic relations. Further, apart from this fact, the child's love is most frequently directed toward those persons who would not be so thought of by mature cultured people, namely, the members of his own family, especially the parents and also the nurses as substitutes for the parents.

He who takes offence at the statement that the first inclinations of a person are regularly incestuous, should be reminded that the childish eroticism, even if it is ever so strong in affect, is accustomed to express itself only with limited aim in the harmless form of affection. For the child growing up in the bosom of the family, other relations of the same intimacy are inconceivable and also for the parents, it has ever been considered the most .beautiful privilege that the first affection of their children should be directed toward them. Soon, the child begins to show a preference for one of the parents and indeed usually, since the attraction of the sexes applies also to the relation between parents and children, for that parent of the opposite sex, by whom it is itself considered with especial tenderness. With the other parent, often also with the brothers and sisters, the child easily comes into a relation of rivalry, since it wishes to share with no one; besides love, there then appears hostility and the fervent wish for the elimination of the rival.

Then, in the period of puberty, the genital zone attains its primacy, the individual instincts lose their independence and arrange themselves for the purpose of attaining the normal sexual aim. Certain ones, as the instinct for mastery in the male, find their gratification in the sexual act itself; others, for example, the instinct for looking (Schautrieb), by affording the forepleasure, serve the purpose of creating the tension which prepares for the sexual act and brings about the end-pleasure. In addition to the renunciation of the isolated gratification of these partial instincts, the erotic inclination toward the members of the family must also be abandoned ; sexuality adapted to a new aim is demanded ; further, another object outside the family must be found, all of which transformations normally come to successful accomplishment after some groping attempts.

Thus, for him who has puberty behind him, sexuality is nothing new ; further, he must also forego some of the hitherto customary modes of gratification, in particular the sexual pleasure derived from his own body as object and the incestuous fixation on his nearest relatives. If one of the component instincts was especially strongly developed, it will not receive sufficient satisfaction under the new regime.

Just as little as the libido appears in the mental life as something new, even so little can it again disappear from the same. Every striving toward the attainment of pleasure is indestructible. The libido can change its form under the influence of internal or external forces but the instinct will constantly be nourished from its old sources. If, under such a change, a gain of pleasure is sacrificed in part or in whole, because in the changed form, the instinct no longer finds adequate possibility for gratification, this instinct nevertheless still continues its existence and with its impetuous demands for the old pleasure, becomes a dangerous enemy of the new order of things.

The result of this relation would be a never-ending conflict; consciousness, which in the service of the control of reality, should be directed toward impressions coming from the external world, might be completely engrossed in the endopsychic perception of this struggle and the psychic economy permanently disturbed. Only the repression of the overpowering forms of gratification of instinct from the visual field of consciousness makes it possible to keep consciousness open for sense perceptions and the mind in equilibrium. The mechanisms employed in this task we shall soon examine.

The phenomena which we have thus far recognized form only the nucleus of the unconscious, not in any way its whole extent. Indeed, in no field is so much renunciation expected of a man in the course of his development as in his sexuality and scarcely anywhere is this renunciation harder to carry through ; in addition, still other wishes left permanently unfulfilled, even though arising from the pure ego instincts, reinforce and interact with this material to form the content of the unconscious. Often we are confronted with the necessity of recognizing an unpleasant reality in which our wishfulfillment finds no place and with the further necessity of making our peace with this stern reality. Now that is a task which the normal person is regularly able to accomplish in his consciousness. But with the appearance of the need to escape an especially painful conflict, the attractive force of that first repression process may work so enticingly that this recent denial finds its solution in the same manner, through repression. With the exception of those cases where the original repression process had not proceeded smoothly, this later repression also succeeds. As a result of failure in this repression, the neurosis makes its appearance. But also with healthy individuals, under the favoring cooperation of the sleeping state, the unfulfilled wishes of the present find connection with those of childhood and from this union arises the structure of the dream. Since every person is not only a dreamer but also in ^ some one part, at least, closely related.to the neurotic, perhaps in the anxiety-affects which he suffers, perhaps only in the production of the little mistakes of daily life, the assumption is justified that the normal individual also removes by repression a part of his mental conflicts, especially those which invite this fate by their resemblance to the conflicts of childhood.

