(_c_) From certain of my remarks you will have gathered that there are many characteristics in the analytic method which prevent it from being an ideal form of therapy. _Tuto, cito, jucunde_: investigation and probing do not indicate speedy results, and the resistance already mentioned would prepare you to expect unpleasantness in various ways. Psycho-analytic treatment certainly makes great demands upon the patient as well as upon the physician. From the patient it requires perfect sincerity---a sacrifice in itself; it absorbs time and is therefore also costly; for the physician it is no less time-absorbing, and the technique which he must study and practise is fairly laborious. I consider it quite justifiable to resort to more convenient methods of healing as long as there is any prospect of attaining anything by their means. That, after all, is the only point at issue. If the more difficult and lengthy method accomplishes considerably more than the short and easy one, then, in spite of everything, the use of the former has its justification. Just consider how much more inconvenient and costly is the Finsen therapy of lupus than the method of cauterizing and scraping previously employed; and yet the use of the former signifies a considerable advance, for it performs a radical cure. Although I do not wish to carry this comparison to all lengths, the psycho-analytic method may claim a similar privilege. Actually, I have been able to elaborate and to test {257} my therapeutic method only on severe, nay, the severest cases; at first my material consisted entirely of patients who had tried everything else without success, and had spent long years in sanatoria. I have scarcely been able to bring together sufficient material to enable me to say how my method would work with those cases of lighter, episodically appearing invalidism which we see recover under all kinds of influences and even spontaneously. Psycho-analytic therapy was created through and for the treatment of patients permanently unfitted for life, and its great triumph has been that by its measures a satisfactorily large number of these have been rendered permanently fit for existence. In the face of such an achievement all the effort expended seems trivial. We cannot conceal from ourselves what, as physicians, we are in the habit of denying to our patients, namely, that a severe neurosis is no less serious for the sufferer than any cachexia, any of the dreaded major diseases.

(_d_) The conditions under which this method is indicated, or contra-indicated, can scarcely be definitely laid down as yet, because of the many limitations to which the scope of my activities have been subjected in practice. Nevertheless, I will attempt to discuss a few of them here:

1. It is important that the morbid condition of the patient should not be allowed to blind one in making an estimate of his whole personality; those patients who do not possess a reasonable degree of education and a fairly reliable character should be refused. It must not be forgotten that there are healthy persons as well as unhealthy ones who are good for nothing in life, and that there is much too prompt an inclination to ascribe to their malady everything which {258} makes such people unfit, if they show the slightest symptoms of a neurosis. In my opinion a neurosis is by no means a stamp of degeneracy, though it may often enough be found in one person in conjunction with the manifestations of degeneration. Now analytic psychotherapy is not a process suited to the treatment of neuropathic degeneration; on the contrary, degeneracy acts as a hindrance to its effectiveness. Nor is the method applicable to any who are not urged to seek a cure by their own sufferings, but who undergo treatment only because they are forced into it by the authority of relatives. The qualification which is the determining factor of fitness for psycho-analytic treatment---that is, whether the patient is educable---must be discussed from yet another standpoint.

2. To be quite safe, one should limit one's choice of patients to those who possess a normal mental condition, since in the psycho-analytic method this is used as a foothold from which to obtain control of the morbid manifestations. Psychoses, states of confusion and deeply-rooted (I might say toxic) depression are therefore not suitable for psycho-analysis; at least not for the method as it has been practised up to the present. I do not regard it as by any means impossible that by suitable changes in the method we may succeed in advancing beyond these hindrances---and so be able to initiate a psychotherapy of the psychoses.

3. The age of patients has this importance in determining their fitness for psycho-analytic treatment, that, on the one hand, near or above the fifties the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking---old people are no longer educable---and, on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment indefinitely. In the {259} other direction the age limit can be determined only individually; youthful persons, even under the age of adolescence, are often exceedingly amenable to influence.

4. Psycho-analysis should not be attempted when the speedy removal of dangerous symptoms is required, as for example, in a case of hysterical anorexia.

By this time you will have received the impression that the field of analytic psychotherapy is a very narrow one, since you have really heard nothing from me except the indications which point against it. There remain, however, cases and types of disease enough on which this therapy may be tested, as for instance, all chronic forms of hysteria with residual manifestations, the broad field of obsessive conditions, aboulias, and the like.

It is gratifying that precisely the most valuable and most highly developed persons are best suited for these curative measures; and one may also safely claim that in cases where analytic psychotherapy can achieve but little, any other therapy would certainly not have been able to effect anything.

(_e_) You will no doubt wish to enquire about the possibility of doing harm by undertaking a psycho-analysis. In reply to this I may say that if you are willing to judge impartially, if you will consider this procedure in the same spirit of critical fairness that you show to our other therapeutic methods, you will have to agree with me that no injury to the patient is to be feared when the treatment is conducted with real comprehension. Anyone who is accustomed, like the lay public, to blame the treatment for whatever happens during an illness will doubtless judge differently. It is not so very long ago since the {260} same prejudice was directed against our hydropathic establishments. Many a patient who was advised to go into an establishment of the kind hesitated because he had known someone who had entered the place as a nervous invalid and had become insane there. As you will imagine, these were cases of early general paralysis that could still in the first stage be sent to a hydropathic establishment; once there, they had run their inevitable course until manifest mental derangement supervened: but the public blamed the water as the originator of this disastrous change. When it is a matter of new kinds of therapeutic influence even physicians are not always free from such errors of judgement. I recall once making an attempt at psychotherapy with a woman who had passed the greater part of her life in a state alternating between mania and melancholia. I took on the case at the close of a period of melancholia and for two weeks things seemed to go smoothly; in the third week we were already at the beginning of the next attack of mania. This was undoubtedly a spontaneous transformation of the symptoms, since in two weeks analytic psychotherapy cannot accomplish anything. And yet the eminent physician (now deceased) who saw the case with me could not refrain from the remark that psychotherapy was probably to blame for this 'relapse'. I am quite convinced that he would have shown himself possessed of more critical judgement in other circumstances.

(_f_) Finally, I must confess that it is hardly fair to take up your attention for so long on the subject of psycho-analytic therapy without telling you in what this treatment consists and on what it is based. Still, as I am forced to be brief, I can only hint at this. This therapy, then, is based on the recognition that unconscious {261} ideas---or better, the unconsciousness of certain mental processes---constitutes the direct cause of the morbid symptoms. We hold this opinion in common with the French school (Janet) which, by the way, owing to too crude a schematization, refers the cause of hysterical symptoms to an unconscious _idée fixe_. Now please do not be afraid that this is going to land us in the depths of philosophical obscurities. Our unconscious is not quite the same thing as that of philosophers and, moreover, the majority of philosophers decline all knowledge of 'unconscious mentality'. If, however, you will look at the matter from our point of view, you will understand that the transformation of this unconscious material in the mind of the patient into conscious material must have the result of correcting his deviation from normality and of lifting the compulsion to which his mind has been subjected. For conscious will-power governs only the conscious mental processes, and every mental compulsion is rooted in the unconscious. Nor need you ever fear that the patient will be harmed by the shock accompanying the introduction of the unconscious into consciousness, for you can convince yourselves theoretically that the somatic and emotional effect of an impulse that has become conscious can never be so powerful as that of an unconscious one. It is only by the application of our highest mental energies, which are bound up with consciousness, that we can command all our impulses.

There is, however, another point of view which you may take up in order to understand the psycho-analytic method. The discovery of the unconscious and the introduction of it into consciousness is performed in the face of a continuous _resistance_ on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is {262} associated with 'pain' (_Unlust_), and because of this pain the patient again and again rejects it. It is for you then to interpose in this conflict in the patient's mental life. If you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected (repressed), you will then have accomplished something towards his education. For it is an education even to induce a person who dislikes leaving his bed early in the morning to do so all the same. Psycho-analytic treatment may in general be conceived of as such a _re-education in overcoming internal resistances_. Re-education of this kind is, however, in no respect more necessary to nervous patients than in regard to the mental element in their sexual life. For nowhere else have civilization and education done so much harm as in this field, and this is the point, as experience will show you, at which to look for those ætiologies of the neuroses that are amenable to influence; since the other ætiological factor, the constitutional component, consists of something fixed and unalterable. And from this it comes that one important qualification is required of the physician in this work: not only must his own character be irreproachable---'As to morals, that goes without saying', as the hero of Vischer's novel _Auch Einer_ was wont to say---but he must also have overcome in his own mind that mixture of lewdness and prudery with which, unfortunately, so many people habitually consider sexual problems.

At this juncture another remark is perhaps not out of place. I know that the emphasis which I lay upon the part played by sexuality in creating the psychoneuroses has become generally known. But I know, {263} likewise, that qualifications and exact particularization are of little use to the general public; there is very little room in the memory of the multitude; it really only retains an undigested kernel of any proposition and fabricates an extreme version which is easy to remember. It may be that this has happened with many physicians, too, so that they vaguely apprehend the content of my doctrine to be that I regard sexual privation as the ultimate cause of the neuroses. In the conditions of life in modern society there is certainly no lack of sexual privation. This being so, would it not be simpler to aim directly at recovery by recommending the satisfaction of sexual needs as a therapeutic measure, instead of undertaking the circuitous path of mental treatment? I know of nothing which could impel me to suppress such an inference if it were justified. The real state of things, however, is otherwise. Sexual need and privation are merely one factor at work in the mechanism of neurosis; if there were no others the result would be dissipation, not disease. The other, no less essential, factor, which is all too readily forgotten, is the neurotic's aversion from sexuality, his incapacity for loving, that feature of the mind which I have called 'repression'. Not until there is a conflict between the two tendencies does nervous illness break out, and therefore to counsel the active gratification of sexual needs in the psychoneuroses can only very rarely be described as good advice.

Let me conclude with the following defensive remark. We will hope that, when freed from every prejudice, your interest in psychotherapy may lend us support in this way---that you also will then achieve success even with severe cases of psychoneurosis.

XIII {264} FREUD'S PSYCHO-ANALYTIC METHOD[56] (1904)

The particular method of psychotherapy which Freud practises and terms psycho-analysis is an outgrowth of the so-called cathartic treatment discussed by him in collaboration with J. Breuer in the _Studien über Hysterie_, published in 1895. This cathartic therapy was Breuer's invention and was first employed by him when treating an hysterical patient about ten years before; in so doing he had obtained an insight into the pathogenesis of her symptoms. At the personal suggestion of Breuer, Freud revived this method and tried it with a large number of patients.

The cathartic mode of treatment presupposed that the patient could be hypnotised and was based on the widening of consciousness which occurs in hypnosis. Its goal was to remove the morbid symptoms, and it attained this end by making the patient revert to the psychic state in which the symptom had appeared for the first time. In this state there came up in the hypnotised patient's mind memories, thoughts and impulses which had previously dropped out of his consciousness, and, as soon as he had related these to the physician, accompanying this expression with intense emotion, the symptom was overcome and its return done away with. This experience, which could regularly be made, was taken by the authors in their joint paper to signify that {265} the symptom represents suppressed processes which had not reached consciousness, that is, that it represents a transformation ('conversion') of these processes. They explained the therapeutic effectiveness of their treatment by the discharge of the previously 'strangulated' affect attaching to the suppressed mental acts ('abreaction'). But in practice the simple outline of the therapeutic operation was almost always complicated by the circumstance that it was not a single ('traumatic') impression, but in most cases a series of impressions---to be viewed in its entirety only with difficulty---which had participated in the creation of the symptom.

The main characteristic of the cathartic method, in contrast to all other methods used in psychotherapy, consists in the fact that its therapeutic efficacy does not lie in the suggestive prohibitive command of the physician. The expectation is rather that the symptoms will disappear automatically as soon as the operation, based on certain hypotheses concerning the psychic mechanism, succeeds in diverting the course of mental processes from the direction which previously had found an outlet in the formation of the symptom.

The changes which Freud introduced in Breuer's cathartic method of treatment were at first changes in technique; these, however, brought about new results and have finally necessitated a different though not contradictory conception of the therapeutic task.

The cathartic method had already renounced suggestion; Freud went one step further and gave up hypnosis as well. At the present time he treats his patients as follows: without exerting any other kind of influence he invites them to recline in a comfortable position on a {266} couch, while he himself is seated on a chair behind them outside their field of vision. He does not ask them to close their eyes, and avoids touching them as well as any other form of procedure which might remind them of hypnosis. The consultation thus proceeds like a conversation between two equally wakeful persons, one of whom is spared every muscular exertion and every distracting sensory impression which might draw his attention from his own mental activity.

Since it depends upon the will of the patient whether he is to be hypnotised or not, no matter what the skill of the physician may be, and since a large number of neurotic patients cannot be hypnotised by any means whatever, it followed that with the abandonment of hypnosis the applicability of the treatment was assured to an unlimited number of patients. On the other hand, the widening of consciousness, which had supplied the physician with just that psychic material of memories and images by the help of which the transformation of the symptoms and the liberation of the affects was accomplished, was now missing. Unless a substitute could be found for this missing element all therapeutic effect was out of the question.

Freud now found an entirely adequate substitute in the 'associations' of the patients; that is, in the involuntary thoughts most frequently regarded as disturbing elements and therefore ordinarily pushed aside whenever they cross an intention of following a definite train of thought.

In order to secure these ideas and associations he asks the patient to 'let himself go' in what he says, 'as you would do in a conversation which leads you "from cabbages to kings".' Before he asks them for a detailed account of their case-history he admonishes them to relate {267} everything that passes through their minds, even if they think it unimportant or irrelevant or nonsensical; he lays special stress on their not omitting any thought or idea from their story because to relate it might be embarrassing or painful to them. In the task of collecting this material of otherwise neglected ideas Freud made the observations which became the determining factors of his entire theory. There were gaps in the patient's memory even in narrating his case: actual occurrences were forgotten, the chronological order was confused, or causal connections of events were broken, yielding unintelligible effects. No neurotic case-history is without amnesia of some kind or other. If the patient is urged to fill these gaps in his memory by serious application of his attention it is noticed that all the ideas which occur to him are pushed back by him with all critical means available, until at last he feels actual discomfort when the memory has really returned. From this experience Freud concludes that the amnesias are the result of a process which he calls _repression_ and the motivation of which he finds in feelings of 'pain' (_Unlust_). The psychical forces which have brought about this repression are traceable, according to him, to the _resistance_ which operates against the reintegration of these memories.

The factor of resistance has become one of the cornerstones of his theory. The ideas otherwise pushed aside with all kinds of excuses---as those mentioned above---he regards as derivatives of the repressed psychical manifestations (thoughts and impulses), as distortions of these because of the resistance which is exerted against their reproduction.

The greater the resistance, the greater is the distortion. The value for the therapeutic technique of these unintentional thoughts lies in {268} their relation to the repressed psychical material. If one possesses a procedure which makes it possible to arrive at the repressed from the associations, at the distorted material from the distortions, then what was formerly unconscious in mental life may be made accessible to consciousness even without hypnosis.

Freud has developed on this basis an art of interpretation which takes on the task of freeing, as it were, the pure metal of the repressed thoughts from the ore of the unintentional ideas. The objects of this work of interpretation are not only the patient's ideas but also his dreams, which open up the straightest road to the knowledge of the unconscious, his unintentional as well as his purposeless actions (symptomatic acts) and the blunders he makes in every-day life (slips of the tongue, erroneous acts, and the like). The details of this technique of interpretation or translation have not yet been published by Freud. According to the hints he has given they comprise a number of rules, reached empirically, of how the unconscious material may be reconstructed from the associations, directions how to interpret the fact when the patient's ideas cease to flow, and experience concerning the most important typical resistances that arise in the course of such a treatment. A bulky volume called _Die Traumdeutung_, published by Freud in 1900, may be regarded as the forerunner of an initiation into his technique.

From these remarks concerning the technique of the psycho-analytic method the conclusion could be drawn that its inventor has given himself needless trouble and has made a mistake in abandoning the less complicated hypnotic mode of procedure. However, in the first place, the technique of psycho-analysis is much easier in practice once one has learnt it than any description of it would indicate, and secondly, {269} there is no other way which leads to the desired goal, so the hard road is still the shortest one to travel. The objection to hypnosis is that it conceals the resistance and for this reason has obstructed the physician's insight into the play of psychic forces. Hypnosis does not do away with the resistance but only avoids it and therefore yields only incomplete information and transitory therapeutic success.

The task which the psycho-analytic method tries to perform may be formulated in different ways, which are, however, in their essence equivalent. It may, for instance, be stated thus: the task of the cure is to remove the amnesias. When all gaps in memory have been filled in, all the enigmatic products of mental life elucidated, the continuance and even the renewal of the morbid condition is impossible. Or the formula may be expressed in this fashion: all repressions are to be undone; the mental condition is then the same as if all amnesias are removed. Another formulation reaches further; the problem consists in making the unconscious accessible to consciousness, which is done by overcoming the resistances. But it must be remembered that such an ideal condition is not present even in the normal and further that it is only rarely possible to carry the treatment to a point approaching this condition. Just as health and sickness are not qualitatively different from each other but are only gradually separated in an empirically determined way, so the aim of the treatment will never be anything else but the practical recovery of the patient, the restoration of his ability and capacity for enjoyment and an active life. In a cure which is incomplete or in which success is not perfect, one at any rate achieves a considerable {270} improvement in the general mental condition, while the symptoms (though now of smaller importance to the patient) may continue to exist without stamping him as an invalid.

The therapeutic process remains the same, apart from insignificant modifications, for all the symptom-formations of the varied manifestations of hysteria, and all forms of the obsessional neurosis. This does not imply, however, that there can be an unlimited application of this method. The nature of the psycho-analytic method involves indications and contraindications with respect to the person to be treated as well as with respect to the clinical picture. Chronic cases of psychoneuroses with few violent or dangerous symptoms are the most favourable ones for psycho-analysis: so in the first place all forms of the obsessional neurosis, obsessive thinking and acting, and cases of hysteria in which phobias and aboulias play the most important part; further, all somatic expressions of hysteria whenever they do not, as in anorexia, require the physician to attend promptly to the speedy removal of symptoms. In acute cases of hysteria it will be necessary to await a calmer stage; in all cases where nervous exhaustion dominates the clinical picture a treatment which in itself demands effort, brings only slow improvement and for a time cannot consider the persistence of the symptoms, is to be avoided.

Various qualifications are demanded in the person if he is to be beneficially affected by psycho-analysis. To begin with, he must be capable of a psychically normal condition; during periods of confusion or melancholic depression nothing can be accomplished even in cases of hysteria. Furthermore, a certain measure of natural intelligence and ethical development may be required of him; with worthless persons the physician soon loses the interest which makes it possible for him to {271} enter profoundly into the mental life of the patient. Deep-rooted malformations of character, traits of an actually degenerative constitution show themselves during treatment as sources of a resistance that can scarcely be overcome. In this respect the constitution of the patient does in fact set a limit to the curative effect of psychotherapy. If the patient's age is near or above the fifties the conditions for psycho-analysis become unfavourable. The mass of psychical material can then no longer be thoroughly inspected; the time required for recovery is too long; and the ability to undo psychic processes begins to grow weaker.

In spite of all limitations the number of persons suitable for psycho-analytic treatment is extraordinarily large and the extension which has come to our therapeutic knowledge from this method is, according to Freud, very considerable. Freud requires long periods, six months to three years, for an effective treatment; yet he informs us that up to the present, from various circumstances which may easily be divined, he has for the most part been in a position to try his treatment only on very severe cases; patients have come to him after many years of illness, completely incapacitated for life, and after being disappointed by all kinds of treatments have had recourse to his new and much-suspected method as to a last resort. In cases of less severe illness the duration of the treatment might well be much shorter, and momentous advantage in the way of prevention for the future might be gained.

XIV {272} MY VIEWS ON THE PART PLAYED BY SEXUALITY IN THE ÆTIOLOGY OF THE NEUROSES[57] (1905)

I am of opinion that the best idea of my theory concerning the ætiological significance of the sexual factor in neurosis is obtained by examining its evolution. For I have no sort of wish to deny that this theory has passed through a process of development and has undergone a transformation during this process. My colleagues could regard this admission as evidence that the doctrine is nothing but the result of continued and constantly extended experience; for anything that arises from speculation may very easily appear once for all complete in form and then remain unalterable.

The theory originally applied merely to the morbid states embraced under the term neurasthenia; among these, I noticed two which occasionally appeared in a pure form and which I have named 'neurasthenia proper' and 'anxiety-neurosis'. It was indeed always a matter of general knowledge that sexual factors may play a part in the causation of these forms of disease, but neither were these factors found to be regularly active nor was there any thought of allotting them a preferential position among other ætiological influences. I was surprised to begin with at the frequency of grave disturbances in the _vita sexualis_ of nervous invalids; the more I enquired into such {273} disturbances (bearing in mind that all men conceal the truth in these matters) and the more adept I became at persisting in my interrogations in spite of denials at the beginning, the more regularly did pathogenic factors from sexual life disclose themselves, until there seemed to me little to prevent an assumption of their general occurrence. Nevertheless, it was necessary to be prepared at the outset for a frequent incidence of sexual irregularities such as this, in view of the pressure of present-day social conditions, and one might still be doubtful what degree of deviation from normal sexual functioning was to be regarded as pathogenic. I therefore could attribute less importance to the regular, demonstrable appearance of sexual noxiæ than to another observed phenomenon which seemed to me less ambiguous in character. It appeared that each type of ailment, whether neurasthenia or anxiety-neurosis, showed a constant relation to the type of sexual noxia. In typical cases of neurasthenia evidence of masturbation or frequent pollutions would come to light; in anxiety-neurosis, factors such as coitus interruptus and 'frustrated excitation' could be shown which appeared to contain one common element, namely, an unsatisfying discharge of the libido aroused. Only after this recognition, which was easily observed and could at will be frequently confirmed, had I the courage to accord a preferential position to sexual influences in the ætiology of the neuroses. In addition, a combination of the ætiologies ascribed to these manifestations was discoverable in the cases of combined neurasthenia and anxiety-neurosis which often occur; and it appeared that such a dualism in the manifestations of neurosis accorded well with the polar character of sexuality, male and female. {274}

At the time that I attributed to sexuality this part in the creation of simple neuroses[58] I still adhered as regards the psychoneuroses (hysteria and obsessions) to a purely psychological doctrine in which sexual factors had no more significance than other sources of emotion. In conjunction with J. Breuer, and based upon observations made by him at least a decade before on an hysterical patient, I had studied, by means of awakening memories in hypnotic states, the mechanism of the origin of hysterical symptoms. We had reached inferences which helped to bridge the gap between Charcot's traumatic hysteria and the common, non-traumatic hysteria.[59] We had arrived at the conception that the symptoms of hysteria were lasting effects of psychic traumas, whose sum of affect had by peculiar circumstances been prevented from being worked off in consciousness and had therefore forced an abnormal outlet into bodily innervation. The terms 'strangulated affect', 'conversion' and 'abreaction' embrace the distinctive points of this conception.

In view of the close relation of the psychoneuroses to the simple neuroses, which can go so far that an unpractised physician often finds it difficult to make a diagnostic distinction, it became inevitable that the knowledge acquired in one field would throw light as well on the other. Moreover, quite apart from such a correlation, closer examination of the psychical mechanism of hysterical symptoms led to the same result. For, as the psychical traumas which were the starting-point of the hysterical symptoms were followed---by means of the cathartic method initiated by Breuer and myself---further and further back into the patient's past, experiences were finally reached {275} which belonged to his infancy and concerned his sexual life; and this was so even where an ordinary emotion, not of a sexual kind, had led to the outbreak of the disease. Without taking into account these sexual traumas of childhood it was impossible to explain the symptoms, comprehend their determination, or prevent their return. After this, the unique significance of sexual experiences in the ætiology of the psychoneuroses seemed incontestably established; and this fact remains to-day one of the cornerstones of the theory.

When this theory is described in the statement that the cause of a life-long hysterical neurosis lies in sexual experiences of infancy, usually commonplace in themselves, it may indeed sound strange enough. Yet if allowance is made for the historical development of the theory, if its main content be summarised in the thesis that hysteria is the expression of a peculiar behaviour of the sexual function in the person concerned and that this behaviour is already decisively determined by the first impressive influences and experiences during infancy, we shall indeed be the poorer by a paradox, yet the richer by a motive for directing our attention to these most significant after-effects of infantile impressions which have hitherto been so grossly neglected.

Reserving for a later, more detailed discussion the question whether the ætiology of hysteria and the obsessional neurosis is to be regarded as contained in the sexual experiences of childhood, I will return to the form the theory assumed in some short preliminary papers published in the years 1895 and 1896[60]. By emphasizing the ætiological factors already inferred, it was possible at that time to contrast the common neuroses, which had a current ætiology, with the {276} psychoneuroses, the ætiology of which lay particularly in sexual experiences of the remote past. The doctrine culminated in the sentence: No neurosis is possible with a normal _vita sexualis_.