We turn now to that group of forces which cause the repression. One of these forces, we have already recognized, namely, the demand arising from the organic changes occurring before and during puberty, as a result of which, the psychic primacy of the genitals corresponding to the bodily development and the unification of the component instincts directed toward the activity of these organs, became necessary. The weightiest factor, how-, ever, is the demand which the cultural environment imposes on) the growing individual, to which he cannot submit himself with--' out giving up his infantile wish-goals. The repression indicates the measure of the sacrifice which the cultural development of a community enjoins on its members. The means by which the cultural demands make themselves evident to the adolescent are manifold. By far the most important is the influence of the objects of the infantile love-choice, the education by the parents or their representatives.

Here must be mentioned some of the instinct-mechanisms by which the successful division between conscious and unconscious is first rendered possible. Where love and hate, both directed toward the same object, are opposed to each other, the weaker one must sink into the unconscious. This ambivalent relation may also be shown with certain instincts which are composed of a pair of component opposites (for example, sadism and masochism). Since the two contrary instincts cannot exist side by side, the stronger assumes the initiative and crowds the weaker into the unconscious.

In all cases, the effect of the ambivalence is to cause the victorious member, in order to assure its supremacy, to show an unusual intensity in the conscious mental life (reaction formation) ; to this reaction formation the instinct under subjection also affords a contribution of energy since the possibility of direct expression was taken from it by the repression. Still more important for the purposes of civilization is the ability of many instincts to change their modes of gratification by accepting another aim for winning of pleasure in place of the one previously enjoyed; the two modes of gratification must be similar and between the old and new aims there must be an associative connection. In this way, it is possible to divert at least a portion of the gross sexual instincts of the child to higher cultural aims (sublimation). The portion not divertible, so far as it may not be directly gratified, falls under the repression.

Because certain desires are repressed, it does not follow that a wish which is unconscious and cut off from direct affect-expression, can develop no further activity; on the contrary, the repressed wish exercises a determining influence on the most important processes of the mental life as far as this is possible during the condition of being excluded from consciousness. In this matter, there are two points which need a further elucidation : first, by what mechanisms does the unconscious succeed in becoming active without offending against the condition imposed by the repression? Second, in what psychical products do unconscious processes or those which are directed by the unconscious, have an especially large share?

The mechanisms by which the repressed instinctive impulses and unconscious wishes succeed in breaking through the repression and influencing the actions and thought of the civilized man in his relation to reality serve collectively, as the nature of the conflict with the unconscious demands, for the distortion of the unconscious and its compromise with consciousness. This distortion becomes developed to various degrees according to the stage of repression, the mental status of the individual and the degree of civilization of the race; in short, corresponding to the prevailing relation of consciousness to the unconscious ; while this conflict between consciousness and the unconscious is going

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND ITS FORMS OF EXPRESSION II

on, it produces various valuable compromise products in social relations. As psychoanalysis learns to consider the ideational life, in general, as counterplay of the instinctive life, so the individual mental mechanisms of distortion and compromise formation correspond to the different possibilities of the fate of instinct ; among these possible results, we recognize besides the repression, still others, especially tranformations of instincts (such as the inversion into the opposite). We have now to devote special attention to those processes which, unlike the repression, do not find an end with the banishment into the unconscious, but send substitute structures into consciousness which are derived from the original sources of affect. This fate may befall both the instinct in question and its sublimated representative. For example, we recognize in the mental field the mechanism of biased projection, by means of which an inner, unbearable perception is projected outward; another example is the mechanism of "splitting into parts" (dissociation) which separates into the constituent parts the elements usually united in the unconscious, especially contradictions (of ambivalence, contrary meaning, etc.) ; this mechanism of splitting makes contrasts in order to render possible the conscious acceptation of the separate impulses which have become unbearable to one another. On the other hand, we have what you might call the introacting mechanisms of the real repression and the condensation (contamination) which seek to save or blend the elements which have become unbearable to consciousness, especially contrasts. Finally, there corresponds to the inversion of instinct, the representation by the opposite, in which a shocking unconscious element is usually represented by its opposite excessively emphasized in consciousness. Other mechanisms exercise a distorting and compromise-forming influence by the inversion of affect, by the displacement of the affect from the important to the non-essential, and lastly by the shifting of sensations or the perception of these from shocking to innocent places (displacement from below upward) .