Although even to-day I do not regard these statements as incorrect, it is surely not surprising that during ten years of constant work towards elucidation of these problems I should have travelled some distance beyond my previous point of view and now believe that further more extensive experience has placed me in a position to correct the incompleteness, the displacements and the misconceptions under which the theory then laboured. It happened by chance that my earlier, not very plentiful material contained a disproportionately large number of cases in whose infantile history seduction by adults or other older children had played the chief part. I overestimated the frequency of these occurrences, which are otherwise quite authentic, and all the more so since I was not at this period able to discriminate between the deceptive memories of hysterics concerning their childhood and the memory-traces of actual happenings. I have since learned to unravel many a phantasy of seduction and found it to be an attempt at defence against the memory of sexual activities practised by the child himself (masturbation of children). This explanation deprived the 'traumatic' element in the sexual experiences of childhood of their importance, and there remained a recognition that the form of the infantile sexual activity (whether spontaneous or provoked) determines the direction taken by later sexual life after maturity. This same explanation, by which I was able to correct the most momentous of my early errors, necessitated a change in the conception of the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. These now no longer appeared as direct derivations of {277} repressed memories of sexual experiences in childhood; but, on the contrary, it appeared that between the symptoms and the infantile impressions were interpolated the patient's phantasies (memory-romances), created mostly during the years of adolescence and relating on one side to the infantile memories on which they were founded, and on the other side to the symptoms into which they were directly transformed. Only after the factor of the hysterical phantasies had been introduced did the structure of the neurosis and its relation to the patient's life become perspicuous; at the same time a really surprising analogy came to light between these unconscious phantasies of hysterics and the romances which become conscious as delusions in paranoia.

After this correction, the 'infantile sexual traumas' were in a sense supplanted by the 'infantilism' of the sexuality in these cases. It was not a far step to a second modification of the original theory. When the frequency of seduction in childhood was no longer assumed, there vanished also the overemphasis on the 'accidental', external influencing of the sexuality to which I had attributed the chief part in the causation of the disease, without, however, denying the existence of constitutional and hereditary elements. In connection with the details of the various sexual experiences of childhood, I had even hoped to solve the problem of the 'choice of neurosis', that is, to ascertain what form of psychoneurosis would develop from each type of experience; I believed at that time, though with some reservations, that passivity in such experiences produced a specific predisposition to hysteria, and activity to obsessional neurosis. These views I was later compelled to abandon entirely, although many actual facts seem {278} to suggest that the supposed correlation between passivity and hysteria and activity and the obsessional neurosis should be retained in some form or other. With the decline in importance of the influences experienced accidentally the constitutional and hereditary elements again won the upper hand; with this difference, however, from prevailing opinion, that in my conception the 'sexual constitution' took the place of a general neuropathic disposition. In my recently published _Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_ (1905) I have attempted to describe the many aspects and varieties of this sexual constitution, as well as the composite nature of the sexual instinct as a whole and its origin from various contributory sources in the organism.

While still maintaining the modifications imposed by the altered conception of the 'infantile sexual traumas', the theory now advanced in a direction which had already been indicated in the publications of the years 1894--96. Already at that time, and even before sexuality had been accorded its proper position in the ætiology, I had put it forward as a condition of the pathogenic effectiveness of a given experience that it must seem to the ego intolerable and must evoke an effort towards defence[61]. To this defence I had referred the mental dissociation---or as it was then called, the dissociation of consciousness---of hysteria. If the defence succeeded, then the unbearable experience and its affective consequences were banished from consciousness and from the memory of the ego; but under certain conditions the banished material---now become unconscious---became operative and returned into consciousness by way of the symptoms and the affects attached to them, so that the outbreak of the disease represented a failure of the defence. This conception had the merit of {279} taking into account the interplay of the mental forces, thereby bringing the mental processes of hysteria nearer to the normal, instead of reducing the characteristic of the neurosis to a mysterious disturbance incapable of further analysis.

Investigation into the mental life of normal persons then yielded the unexpected discovery that their infantile history in regard to sexual matters was not necessarily different in essentials from that of the neurotic, and that seduction particularly had played the same part in it; the result was that the accidental influences receded still further into the background in favour of the influence of 'repression', as I had begun to call what I had formerly termed 'defence'. The important thing, therefore, was evidently not the sexual stimulation that the person had experienced during childhood; what mattered was, above all, how he had reacted to these experiences, whether he had responded to them with 'repression' or not. With regard to spontaneous sexual activity it became evident that in the course of development it was often broken off by an act of repression. Thus the sexually mature neurotic regularly carried within him a fragment of 'sexual repression' from his childhood days, which came to expression under the stress imposed upon him by real life. And psycho-analysis of hysterics showed that their illness was the result of a conflict between the libido and the sexual repression, their symptoms being equivalent to compromises in the conflict between these two mental currents.

I could not expound this part of my theory further without a detailed discussion of my views on the subject of repression. It must suffice to bring the reader's notice at this point to my _Drei Abhandlungen {280} zur Sexualtheorie_, in which I have attempted to throw some light, even if only a meagre ray, on the somatic processes in which the essence of sexuality lies. I have there described how the constitutional disposition of the child is by far more variegated than we might have expected, how it deserves to be called 'polymorphously perverse' and how what is called the normal sexual function develops from this disposition through certain components of it becoming repressed. The infantile characteristics of sexuality provided a clue which enabled me to establish a simple correlation between health, perversion, and neurosis. It appeared that normality developed as the result of repression of certain component-instincts and components of the infantile disposition, and of a subordination of the remainder under the primacy of the genital zone in the service of the reproductive function; perversions represented disturbances in this process of coalescence caused by an excessive (obsessive, as it were) development of certain of the component-instincts; and neurosis could be traced back to unduly severe repression of libidinal tendencies. Since almost all the perverse impulses comprising the infantile disposition demonstrably constitute the symptom-forming forces of neurosis, though in the latter they are in a state of repression, I was able to designate neurosis as the 'negative' of perversion.

I consider it worth emphasis that, in spite of all changes in them, my views concerning the ætiology of the psychoneuroses have never yet caused me to disavow or abandon two points of view: namely, the importance of sexuality and of infantilism. In other respects, constitutional factors have supplanted accidental influences; 'sexual repression' has taken the place of the concept of 'defence' which was intended purely psychologically. Now if anyone should enquire where he {281} is to look for an incontestable proof of the ætiological importance of sexual factors in the psychoneuroses---since these maladies are observed to ensue after the most commonplace emotional, or even somatic disturbances, and since a specific ætiology in the form of particular infantile experiences is not forthcoming---then I would indicate psycho-analytic investigation of neurotics as the source from which the disputed conviction springs. When this irreplaceable method of investigation is used one learns that the _symptoms represent the patient's sexual activity_, either the whole of it or a part of it, and are rooted in the normal or the perverse component-instincts of sexuality. Not only does a considerable portion of hysterical symptomatology spring directly from the manifestations of sexual excitement; not only does a series of erotogenic zones assume the importance of genital organs in the neurosis by intensification of their infantile qualities; but even the most complicated symptoms reveal themselves as 'converted' representations of phantasies which have a sexual situation as their content. Whoever knows how to interpret the language of hysteria can perceive that the neurosis deals only with the patient's repressed sexuality. Only one must conceive of the sexual function in its true range, as circumscribed by the infantile disposition. Wherever a commonplace emotion must be included among the causative factors of the illness, analysis will regularly show that the pathogenic effect has been exercised by the ever-present sexual element in the traumatic occurrence.

This has led us imperceptibly away from the question of the causation of the psychoneuroses to the problem of their nature. On the basis of the knowledge acquired by means of psycho-analysis one can only say {282} that the nature of these maladies lies in disturbances of the sexual processes, of those organic processes which determine the development and form of expression of the sexual craving. One can scarcely avoid, in the last analysis, picturing those processes as chemical, so that we might recognize the so-called actual neuroses as the somatic effects of disturbances in sexual metabolism, and the psychoneuroses as, in addition, the psychical effects of these disturbances. The similarity of the neuroses to the phenomena of intoxication and abstinence following upon certain alkaloids, as well as to Graves' and to Addison's diseases, is readily apparent on the clinical side; and, just as we can no longer describe as 'nervous diseases' the two maladies mentioned, so the 'actual neuroses' also, despite their name, will probably soon have to be removed from this category.

Thus, whatever has a harmful effect on the processes serving the sexual function belongs to the ætiology of the neuroses. In the first place, accordingly, there are the noxiæ affecting the sexual function itself, in so far as they are felt to be harmful by the sexual constitution, which varies with social culture and education. In the next place, there are all the other noxiæ and traumas which are capable of injuring the sexual processes secondarily through general injury to the whole organism. It should not, however, be forgotten that the ætiological problem presented by the neuroses is at least as complicated as the causative factors of any other disease. A single pathogenic influence is scarcely ever adequate to cause disease; most often a number of ætiological factors supporting one another are necessary and these are consequently not to be opposed to one another. This is the reason why a condition of neurotic invalidism is {283} not sharply distinguished from that of normal health. The malady results from a summation of causes, and the measure of the ætiological conditions may be filled from various accessory sources. To seek the ætiology of the neuroses exclusively in heredity or in the constitution would be no less one-sided than to attempt to find this ætiology only in the accidental modifications undergone by sexuality during life, although investigations show that the nature of these disorders consists only of a disturbance of the sexual processes within the organism.

ON THE HISTORY OF THE {285} PSYCHO-ANALYTIC MOVEMENT (1914)

ON THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHO- {287} ANALYTIC MOVEMENT[62] (1914)

I

_Fluctuat nec mergitur._

No one need be surprised to find a subjective element in the contribution I propose to make here to the history of the psycho-analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation; I was for ten years the only person who concerned himself with it, and all the dissatisfaction which the new doctrine aroused in my contemporaries has been poured forth in the form of criticisms on my head. Although it is long now since I was the only psycho-analyst, I regard myself as justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name. In thus rejecting what seems to me a cool act of usurpation, I am indirectly informing the readers of this _Jahrbuch_ of the events leading to the changes in editorship and in character that it has undergone.

In 1909, in the lecture-hall of an American university, I had my first opportunity of speaking in public about psycho-analysis[63]; the occasion was a momentous one for my work, and moved by this thought I {288} then declared that it was not I who had brought psycho-analysis into existence. The credit for this was due to another, to Josef Breuer, whose work had been done at a time when I was still a student occupied with my examinations (1880--82). Since I gave those lectures, however, well-meaning friends have suggested to me a doubt whether my gratitude should not have been expressed less extravagantly on that occasion. According to them, I should have done as I had previously been accustomed to do, and regarded Breuer's 'cathartic procedure' as a forerunner of psycho-analysis, the latter beginning with my discarding the hypnotic method and introducing that of free association. It is of no great importance in any case whether the history of psycho-analysis is reckoned as beginning with the cathartic method or with my modification of it; I refer to this uninteresting point merely because certain opponents of psycho-analysis have the habit of recollecting occasionally that the art of psycho-analysis was after all not invented by me, but by Breuer. This of course happens only when for once in a way they are able to find something worthy of attention in it; when they impose no such limits to their general rejection of it, however, psycho-analysis is always without question my work alone. I have never heard that Breuer's great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a corresponding measure of criticism and abuse; and as it is long ago now since I recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psycho-analysis, I conclude that I must be the real originator of all that is particularly characteristic in it. I am happy to be able to add that none of the efforts to minimize my part in creating this much-reviled analysis have ever come from Breuer himself or have {289} met with any support from him.

Breuer's discovery has so often been described that I can dispense with discussing it in detail here. The fundamental fact was that the symptoms of hysterical patients are founded upon highly significant, but forgotten, scenes in their past lives (traumas); the therapy founded upon this consisted in causing them to remember and reproduce these scenes in a state of hypnosis (catharsis); and the fragment of theory inferred from this was that these symptoms represented an abnormal form of discharge for quantities of excitation which had not been disposed of otherwise (conversion). Whenever Breuer, in his theoretical contribution to the _Studien über Hysterie_, referred to this process of conversion, he always added my name in brackets after it, as though the priority for this first attempt at theoretic evaluation belonged to me. I believe that actually this distinction relates only to the name, and that the conception was evolved by us simultaneously together.

It is known that after Breuer made his first discovery of the cathartic method he let it rest for a number of years, and took it up again only after I returned from studying with Charcot and induced him to do so. He had a large consulting practice in medicine which made great claims on him; I had only unwillingly taken up the profession of medicine, but I had at that time a strong motive for helping nervous persons or at least for wishing to understand something about nervous states. I had already devoted myself to physical therapy, and had felt absolutely helpless after the disappointing results I had experienced with Erb's 'electrotherapy', which was so full of detailed indications. If I did not at the time arrive on my own account at the {290} conclusion which Möbius later established, that the successes of electrical treatment in nervous patients are the effects of suggestion, certainly only the total absence of these promised successes was to blame. Treatment by suggestion during deep hypnosis, which I learned from Liébeault's and Bernheim's highly impressive demonstrations, then seemed to offer a satisfactory substitute for the failure of electrical treatment. But the method of investigating patients in a state of hypnosis, which I learned of from Breuer---with its automatic effectiveness and the satisfaction it afforded to scientific interest---was bound to be incomparably more attractive than the monotonous, arbitrary prohibitions used in treatment by suggestion, which stood in the way of all research.

We have lately received an admonition purporting to represent one of the latest developments of psycho-analysis, to the effect that the current conflict and the exciting cause of illness are to be brought into the foreground in the analysis. Now this is exactly what Breuer and I used to do at the beginning of our work with the cathartic method. We led the patient's attention directly to the traumatic scene in which the symptom had arisen, endeavoured to find the mental conflict inherent in it and to release the suppressed affect. In the course of this we discovered the mental process, so characteristic of the neuroses, which I later named regression. The patient's associations led back from the scene which one was trying to elucidate to earlier experiences, and compelled the analysis, which had to correct the present, to occupy itself with the past. This regression led constantly further backwards; at first it seemed regularly to bring us to puberty; later on, failures and points which still awaited explanation beckoned the analytic work still further back into years {291} of childhood which had hitherto been inaccessible to any kind of exploration. This regressing trend became an important character of analysis. It appeared that psycho-analysis could explain nothing current without referring back to something past; more, that every pathogenic experience implied a previous one which, though not in itself pathogenic, had yet endowed the later one with its pathogenic quality. The temptation to confine attention to the known actual exciting cause was so strong, however, that even in later analyses I gave way to it. In the analysis of the patient I named 'Dora', carried out in 1899, I had knowledge of the event which occasioned the outbreak of the actual illness. I tried innumerable times to analyse this experience, but even direct demands always failed to produce from her anything more than the same meagre and incomplete description of it. Not until a long détour, leading back over her earliest childhood, had been traversed, did a dream present itself which on analysis brought to mind the hitherto forgotten details of this scene, so that comprehension and a solution of the current conflict became finally possible.

This one example shows how very misleading is the advice just now referred to, and what a degree of scientific regression is represented by the neglect of regression in analytic technique thus enjoined upon us.

The first difference between Breuer and myself came to light in regard to a question concerning the finer psychical mechanism of hysteria. He gave preference to a theory which was still to some extent physiological, as one might call it; he wished to explain the mental dissociation of hysteria by the absence of communication between various psychical states (states of consciousness, as we called them {292} at that time), and he therefore constructed the theory of 'hypnoid' states, the effects of which were supposed to penetrate into waking consciousness like unassimilated foreign bodies. I had taken the matter less academically; everywhere I seemed to discern motives and tendencies analogous to those of everyday life, and I looked upon mental dissociation itself as an effect of a process of rejection which at that time I called _defence_, and later called _repression_. I made a shortlived attempt to allow the two mechanisms a separate existence side by side, but as observation showed me always and only one thing, it was not long before my 'defence' doctrine took up its stand opposite his 'hypnoid' theory.

I am quite sure, however, that this opposition between our views had nothing to do with the severance of our relations which followed shortly after. This severance had deeper causes, but it came about in such a way that at first I did not understand it; it was only later that I learnt from many sure indications how to account for it. It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the sexual element was amazingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very rich clinical picture of the case. I have always wondered why the critics did not more often cite this assurance of Breuer's as an argument against my contention of a sexual ætiology in the neuroses, and even to-day I do not know whether I should regard the omission as evidence of tact or of carelessness on their part. Anyone who reads the history of Breuer's case now in the light of the knowledge gained in the last twenty years will at once perceive the symbolism in it---the snake, the stiffening, the disabling of the arm---and, on taking into account the situation at the bedside of the sick father, will easily guess the real {293} interpretation of her symptom-formation; his opinion of the part played by sexuality in the young woman's mental life will then be very different from that of her physician. In his treatment of her case, Breuer could make use of a very intense suggestible _rapport_ on the part of the patient, which may serve us as a prototype of what we call 'transference' to-day. Now I have strong reasons for surmising that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an 'untoward event', he broke off all further investigation. He never told me this in so many words, but he gave me at various times indications enough to justify this reconstruction of what happened. When I later began more and more resolutely to put forward the significance of sexuality in the ætiology of neurosis, he was the first to show that reaction of distaste and repudiation which was later to become so familiar to me, but which at that time I had not yet learnt to recognize as my inevitable fate.

The fact of the transference appearing, although neither desired nor induced by either physician or patient, in every neurotic who comes under treatment, in its crude sexual, or affectionate, or hostile form, has always seemed to me the most irrefragable proof that the source of the propelling forces of neurosis lies in the sexual life. This argument has never received anything approaching the degree of attention that it merits, for if it had, there would really be no choice but acceptance. In my own conviction of the truth it remains, beside and above the more specific results of analytic work, the decisive factor. {294}

There was some consolation for the bad reception accorded even among my intimate friends to my contention of a sexual ætiology in the neuroses---a vacuum rapidly formed itself about my person---in the thought that I was taking up the fight for a new and original idea. But, one day, certain memories collected in my mind which disturbed this pleasing notion, and gave me instead a valuable insight into the processes of human activity and the nature of human knowledge. The idea for which I was being made responsible had by no means originated with me. It had been imparted to me by no less than three people whose opinion had commanded my deepest respect---by Breuer himself, by Charcot, and by the gynæcologist of Vienna University, Chrobak, perhaps the most eminent of all our Viennese physicians. These three men had all communicated to me a piece of knowledge which, strictly speaking, they themselves did not possess. Two of them later denied having done so when I reminded them of the fact; the third (Charcot) would probably have done the same if it had been granted to me to see him again. But these three identical opinions, which I had heard without understanding, had lain dormant in my mind for years until one day they awoke in the form of an apparently original idea.

One day when I was a young house-physician I was walking with Breuer through the town, when a man came up who evidently wished urgently to speak to him. I fell back; as soon as Breuer was free, he told me in his friendly instructive way that this man was the husband of a patient and had brought him some news of her. The wife, he added, was behaving in such an extraordinary way in society that she had been brought to him for treatment as nervous. Then he concluded: 'These things are always _secrets d'alcove!_' Astonished, I asked him what he {295} meant, and he answered by telling me the meaning of the word _alcove_ (marriage-bed), for he did not realize how extraordinary his remark had seemed to me.

Some years later, at one of Charcot's evening receptions, I happened to be standing near the great teacher at a moment when he appeared to be telling Brouardel some very interesting story from his day's work. I hardly heard the beginning, but gradually my attention was seized by what he was saying. A young married couple from the far East: the woman a confirmed invalid: the man either impotent or exceedingly awkward. '_Tâchez donc_, I heard Charcot repeating, _je vous assure, vous y arriverez_.' Brouardel, who spoke less loudly, must have expressed his astonishment that symptoms such as the wife's could have been produced in such circumstances. For Charcot suddenly broke in with great animation, '_Mais, dans des cas pareils c'est toujours la chose génitale, toujours_ ... _toujours_... _toujours_'; and he crossed his arms over his stomach, hugging himself and jumping up and down on his toes several times in his own characteristic lively way. I know that for one second I was almost paralyzed with amazement and said to myself, 'Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say so?' But the impression was soon forgotten; brain anatomy and the experimental induction of hysterical paralyses absorbed all available interest.

A year later, I had begun medical practice in Vienna as a _Privatdozent_ for nervous diseases, and in everything relating to the ætiology of the neuroses I was still as ignorant and innocent as one could only expect of a promising student trained at a university. One day I had a friendly message from Chrobak, asking me to take a patient {296} of his to whom he could not give enough time, owing to his new appointment as University lecturer. I arrived at the patient's house before he did and found that she was suffering from attacks of insensate anxiety, and could only be soothed by the most detailed information about where her physician was at every moment of the day. When Chrobak arrived he took me aside and told me that the patient's anxiety was due to the fact that although she had been married for eighteen years she was still _virgo intacta_. The husband was absolutely impotent. In such cases, he said, there was nothing for a medical man to do but to shield this domestic misfortune with his own reputation, and put up with it if people shrugged their shoulders and said of him, 'He is no good if he can't cure her after so many years'. The sole prescription for such a malady, he added, is familiar enough to us, but we cannot order it. It runs:

R. Penis normalis dosim repetatur!

I had never heard of such a prescription and would have liked to shake my head over my kind friend's cynicism.

I have certainly not disclosed the illustrious parentage of this scandalous idea in order to saddle others with the responsibility for it. I am well aware that it is one thing once or twice, or even oftener, to give words to an idea that comes in the form of a fleeting inspiration, and quite another to intend it seriously, to take it literally, to pursue it in spite of all difficulties into every detail and to win it a place among accepted truths. It is the difference between a casual flirtation and solemn matrimony with all its duties and difficulties. 'To be wedded to an idea' is not an uncommon figure of speech. {297}

Among the other new factors which were added to the cathartic procedure as a result of my work, transforming it into psycho-analysis, I should mention particularly: The doctrine of repression and resistance, the recognition of infantile sexuality, and the interpreting and making use of dreams as a source of knowledge of the unconscious.

The doctrine of repression quite certainly came to me independently of any other source; I know of no outside impression which might have suggested it to me, and for a long time I imagined it to be entirely my own, until Otto Rank showed us the passage in Schopenhauer's _World as Will and Idea_ in which the philosopher is trying to give an explanation of insanity[64]. What he says there about the struggle against acceptance of a painful part of reality fits my conception of repression so completely that I am again indebted for having made a discovery to not being a wide reader. And yet others have read the passage and passed it by without making this discovery, and perhaps the same would have happened to me if in my young days I had had more taste for reading philosophical works. In later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche from a deliberate resolve not to be hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of expectation derived from without. I have to be prepared, therefore---and am so, gladly---to forego all claim to priority in the many instances in which laborious psycho-analytic investigation can merely confirm the truths which this philosopher recognized intuitively.

The doctrine of repression is the foundation-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests, the most essential part of it, and {298} yet it is nothing but a theoretical formulation of a phenomenon which may be observed to recur as often as one undertakes an analysis of a neurotic without resorting to hypnosis. One notices a resistance then making itself evident in opposition to the work of analysis and inducing a failure to recall memories in order to frustrate it. The use of hypnosis is bound to hide this resistance; the history of psycho-analysis proper, therefore, begins with the new technique that dispenses with hypnosis. Considered theoretically, the fact that this resistance coincides with an amnesia leads inevitably to that view of unconscious mental activity which is peculiar to psycho-analysis and after all distinguishes it quite clearly from philosophical speculations about the unconscious. It may thus be said that the theory of psycho-analysis is an attempt to account for two observed facts that strike one conspicuously and unexpectedly whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation, no matter what its direction, which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting-point of its work may call itself psycho-analysis, though it arrives at results other than my own. But anyone who takes up other sides of the problem while avoiding these two premisses will hardly escape the charge of misappropriating by attempted impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a psycho-analyst.

If anyone should seek to regard the theory of repression and of resistance as assumptions instead of as results following from psycho-analysis, I should oppose him most emphatically. Such assumptions of a general psychological and biological nature do exist, and it would be useful to consider them on some other occasion; but {299} the doctrine of repression is the outcome of psycho-analytic work, a theoretic inference legitimately drawn from innumerable observations. The formulation of infantile sexuality is another of these products, acquired, however, at a much later date; in the early days of tentative investigation by analysis no such thing was thought of. At first one merely remarked that the effect of current experiences had to be traced back to something in the past. Only, 'enquirers often find more than they bargain for'. One was drawn further and further back into the past; one hoped at last to be able to halt at puberty, the period in which sexuality is traditionally supposed to awake. But in vain; the tracks led on still further backwards, into childhood and into its earliest years. On the way an obstacle had to be overcome that was almost fatal to the young science. Influenced by Charcot's view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and ætiologically significant the statements made by patients in which they ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in early childhood --- broadly speaking, to seduction. When this ætiology broke down under its own improbability and under contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led by the right paths back to these sexual traumas, and yet they were not true. Reality was lost from under one's feet. At that time I would gladly have given up the whole thing, just as my esteemed predecessor, Breuer, had done when he made his unwelcome discovery. Perhaps I persevered only because I had no choice and could not then begin again at anything else. At last came the reflection that, after all, one has no right to despair because one has been deceived in one's expectations; one must revise them. If {300} hysterics trace back their symptoms to fictitious traumas, this new fact signifies that they create such scenes in phantasy, and psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside actual reality. This was soon followed by the recognition that these phantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of early childhood, to gloss it over and raise it to a higher level; and then, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of the child's sexual life came to light.