While the mechanisms named, even if acting under the biased, distorting compulsion of the conscious censor, nevertheless, work according to their own laws which are inherent in the unconscious because of its close relation to the instinctive life, still there are other influences, proceeding from the logical and formal demands of consciousness, which compel still further modifications of the unconscious material. In this group belongs, first of all, the so-called secondary elaboration of the dream, which seeks to adapt to the demands of the fully conscious psychic judgment the unconscious material which is in certain parts too much distorted, in other parts too little distorted, and therefore at first, unintelligible, defective or too shocking. In this over-elaboration and arrangement, isolated elements of the unconscious, which are no longer intelligible, are afterwards given a logical motive in favor of the connection striven after; in the course of development, these elements often, indeed usually, receive a new, as one might say, systematized sense. This kind of secondary elaboration, namely, the mechanism of rationalization or systematization proceeding from consciousness, which is of far reaching importance for the origin of the psychoanalytic understanding, especially of the great achievements of civilization, represents an appropriate supplement to the mechanisms of the unconscious by arranging and elaborating the biased, distorted unconscious contributions of the phantasy and mental activity to new, useful connections. The knowledge of this process (rationalization) and the possibility of its reduction to the impelling forces of the unconscious, permit psychoanalysis to hold fast to the principle of over-determination of all psychic phenomena, so far as the unconscious shares in them, even where a logical, satisfactory meaning and a fully conscious understanding seems to render any further explanation of a phenomenon superfluous and excluded. So little, however, as the knowledge of the conscious part in itself alone, affords the full understanding of a mental performance, even so little may the consideration of the unconscious motives by themselves alone exhaust the full significance ; still, the unconscious motives alone render intelligible the genesis of the mental production and also the process of rationalization itself in its relation to the denial of the repressed material.

A further, formal factor, to which the unconscious must conform in its sometime entrance into consciousness, is the attempt at dramatic form which appears in the culturally valuable perf ormances, especially the artistic ones, not less plainly than in the dream life. It is conceivable without further discussion, that the material in which an unconscious impulse manifests itself, must not only influence the definite form but also the content in a certain sense, that thus, for example, the poet must bring the same feeling to expression differently from the painter; the philosopher, the same thoughts differently from the writer of myths. And further, the temporary state of mind will make itself evident in the representation so that the inspired religious writer will afford different expression to the same emotions than the matterof-fact expositor; and the lunatic represent the same impulse differently from the dreamer.

A final means of expression of the repressed material, which, on account of its especial suitability for disguising the unconscious material and its adaptability (compromise formation) to new contents of consciousness, finds great favor, is the symbol. We understand under this term, a special kind of indirect representation which is distinguished by certain peculiarities from the closely related figures of speech, such as simile, metaphor, allegory, allusion and other forms of pictorial representation of thought material (after. the manner of the rebus). In a measure, the symbol represents an ideal union of all these means of expression : it is a representative pictorial substitute expression for something hidden, with which it has perceptible characteristics in common or is associatively joined by internal connections. Its essence consists in the possession of two or more meanings, as it has itself also arisen by a kind of condensation, an amalgamation of individual characteristic elements. The tendency of the symbol from the ideal toward the evident puts it close to primitive thought ; by this relationship, symbolization belongs essentially to the unconscious but, as compromise formation, lacks in no way the conscious determinants which condition in various degrees symbol formation and symbol interpretation.