With this sexual activity during early childhood the inherited constitution at last came into its own. Predisposition and experience were here linked up in an indissoluble ætiological unity; impressions which were entirely commonplace, and would otherwise have had no effect, became exaggerated by the predisposition into traumas giving rise to excitation and fixations; while experiences stimulated factors in the disposition which, without them, might have remained long dormant and perhaps never have awakened. The last word on the subject of traumatic ætiology was spoken later by Abraham, when he pointed out that the peculiarity of the sexual constitution in children is precisely calculated to provoke sexual experiences of a certain kind, namely, traumas.

In the beginning my formulations regarding infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively upon the results of analysis in adults, leading as they did back into the past. I had no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm almost all my inferences by direct observation and analysis of children, a triumph that lost some of its magnitude as one gradually realized that the nature of the discovery was such that one should really be ashamed of having to make {301} it. The further one carried these observations on children, the more self-evident the facts became, and the more astonishing was it too that so much trouble was taken to overlook them.

Such a certain conviction of the existence and significance of infantile sexuality can, it is true, only be obtained by the path of analysis, pursuing the symptoms and peculiarities of neurotics back to their ultimate sources, the discovery of which then explains whatever is explicable in them and enables whatever is modifiable in them to be changed. I can understand that one would arrive at different results if, as C. G. Jung has recently done, one first forms a theoretical conception of the nature of the sexual instinct and then seeks to explain the life of children on this basis. A conception of this kind is bound to be selected arbitrarily or in accordance with secondary considerations, and runs the risk of not corresponding adequately to the field in which it is applied. It is true that the road of analysis leads also to certain final difficulties and obscurities in regard to sexuality and its relation to the whole life of the individual: but these problems cannot be dealt with by speculation; they must await solution by other observations or by observations in other fields.

I need say little about the interpretation of dreams. It came as the first-fruits of the new technique, when, following a dim presentiment, I had decided to exchange hypnosis for free association. My desire for knowledge had not been directed to start with towards understanding dreams. I do not know of any outside influence which drew my interest to them or inspired me with any helpful expectations. Before Breuer and I ceased to meet there had only just been time for me to tell him in one sentence that I now understood how to translate dreams. Since {302} this was how the discovery came about, it followed that the symbolism in the language of dreams was almost the last thing to become clear to me, for the dreamer's associations help very little towards understanding symbols. I have held fast to the habit of always studying things themselves before looking for information about them in books, and therefore I was able to establish the symbolism of dreams for myself before I was led to it by Scherner's work on the subject. It was only later that I came to appreciate to its full extent this mode of expression in dreams---partly through the influence of Stekel, who at first did such very creditable work but afterwards went totally astray. The close connection between psycho-analytic dream-interpretation and the art of interpreting dreams as practised and held in such high esteem by the ancients only became clear to me much later. I found the essential characteristic and most significant part of my dream theory---the reduction of dream-distortion to an inner conflict, a kind of inward dishonesty---later in a writer who was familiar with philosophy though not with medicine, the engineer J. Popper, who published his _Phantasien eines Realisten_ under the name of Lynkeus.

The interpretation of dreams became a solace and a support to me in those arduous first years of analysis, when I had to master the technology, clinical phenomena and therapy of the neuroses all at the same time; I was then completely isolated, and in the network of problems and accumulation of difficulties often dreaded losing my way and also my confidence. It was often a long time before the test of my hypothesis, that a neurosis must become intelligible by analysis, was realized in the patient; in their dreams, which might be regarded as analogues of their symptoms, this hypothesis was confirmed almost {303} without exception.

It was only my success in this direction that enabled me to persevere. The result is that I have acquired the habit of gauging the measure of a psychologist's understanding by his attitude to dream-interpretation; and have observed with satisfaction that most of the opponents of psycho-analysis avoid this question altogether or else display remarkable clumsiness if they attempt to deal with it. I soon saw the necessity of an analysis of myself and this I carried out with the help of a series of my own dreams which led me back through all the events of my childhood; I am still to-day of the opinion that this kind of analysis may suffice for anyone who is a prolific dreamer and not too abnormal.

I think that by narrating this history of its development I have shown what psycho-analysis is better than by a systematic description of it. I did not at first perceive the peculiar nature of what I had discovered. Without thinking, I sacrificed at its inception my popularity as a physician, and the growth of a large consulting practice among nervous patients, by enquiries relating to the sexual factors involved in the causation of their neuroses; this brought me a great many new facts which definitively confirmed my conviction of the practical importance of the sexual factor. Unsuspectingly, I spoke before the Vienna Neurological Society, then under the presidency of Krafft-Ebing, expecting to be compensated by the interest and recognition of my colleagues for the material losses I had willingly undergone. I treated my discoveries as ordinary contributions to science and hoped to be met in the same spirit. But the silence with which my addresses were received, the void which formed itself about me, the insinuations that found their way to me, caused me gradually {304} to realize that one cannot count upon views about the part played by sexuality in the ætiology of the neuroses meeting with the same reception as other communications. I understood that from now onwards I belonged to those who have 'disturbed the sleep of the world', as Hebbel says, and that I could not reckon upon objectivity and tolerance. Since, however, my conviction of the general accuracy of my observations and conclusions grew and grew, and as my confidence in my own judgement was by no means slight, any more than my moral courage, there could be no doubt about the outcome of the situation. I made up my mind that it had been my fortune to discover particularly important connections, and was prepared to accept the fate that sometimes accompanies such discoveries.

I imagined the future somewhat as follows: I should probably succeed in sustaining myself by means of the therapeutic success of the new method, but science would ignore me entirely during my lifetime. Some decades later, someone else would infallibly come upon the same things---for which the time was not yet ripe---, would achieve recognition for them and bring me to honour as a forerunner whose failure had been inevitable. Meanwhile I settled down, like Robinson, as comfortably as possible on my lonely island. When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressure and preoccupations of to-day, it seems to me like a glorious 'heroic era'; my 'splendid isolation' was not lacking in advantages and in charms. I had not to read any publications, nor to listen to any ill-informed opponents; I was not subject to influence from any quarter; no one attempted to hurry me. I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow {305} the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot---to look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak. There was no need for my writings, for which with some difficulty I found a publisher, to keep pace with my knowledge; they could be postponed as long as I pleased; there was no doubtful 'priority' to be secured. _Die Traumdeutung_, for instance, was complete in all essentials at the beginning of 1896; it was not written out until the summer of 1899. The analysis of 'Dora' was over at the end of 1899; the case was noted down in the next two weeks, but not published until 1905. All this time my writings were not reviewed in the medical journals, or, if by an exception this happened, they were scouted with contemptuous or pitying arrogance. Occasionally a colleague would make some reference to me in one of his publications; it would be very short and not at all flattering---such as 'eccentric', 'extreme', 'very peculiar ideas'. It happened once that an assistant at the clinic in Vienna where I gave lectures asked me for permission to attend one of the courses. He listened very attentively and said nothing; after the last lecture was over he offered to accompany me. As we walked, he told me that with the knowledge of his chief he had written a book against my views, but regretted very much that he had not first learnt more about them from my lectures, as in that case he would have written very differently. He had indeed enquired at the clinic whether he had not better first read the _Die Traumdeutung_; but had been advised against it, as it was not worth the trouble. He then himself compared the solidity of the structure of my doctrine with that of the Catholic church. In the interests of his salvation I take this as an expression of acknowledgement. But, he concluded {306} by saying, it was too late to alter anything; his book was already printed. Nor did this man think it necessary later on to make known anything of the change in his opinion of psychoanalysis, but in his capacity of reviewer for a medical journal chose rather to follow its development with flippant comments.

Whatever personal sensitiveness I possessed was blunted in those years, to my advantage. From embitterment I was saved, however, by one circumstance that is not always present to help lonely discoverers. Many a one is tormented by the need to account for the lack of sympathy or the repudiation expressed by his contemporaries, and feels their attitude painfully as a contradiction of his own secure conviction. There was no need for me to feel so; for psycho-analytical principles enabled me to understand this attitude in my contemporaries and to see it as a necessary consequence of fundamental analytic premisses. If it was true that the associated connections I had discovered were kept from the knowledge of patients by inward resistances of an affective kind, then these resistances would be bound to appear in the healthy also, as soon as, from some external source, they became confronted with what is repressed. It was not surprising that they should be able to justify on intellectual grounds this rejection of my ideas though it was actually affective in nature. The same thing happened just as often in patients, and the arguments they advanced were just the same and not precisely brilliant---reasons are as plenty as blackberries, as Falstaff says. The only difference was that with patients one was in a position to bring pressure to bear on them, so as to induce them to realize their resistances and overcome them, but had to do without this advantage in dealing with those who were apparently healthy. How to {307} compel these normal persons to examine the matter in a cool, objective scientific spirit was an insoluble problem which was best left to time to accomplish. In the history of science one can clearly see that often the very proposition that at first called out nothing but contradiction came later on to be accepted, although no new proofs in support of it were forthcoming.

One would hardly, however, expect me, during those years when I alone represented psycho-analysis, to have developed any particular respect for the opinion of the world or any propensity to intellectual compromise.

II

From the year 1902 onwards, a number of young medical men gathered round me with the express intention of learning, practising, and spreading knowledge of psycho-analysis. The stimulus came from a colleague who had himself experienced the beneficial effect of analytic therapy. Regular meetings were held on certain evenings at my house; discussions were arranged according to certain rules; the guests endeavoured to orient themselves in this new and strange field of research and to interest others in it. One day a young man who had passed through the technical training school introduced himself with a manuscript which showed very unusual comprehension. We induced him to go through the _Gymnasium_ and the University and to devote himself to the non-medical side of psycho-analytic investigation. The little society acquired in him a zealous and dependable secretary and I gained in Otto Rank a faithful helper and co-worker.

The little circle soon expanded, and in the course of the next few years often changed its composition. On the whole I could regard it as {308} hardly inferior, in wealth and variety of talent, to the staff of any clinical lecturer one could think of. It included from the beginning those men who were later to play such a considerable, if not always an agreeable, part in the history of the psycho-analytic movement. At that time, however, one could not imagine these developments. I had every reason to be satisfied, and I think I did everything possible to impart to the others my own knowledge and experiences. There were only two inauspicious circumstances which at last estranged me inwardly from the group. I could not succeed in establishing among the members those friendly relations that ought to obtain between men who are all engaged upon the same difficult work, nor could I crush out the disputes about priority for which there were many opportunities under these conditions of work in common. The difficulties in the way of instructing beginners in the practice of psycho-analysis, which are quite particularly great and are responsible for much in the present dissensions among us, were evident already in this private Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. I myself did not venture to put forward a technique which was still incomplete, or a theory which was still in the making, with that authority which, if I had, would perhaps have spared the others many a pitfall and many a fatal error. The self-reliance of intellectual workers, their early independence of their teacher, is always gratifying psychologically; it is an advantage scientifically only when the workers personally fulfil certain conditions which are none too common. For psycho-analysis in particular a long and severe discipline and training in self-discipline was actually required. In view of the courage displayed by devotion to a subject so despised and so poor in prospects, I was disposed to tolerate much among the members to {309} which I should otherwise have made objection. The circle also included others besides medical men---cultured persons who had recognized something important in psycho-analysis---writers, painters and so on. _Die Traumdeutung_ and the book on wit (_Der Witz_), among others, had shown from the beginning that the principles of psycho-analysis cannot be limited to the medical field, but are capable of application to various other mental sciences.

In 1907 the situation changed at one stroke, contrary to all expectations. It appeared that psycho-analysis had unobtrusively awakened interest and gained friends, and that even some scientific workers existed who were ready to acknowledge an allegiance to it. A communication from Bleuler had informed me before this that my works had been studied and made use of in Burghölzli. In January 1907, a physician of the Zurich clinic, Dr. Eitingon, came to Vienna for the first time and other visits followed which led to an animated exchange of ideas. Finally, on the invitation of C. G. Jung, at that time still assistant physician at Burghölzli, a first meeting took place at Salzburg in the spring of 1908 which included friends of psycho-analysis from Vienna, Zurich and other places. One of the results of this first psycho-analytical Congress was the founding of a periodical called the _Jahrbuch für psycho-analytische und psychopathologische Forschungen_, published by Bleuler and Freud, and edited by Jung, which first appeared in the year 1909. A close community in the work of Vienna and Zurich found expression in this publication.

I have repeatedly acknowledged with gratitude the great efforts made towards the spread of psycho-analysis by the Zurich School of Psychiatry, in particular by Bleuler and Jung, and I have no {310} hesitation in doing so again, even in such altered circumstances. It was not indeed the partisanship of the Zurich School which led the attention of the scientific world to psycho-analysis at that time. The latency period had expired and everywhere psycho-analysis was becoming the object of ever-increasing interest. But in all other places this accession of interest at first produced nothing but very emphatic repudiation, mostly quite violent; whereas in Zurich, on the contrary, agreement was on the whole the dominant note. Moreover, nowhere else could such a compact little group of adherents be found, or a public clinic be placed at the service of psycho-analytic researches, or was there a clinical lecturer who embodied psycho-analytical principles as an integral part in his psychiatric course. The Zurich group became as it were the nucleus of the little band who were fighting for the recognition of analysis. The only opportunity of learning the new art and working at it in practice lay there. Most of my followers and co-workers at the present time came to me by way of Zurich, even those who were geographically much nearer to Vienna than to Switzerland. For western Europe, which contains the great centres of culture, the position of Vienna is an outlying one; and its prestige has for many years been affected by strong prejudices. Representatives of all the most important nations congregate in Switzerland where mental activity is so great; an infective spot there was bound to be of great importance for the spread of the 'psychical epidemic', as Hoche of Freiburg has called it.

According to the evidence of a colleague who witnessed developments at Burghölzli, it appears that psycho-analysis awakened interest there very early. In Jung's work on occult phenomena, published in 1902, {311} there was already an allusion to my book on dream-interpretation. From 1903 or 1904, says my informant, psycho-analysis was in the forefront of interest. After personal relations between Vienna and Zurich had been established in the middle of 1907, an informal society was also started in Burghölzli where the problems of psycho-analysis were discussed at regular meetings. In the alliance between the Vienna and the Zurich schools the Swiss were by no means mere recipients. They had already produced very creditable scientific work, the results of which were of service to psycho-analysis. The association experiments started by the Wundt School had been interpreted by them in a psycho-analytic sense, and had proved applicable in unexpected ways. By this means it had been possible to arrive at rapid experimental confirmation of psycho-analytic observations and to demonstrate to students certain connections which the analyst would only have been able to describe to them. The first bridge linking up experimental psychology with psycho-analysis had been constructed.

In psycho-analytic treatment association-experiments enable a provisional, qualitative analysis of the case to be made, but they furnish no essential contribution to the technique and can be dispensed with in carrying out analyses. More important, however, was another achievement by the Zurich school, or its leaders, Bleuler and Jung. The former showed that light could be thrown on a large number of purely psychiatric cases by reference to the same processes as have been recognized through psycho-analysis to obtain in dreams and neuroses (Freudian mechanisms); and Jung successfully applied the analytic method of interpretation to the most alien and obscure phenomena of dementia præcox, so that their sources in the life and {312} interests of the patient came clearly to light. After this it was impossible for psychiatrists to ignore psycho-analysis any longer. Bleuler's great work on schizophrenia (1911), in which the psycho-analytical point of view was placed on an equal footing with the systematic clinical one, completed this success.

I will not omit to point out a divergence which was already at that time noticeable in the direction taken by the work of the two schools. I had published as early as 1897 the analysis of a case of schizophrenia, which however took a paranoid form, so that the solution of it could not have anticipated the results of Jung's analyses. But to me the important point had been, not so much the possibility of interpreting the symptoms, as the psychical mechanism of the disease, and above all the similarity of this mechanism with that of hysteria which was already known. At that time no light had yet been thrown on the differences between the two disorders. I was in fact already aiming at a libido theory of the neuroses, which should explain all neurotic and psychotic manifestations as abnormal directions taken by libido, that is, as deviations of it from its normal course. This point of view was overlooked by the Swiss investigators. As far as I know, Bleuler maintains the view even to-day that the various forms of dementia præcox have an organic causation; and Jung, whose book on this disease appeared in 1907, at the Congress at Salzburg in 1908 supported the toxic theory of its causation which takes no account of the libido theory, although it is true that it does not exclude it. Later on (1912) he came to grief on this point, by making too much of what he had previously ignored.

There is a third contribution made by the Swiss School, and probably to be ascribed entirely to Jung, which I do not value so highly as {313} others do whose concern with these matters is more remote. I mean the theory of 'complexes' which grew out of the _Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien_ (1906 to 1910). It has neither produced a psychological theory in itself, nor has it proved capable of easy incorporation into the context of psycho-analytical theory. The word 'complex', on the other hand, has become naturalized, so to speak, in psycho-analytic language; it is a convenient and often indispensable term for summing up descriptively a psychological state. None of the other terms coined by psycho-analysis for its own needs has achieved such widespread popularity, or been so misapplied to the detriment of formulating clear concepts. Analysts began to speak among themselves of a 'return of a complex' where they meant a 'return of the repressed'; or got into the habit of saying 'I have a complex against him', where correctly they could only have said 'a resistance against him'.

In the years following 1907 when the schools of Vienna and Zurich were united, psycho-analysis made that extraordinary plunge forward, the momentum of which is felt even to-day; this is shown both by the spread of psycho-analytic literature and by the constant increase in the number of medical men who are practising or studying it, and also by the frequency of the attacks upon it made at Congresses and in learned societies. It has penetrated into the most distant lands and everywhere has not merely startled psychiatrists but has commanded the attention of the cultured public and of scientific workers in other fields. Havelock Ellis, who has followed its development with sympathy without ever calling himself an adherent, wrote in 1911 in a report for the Australasian Medical Congress: 'Freud's psycho-analysis is now {314} championed and carried out not only in Austria and in Switzerland, but in the United States, in England, in India, in Canada, and, I doubt not, in Australasia[65].' A physician from Chile (probably a German) spoke at the International Congress at Buenos Ayres in 1910 in support of the existence of infantile sexuality and commended highly the effects of psycho-analytic therapy for obsessional symptoms[66]. An English neurologist in Central India informed me, through a distinguished colleague who was coming to Europe, that the analyses of Mohammedan Indians which he had carried out showed the same ætiology of neuroses in them as we find in our European patients.

The introduction of psycho-analysis into North America took place with very special marks of honour. In the autumn of 1909, Stanley Hall, the President of Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, invited Jung and myself to take part in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the University by giving addresses in the German language. To our great surprise, we found the members of that small but highly respected University for the study of pedagogy and philosophy so unprejudiced that they were acquainted with all the literature of psycho-analysis and had given it a place in their lectures to students. In prudish America it was possible, at least in academic circles, to discuss freely and scientifically everything that in ordinary life is regarded as objectionable. The five lectures which I improvised in Worcester appeared in English in the American Journal of Psychology, and were shortly after published in German under the title _Über Psychoanalyse_. Jung read a paper on 'Diagnostic {315} Association-experiments' and one on 'Conflicts in the Mind of the Child'. We were rewarded with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. In that week at Worcester, psycho-analysis was represented by five persons; besides Jung and myself, there was Ferenczi, who had joined me as travelling companion, Ernest Jones, then at the University of Toronto (Canada), now returned to London, and A. A. Brill, who was already practising psycho-analysis in New York.

The most important personal relationship which arose from the meeting at Worcester was that with James J. Putnam, Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard University. Some years before, he had expressed an unfavourable opinion of psycho-analysis, but now he rapidly reconciled himself to it and recommended it to his countrymen and his colleagues in a series of lectures which were as rich in content as they were brilliant in form. The esteem he enjoyed throughout America on account of his high moral character and unflinching love of truth was of great service to psycho-analysis and protected it against the denunciations which might otherwise have early overwhelmed it. Later on, yielding too much to the strong ethical and philosophical bent of his nature, Putnam made what seems to me an impossible demand---he expected psycho-analysis to place itself in the service of a particular moral-philosophical conception of the Universe---but he remains the chief pillar of the psycho-analytic movement in his native land.

For the further spread of this movement Brill and Jones deserve the greatest credit; they achieved this by repeatedly with self-denying assiduity bringing to the notice of their countrymen in their writings the easily observable fundamental facts of everyday life, of dreams {316} and neurosis. Brill has contributed still further to this effect by medical practice and by his translations of my works, and Jones by erudite lectures and by his skill in debate at congresses in America.[67] The absence of any deep-rooted scientific tradition in America and the much less stringent rule of official authority there have been decidedly advantageous to the movement which Stanley Hall started. It was characteristic of that country that from the beginning both professors and superintendents of mental hospitals as well as independent practitioners were all equally interested in analysis. But it is clear that precisely for this reason the centres of ancient culture, where the greatest resistance has been displayed, must be the scene of the final decisive battle for psycho-analysis.

Among European countries France has hitherto shown itself the least disposed to welcome psycho-analysis, although useful work in French by A. Maeder of Zurich has provided easy access to its doctrines. The first indications of allegiance came from the provinces; Morichau-Beauchant (Poitiers) was the first Frenchman to subscribe publicly to psycho-analysis. Régis and Hesnard (Bordeaux) have recently (1913) attempted to disperse the prejudices of their countrymen against the new ideas by an exhaustive and intelligent presentation which takes exception only to symbolism. In Paris itself, a conviction still seems to reign (to which Janet himself gave eloquent expression at the Congress in London in 1913) that everything good in psycho-analysis is a repetition of Janet's views with {317} insignificant modifications, and that everything else in it is bad. At this congress, indeed, Janet had to submit to a number of corrections by Ernest Jones, who was able to point out to him his insufficient knowledge of the subject. Even though we deny his claims, however, we cannot forget the value of his work on the psychology of the neuroses.

In Italy, after several promising starts, no real interest was forthcoming. In Holland, analysis found an early hearing by way of personal relationships; Van Emden, Van Ophuijsen, Van Renterghem (_Freud en zijn School_) and the two Stärckes are actively occupied with it both practically and theoretically.[68] In scientific circles in England interest in analysis has developed very slowly, but there is reason to expect that the sense for the practical and the passionate love of justice in the English will ensure it a brilliant future there.

In Sweden, P. Bjerre, who succeeded to Wetterstrand's practice, gave up hypnotic suggestion, at least for the time, in favour of analytic treatment. R. Vogt (Christiania) had already in 1907 appreciated psycho-analysis in his book _Psykiatrien's grundtraek_, so that the first text-book of psychiatry to refer to psycho-analysis was a Norwegian one. In Russia, psycho-analysis has become generally known and has spread widely; almost all my writings, as well as those of other adherents of analysis, have been translated into Russian. But a really penetrating comprehension of analytical principles has not yet been evinced in Russia; so that the contributions of Russian physicians are at present not very notable. The only skilled analyst {318} there is M. Wulff who practises in Odessa. It is principally due to L. Jekels that psycho-analysis has been introduced to Polish scientific and literary circles. Hungary, so near geographically to Austria, and so far from it scientifically, has produced only one collaborator, S. Ferenczi, but one that indeed outweighs a whole society.

The position of psycho-analysis in Germany can only be described by saying that it forms the centre-point of scientific discussions and evokes the most emphatic repudiation from both medical men and laity; these controversies, however, have come to no conclusion, but are continually being revived and intensified. No official seat of learning there has up to the present recognized psycho-analysis; successful practitioners who employ it are very few; only a few institutions, such as Binswanger's in Kreuzlingen (on Swiss soil) and Marcinowski's in Holstein, have introduced it. One of the most prominent representatives of analysis, Karl Abraham, at one time an assistant of Bleuler's, maintains himself in the critical atmosphere of Berlin. One might wonder that this state of things should continue unaltered for several years if one did not know that it is merely a superficial appearance. Too much significance should not be attributed to rejection by the official representatives of science and heads of institutions, together with their dependents and followers. It is natural that opponents should raise a clamour while intimidated adherents preserve silence. Some of the latter, after producing contributions to analysis which raised considerable expectations, later withdrew from the movement under the pressure of circumstances. The movement itself advances surely though silently, wins new adherents continually among psychiatrists and laity, brings in a constant stream of new readers for psycho-analytical literature {319} and so compels its opponents to ever more vehement defensive measures. At least a dozen times in recent years, in reports of the proceedings of certain Congresses and scientific assemblies or in reviews of certain publications, I have read 'Psycho-Analysis is dead, at last defeated and finally abolished!' The answer to all this might be like that of Mark Twain in his telegram to the newspapers which falsely reported his death: Report of my death grossly exaggerated. After these announcements psycho-analysis always gained new adherents and co-operators or acquired new means of advancing itself. After all, to be hailed as a corpse is an advance on being received in dead silence.

Hand in hand with this geographical extension of psycho-analysis went an expansion in its content; its application was pushed forward from the field of the neuroses and psychiatry to other fields of knowledge. I shall not treat this aspect of the development of our discipline in much detail, since this has been done with great success by Rank and Sachs in a volume (one of Löwenfeld's _Grenzfragen_) which deals exhaustively with this side of analytical research. Moreover, this branch is still in its infancy; it has been little worked at, consists mostly of attempts and to a certain extent of work which as yet has only been planned. No reasonable person will see any grounds for a reproach in this. An enormous mass of work confronts our little group of workers, most of whom have their main occupation elsewhere and can bring only the qualifications of an amateur to the technical problems of these unfamiliar fields of science. These workers who belong really to psycho-analysis make no secret of their lack of special training; they intend merely to point a way, and to occupy the places of the specialists to whom they recommend analytic technique {320} and principles only until the latter are ready to take up the work themselves. That the results achieved are nevertheless not inconsiderable is due partly to the fruitfulness of the analytic method, and partly to the circumstance that already there are a few investigators who, without being medical men, have taken up the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences as their profession in life.

As is natural, most of these branches of study owe their origin to remarks in my earlier analytic writings. Analytic examination of neurotic persons and the neurotic manifestations observable in normal people necessitated conclusions in regard to psychological connections which could not possibly be limited to the field in which they had been discovered. In this way analysis has provided us not only with the explanation of pathological phenomena, but has revealed their connection with normal mental life and disclosed undreamt-of relationships between psychiatry and the most various other sciences dealing with products of the mind. Certain typical dreams, for instance, have yielded an explanation of many myths and fairy-tales. Riklin and Abraham followed this hint and initiated those researches into myths which have found their completion, in a manner complying with all expert demands, in Rank's works on mythology. Further investigation into dream-symbolism led to the heart of the problems of mythology, folklore (Jones and Storfer), and the abstractions of religion. A deep impression was made on all hearers at one of the psycho-analytical Congresses when a pupil of Jung demonstrated the correspondence of schizophrenic phantasy-formations with the cosmogonies of primitive times and races. Mythological material later on received further elaboration, no longer free from {321} objection and yet very interesting, at the hands of Jung, in works attempting to correlate the various neurotic, religious and mythological phantasies.

Another path led from the investigation of dreams to the analysis of works of imagination and of their creators---poets and artists themselves. The first step was taken by the recognition that dreams invented by writers will often yield to analysis in the same way as genuine ones (Gradiva). The conception of an unconscious mental activity made it possible to form a preliminary idea of the nature of poetic creative work; and the realization, gained in the study of neurotics, of the part played by the instincts enabled us to perceive the sources of artistic production and confronted us with two problems: how the artist reacts to these stimuli and what means he employs to disguise these reactions[69]. Most analysts with wide general interests have contributed something to the solution of these problems, which are among the most fascinating in the whole application of psycho-analysis. Naturally, opposition in this direction also was not lacking on the part of those who know nothing of analysis; it took the same form as it did in the original field of psycho-analytic research---the same misconceptions and vehement rejections. It was only to be expected from the beginning that, whatever regions psycho-analysis might penetrate into, it would inevitably experience the same struggles with the occupants in possession. These little invasions, however, have not yet all aroused in some fields the attention that awaits them in the future. Among the strictly scientific applications of analysis to literature, Rank's {322} exhaustive work on the theme of incest easily takes the first place; its subject will ensure it the greatest unpopularity. Up to the present, little work based on psychoanalysis has been done in the sciences of language and history. I myself ventured the first approach to the problems of the psychology of religion, in 1910, by drawing a parallel between religious ritual and the ceremonials of neurotics. Dr. Pfister, a clergyman in Zurich, has traced the origin of religious fanaticism back to perverse erotism in his book on the piety of Count von Zinzendorf (as well as in other contributions). In the latest works of the Zurich school we find analysis permeated with religious ideas rather than the opposite, as is intended.

In the four essays called _Totem und Tabu_ I have made an attempt to deal with the problems of race-psychology in the light of analysis; this line of investigation leads direct to the origins of the most important institutions of our civilization, of state organization, morality and religion, and, moreover, of the prohibition against incest and of the conscience. How far the connections which have come to light in this matter will withstand criticism is probably not ascertainable at the present time.

The first example of an application of the analytic mode of thought to the problems of æsthetics was contained in my book on _Wit_. Everything beyond this is still awaiting workers, who may expect a particularly rich harvest in this field. We are entirely without the co-operation of specialists in all these branches, and in order to attract them Hanns Sachs founded in 1912 the periodical _Imago_ which is edited by him and Rank. A beginning has been made by Hitschmann and von Winterstein in illuminating philosophical systems and personalities by analysis, and here both more extended and deeper {323} investigation is much needed.

The revolutionary discoveries of psycho-analysis in regard to the mental life of children---the part played in it by sexual impulses (von Hug-Hellmuth), and the final fate of those components of sexuality which cannot be taken up into the function of reproduction---were bound to direct attention early to pedagogics and to stimulate an attempt to bring the analytic point of view into the foreground in this field of work. Recognition is due to the Rev. Dr. Pfister for having, with sincere enthusiasm, initiated the application of psycho-analysis in this direction and brought it to the notice of ministers of religion and persons concerned with education.[70] He has succeeded in gaining the sympathy and participation of a number of Swiss pedagogues in this matter. Certain members of his own profession are said to share his views but to have elected nevertheless to remain cautiously in the background. In retreating from psycho-analysis, a section of Vienna analysts seems to have alighted upon a kind of medical pedagogy.[71]

With these indications, which are far from complete, I have attempted to give some idea of the innumerable connections, not even yet exhausted, which have evinced themselves between medical psycho-analysis and other fields of science. There is material for a generation of investigators to work at, and I do not doubt that the work will be carried out as soon as the resistances against psycho-analysis are overcome in the field in which it originally appeared.[72] {324}

To write the story of these resistances would be, in my opinion, both fruitless and inopportune at the present time. The story is not very creditable to the scientific men of our time. But to this I will immediately add that it has never occurred to me to pour contempt upon the opponents of psycho-analysis merely because they were opponents, apart from the few paltry creatures, swindlers and adventurers, who are always found on both sides in time of war. I knew very well how to account for the behaviour of these opponents and, moreover, I had learnt that psycho-analysis always brings to the surface the worst that is in a man. But I made up my mind not to answer my opponents and, so far as my influence went, to restrain others from controversy. Under the peculiar conditions of the altercation about psycho-analysis it seemed to me very doubtful whether either spoken or written debates would avail anything; it was certain which way the majority at congresses and meetings would go, and my faith in the reasonableness and nobility of the gentlemen who opposed me was not at any time great. Experience shows that only very few persons are capable of preserving courtesy in a scientific dispute, to say nothing of keeping to the point, and an altercation about a scientific matter had always been odious to me. Perhaps this attitude on my part has been misunderstood; perhaps I have been thought so good-natured or so easily intimidated that no further notice need be taken of me. This was a mistake; I can rave and revile as well as anybody, but I do not find it so easy to give expression in a manner suitable for publication to the emotions involved and therefore I abstain entirely from the attempt.

Perhaps in many respects it would have been better if I had given free rein to my own feelings and to those of others round me. We have all {325} heard of the interesting attempt to explain psycho-analysis as a product of the peculiar character of Vienna as a city; as recently as 1913 Janet did not disdain to employ this argument, although he himself is undoubtedly proud of being a Parisian. This inspiration runs as follows: psycho-analysis, so far as it consists of the assertion that the neuroses are traceable to disturbances in the sexual life, could only have come to birth in a town like Vienna---in an atmosphere of sensuality and immorality foreign to other cities---and it simply contains a reflection, a projection into theory, as it were, of these peculiar Viennese conditions. Now honestly I am no local patriot; but this theory about psycho-analysis always seems to me quite exceptionally stupid, so stupid, in fact, that I have sometimes been inclined to suppose that the reproach of being a citizen of Vienna is only a euphemistic substitute for another reproach which no one would care to put forward openly. If the premisses on which the argument rests were the opposite of what they are, then it might be worth a hearing. Given a town in which the inhabitants imposed exceptional restrictions upon themselves in regard to sexual gratification, and at the same time exhibited a marked tendency to severe neurotic disorders, that town might certainly give rise in the mind of an observer to the idea that these two circumstances had some connection with each other, and to lead to the inference that one was contingent upon the other. But neither of these assumptions is true of Vienna. The Viennese are no more abstinent and no more nervous than dwellers in other large cities. There is rather less embarrassment---less prudery---in regard to sexual relationships than in the cities of the West and North which are so proud of their chastity. These peculiar characteristics of Vienna would be more {326} likely to mislead the supposed observer in regard to the causation of neurosis than to throw any light on it.

Vienna has done everything possible, however, to deny her share in the origin of psycho-analysis. In no other place is the hostile indifference of the learned and cultivated section of the population so evident to the analyst as in Vienna.

It may be that my policy of avoiding wide publicity is to some extent responsible for this. If I had permitted or given an opportunity for the medical societies of Vienna to busy themselves with psycho-analysis in stormy debates, where violent feelings could come to the surface, and the accusations and abuse which everyone had in his heart could be freely expressed, perhaps the ban on psycho-analysis would have been overcome by now and it would no longer be a stranger in its native city. As it is---the poet may be right when he makes his Wallenstein say:

But this the Viennese will not forgive me That I deprived them of a spectacle.

The task to which I was not equal---that of demonstrating _suaviter in modo_ to the opponents of psycho-analysis their injustice and arbitrary attitude---was undertaken and carried out most efficiently by Bleuler in 1911 in his essay _Die Psychanalyse Freuds: Verteidigung und Kritische Bemerkungen_. It would be so natural for me to praise this work which criticizes both sides that I will hasten to say what I deprecate in it. It seems to me in spite of all not truly impartial, too lenient to the faults of the opponents of psycho-analysis and too severe on the shortcomings of its adherents. This trait in it may possibly explain why the opinion of a psychiatrist of such high repute, such undoubted ability and independence, has not had more {327} effect upon his colleagues. The author of _Affektivität_ (1906) will not be surprised that the effect of a book is determined not by the strength of its arguments but by the note of feeling in it. Another aspect of the effect of this book---that on the followers of psycho-analysis---was destroyed later on by Bleuler himself, when in 1913 he showed the reverse side of his attitude to psycho-analysis in his _Kritik der Freudschen Theorie_. In this book he demolishes so much of the structure of psycho-analytical theory that our opponents may well be glad of the assistance this champion of psycho-analysis renders them. No new arguments or better observations have served him as a guide to these pronouncements; he takes his stand simply on his own judgement and no longer himself admits, as he did in earlier works, the inadequacy of this ground. It seemed therefore that an almost irreparable loss threatened psycho-analysis here. But in his last publication, _Die Kritiken der Schizophrenie_, 1914, Bleuler summons up all his forces in the face of the attacks made upon him for introducing psycho-analysis into his book on schizophrenia and makes what he himself calls a 'presumptuous claim'. 'But now I will make a presumptuous claim: I consider that up to the present the various kinds of psychology have contributed precious little towards an explanation of the underlying connections in psychogenic symptoms and diseases, but that the psychology of the depths offers something towards a psychology which still awaits creation and which physicians are in need of in order to understand their patients and to cure them rationally; and I even believe that in my _Schizophrenie_ I have taken a very short step towards the required understanding. The first two assertions are certainly correct; the last may be an error.' {328}

Since by 'psychology of the depths' he means nothing else but psycho-analysis we may for the present be content with this admission.

III

_Mach es kurz!_ _Am Jüngsten Tag ist's nur ein Furz!

Goethe.

Two years after the first, the second private Congress of psycho-analysts took place at Nuremberg, in March, 1910. In the interval between them, influenced partly by the favourable reception in America, the increasing hostility in German-speaking countries, and by the unforeseen acquisition of support from Zurich, I had conceived a project which with the help of my friend Ferenczi I carried out at this second Congress. What I had in mind was to organize the psycho-analytical movement, to transfer its centre to Zurich and to give it a leader who would look after its future career. As this scheme has met with much opposition among the adherents of psycho-analysis, I will set out my reasons for it in some detail. I hope that they will justify my action, even though it turns out that it was not a very wise one.

I judged that its association with Vienna was no recommendation but rather a handicap to the new movement. A place in the heart of Europe like Zurich, at which an academic instructor had adopted psycho-analysis in his institution, seemed to me much more promising. I supposed too that my own person constituted a second handicap; all estimates of my personality were vitiated by the liking or dislike of the different factions; I was either compared with Darwin and Kepler or was hooted at as a general paralytic. I wished to withdraw myself into the background, therefore, as well as the city {329} where psycho-analysis first saw the light. Moreover, I was no longer young; I saw that there was a long road ahead, and I felt oppressed by the thought that the responsibilities of a leader should fall to me at my time of life. Yet I felt that there must be a leader. I knew only too well the pitfalls lying in wait for anyone who undertakes analysis, and hoped that many of them might be avoided if someone prepared to instruct and admonish could be established in a position of authority. This position had at first been occupied by myself, owing to my fifteen years' start in experience which nothing could make up. I felt the need of transferring this authority to a younger man, who would then as a matter of course take my place after my death. This man could only be C. G. Jung, since Bleuler was my contemporary in age; in favour of Jung were his exceptional talents, the contributions he had already made to psycho-analysis, his independent position and the impression of energy and assurance which his personality conveyed. In addition to this, he seemed ready to enter into a friendly relationship with me and for my sake to give up certain prejudices in regard to race which he had previously permitted himself. I had no inkling at that time that in spite of all these advantages the choice was a most unfortunate one, that I had lighted upon a person who was incapable of tolerating the authority of another, who was still less fitted himself to wield it, and whose energies were ruthlessly devoted to the furtherance of his own interests.

I considered it necessary to form an official association because I feared the abuses to which psycho-analysis would be subjected as soon as it became popular. There should be some headquarters whose duty it would be to announce: 'All this nonsense is nothing to do with {330} psycho-analysis; this is not analysis.' The meetings of the branch societies (which together would form the international association) would provide opportunities for learning and studying psycho-analysis and for the training of medical men, whose work would then have a kind of guarantee upon it. Moreover, it seemed to me desirable, since official science had pronounced its solemn ban upon psycho-analysis and had declared a boycott against medical men and institutions practising it, that the adherents of psycho-analysis should come together for friendly communication with one another and mutual support.

This and nothing else was what I hoped to achieve by founding the International Psycho-Analytical Association. It was probably more than could be attained. Just as my opponents were to discover that it was not possible to stem the tide of the new movement, so I was to find that it would not proceed in the direction I wished to mark out for it. The proposals made by Ferenczi in Nuremberg were adopted, it is true; Jung was elected President and made Riklin his secretary; the publication of a correspondence bulletin which should link the Central Executive with the branch Societies was resolved upon. The objects of the Association were declared to be 'to foster and further the science of psycho-analysis founded by Freud, both as a pure discipline of psychology and in its application to medicine and the mental sciences; and to promote mutual support among the members in all endeavours to acquire and to spread psycho-analytical knowledge.' The scheme, unfortunately, was very violently opposed by the Vienna group. Adler, in great excitement, expressed the fear that 'censorship and restrictions of scientific freedom' were intended. Finally the Viennese gave in, after having secured that not Zurich, but the place {331} of residence of the President, should be the centre of the Association and that he should be elected for two years.

At this Congress three local branch societies were inaugurated: one in Berlin, under the chairmanship of Abraham; one in Zurich, whose head became President of the Association; and one in Vienna, the chairmanship of which I made over to Adler. A fourth group, in Budapest, could not be formed until later. Bleuler had not attended the Congress on account of illness, and later he evinced hesitation about joining the Association on grounds of principle; he let himself be persuaded to do so, it is true, after a personal conversation with me, but resigned again shortly after on account of disagreements at Zurich. This severed the connection between the Zurich group and the Burghölzli institution.

One of the results of the Nuremberg Congress was the founding of the _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, for which purpose Adler and Stekel joined forces. It had obviously been designed originally as an instrument of opposition, to win back for Vienna the hegemony threatened by the election of Jung. But when the two founders of the journal, labouring under the difficulties of finding a publisher, assured me of their friendly intentions and as a guarantee of their sincerity gave me a right of veto, I accepted the direction of it and worked energetically for this new organ; its first number appeared in September, 1910.

I will now continue the story of the psycho-analytical Congresses. The third Congress took place in September, 1911, in Weimar, and surpassed the previous ones in spirit and scientific fervour. J. J. Putnam, who was present on this occasion, declared afterwards in America how much {332} pleasure it had given him and expressed his respect for 'the mental attitude' of those present, quoting some words I was said to have used in reference to them, 'They have learnt to endure a bit of the truth.' It is a fact that no one who had attended scientific congresses could have failed to carry away a favourable impression of the Psycho-Analytical Association. I myself had conducted the first two Congresses and I had allowed every speaker time for his paper and left discussions to take place in private afterwards among the members. Jung, as President, took over the direction at Weimar and instituted the practice of discussing each paper at the time, which, however, gave rise to no difficulties on that occasion.

A very different picture was presented by the fourth Congress in Munich two years later in September, 1913; it is still clear in the memory of all who were present. It was conducted in a disagreeable and incorrect manner by Jung; the speakers were greatly restricted in time and the discussions overwhelmed the papers. By a stroke of malice on the part of chance it happened that that evil genius, Hoche, had settled in the very house in which the meetings were held. Hoche might easily have convinced himself how ridiculous his notion was of the adherents of psycho-analysis as a fanatical sect blindly submissive to their leader. The fatiguing and unedifying proceedings ended in the re-election of Jung to the Presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, which he accepted, although two-fifths of those present refused their support. We dispersed without any desire to meet again.

About the time of this third Congress the position of the International Psycho-Analytical Association was as follows. The branch societies in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich had been formed at the Congress {333} in Nuremberg as early as 1910. In May, 1911, a branch at Munich under the chairmanship of Dr. L. Seif was incorporated. In the same year the first American branch society was formed under the chairmanship of A. A. Brill, with the name 'The New York Psycho-Analytic Society'. At the Congress in Weimar the foundation of a second American Society was sanctioned; it came into existence during the following year under the name of 'The American Psycho-Analytic Association', and included members in Canada and the whole of America; Putnam was elected President and Ernest Jones secretary. Shortly before the Congress in Munich in 1913, the Budapest branch society was formed under the chairmanship of S. Ferenczi. Soon after this the first English group was formed by Ernest Jones, who had returned to London. The membership of these branch societies, of which there were now eight, naturally gives no measure of the number of unorganized students and adherents of psycho-analysis.

The development of the periodicals devoted to psycho-analysis also deserves mention. The first of these was a series of monographs entitled _Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde_ which have appeared irregularly since 1907 and now number fifteen volumes. (The publisher was at first H. Heller in Vienna and later F. Deuticke.) They comprise works by Freud (1 and 7), Riklin, Jung, Abraham (4 and 11), Rank (5 and 13), Sadger, Pfister, M. Graf, Jones (10 and 14), Storfer and v. Hug-Hellmuth. When the journal _Imago_, which will be referred to later, was founded this form of publication ceased to have quite the same value. After the meeting in Salzburg in 1908, the _Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen_ was founded, which appeared for five years under Jung's editorship and has now been {334} re-issued, under new editorship and with a slight change in the title, as the _Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse_. It is no longer intended, as formerly, as an archive for collecting valuable work on psycho-analysis, but its editorial activity is aimed at recording all work done and advances made in psycho-analysis during the year. The _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, which was set on foot by Adler and Stekel, as already stated, after the foundation of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Nuremberg, 1910, has in quite a short time had a very unsettled career. As early as the tenth number of the first volume an announcement appeared on the title-page that, on account of scientific differences of opinion with the direction, Dr. Alfred Adler had resolved to withdraw voluntarily from editorship. After this Dr. Stekel remained the sole editor (summer of 1911). At the Congress in Weimar the _Zentralblatt_ was raised to the position of official organ of the International Association and made available to all members by increasing the annual subscription. From the third number of the second year (winter, 1912) Stekel alone was responsible for its contents. His behaviour, which is not easy to describe, compelled me to resign the direction and hurriedly to establish a new organ for psycho-analysis in the _Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse_. The combined efforts of almost all our workers and of H. Heller, the new publisher, resulted in the appearance of the first number in January, 1913, whereupon it took the place of the _Zentralblatt_ as official organ of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

Meanwhile, early in 1912 a new Journal _Imago_ (published by Heller), designed exclusively for the application of psycho-analysis to the mental sciences, was founded by Dr. Hanns Sachs and Dr. Otto {335} Rank. _Imago_ is now in the middle of its third year and enjoys the patronage of a continually increasing number of readers, many of whom have no concern with medical psycho-analysis.

Apart from these four periodical publications (_Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde_, _Jahrbuch_, _Zeitschrift_, and _Imago_) there are other German and foreign journals publishing works which may claim a place in the literature of psycho-analysis. _The Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, directed by Morton Prince, usually contains so many good analytic contributions that it may be regarded as the principal representative of analytic literature in America. In the winter of 1913, White and Jelliffe in New York started a new journal, probably in view of the fact that most medical men in America who are interested in analysis find the German language a great difficulty; it is called the _Psycho-Analytic Review_ and is devoted exclusively to psycho-analysis.[73]

I now have to consider two secessions which have taken place among the adherents of psycho-analysis; the first occurred between the founding of the Association in 1910 and the Congress at Weimar in 1911; the second took place after this and disclosed itself at Munich in 1913. The disappointment that they caused me might have been averted {336} if I had considered more thoughtfully the reactions of patients undergoing analytic treatment. I knew very well of course that anyone may take to flight on a first approach to the unwelcome truths of psycho-analysis; I had always myself asserted that everyone's understanding will be limited by his own repressions (rather, by the resistances which sustain them) so that he cannot go beyond a certain point in his relation to analysis. But I had not expected that anyone who had reached a certain depth in his comprehension of analysis could discard it again, or ever lose it. And yet everyday experience with patients had shown that total rejection of all analytical knowledge may ensue whenever a strong resistance arises at any deep level in the mind; one may have succeeded in laboriously bringing a patient to grasp some parts of analytical knowledge and to handle them like possessions of his own, and yet may see him, in the power of the very next resistance, throw all he has learnt to the winds and defend himself against it as in the first days of his treatment. I had to learn that just the same thing can happen with psycho-analysts as with patients under analysis.

It is no easy or enviable task to write the history of these two defections, partly because I am devoid of any strong personal motive to do so---I had not expected gratitude nor am I revengeful in any active degree---and partly because I know that by so doing I lay myself open to the contumely of not very scrupulous opponents and offer to the enemies of analysis the spectacle they have so warmly desired---of seeing the psycho-analysts tearing one another to bits. I had to exercise so much restraint to keep myself from entering the lists with opponents outside analysis; and now I see myself compelled to take up arms against former followers of it or those who would {337} still like to be called followers. I have no choice in the matter, however; only convenience or cowardice could prompt one to keep silence and this would do more harm than a frank revelation of the existing evils. Anyone who has followed the growth of other scientific movements will know that the same upheavals and dissensions have commonly occurred in them too. It may be that with them they were more carefully concealed; but psycho-analysis, which repudiates so many conventional ideals, is more honest in these matters also.

Another very disagreeable circumstance is that I cannot altogether avoid some analysis in explanation of these two opposition movements. Analysis is not suited, however, to be used in controversy; it presupposes the consent of the analysed; the situation of analysis involves a superior and a subordinate. Anyone who presses analysis into the service of polemics must therefore expect the person analysed to use the weapon upon him in turn, so that the discussion will reach a state which entirely excludes the possibility of convincing any impartial third person. I shall therefore restrict my use of analytic knowledge, and with it, of indiscreet and provocative statements, as far as is possible; and in addition I will state that no criticism in regard to scientific aspects are based on these grounds. I do not propose to deal with the possible truth in the substance of the theories rejected nor shall I attempt to refute them. This task is left to other able workers in psycho-analysis and has already been performed in part. I merely intend to show that these theories controvert the fundamental principles of analysis (and on what points they controvert them) and that for this reason they should not be known under this name. So I shall only avail myself of analysis in {338} order to explain how these departures from analysis could arise among analysts. At the points of departure, it is true, I must defend the just rights of psycho-analysis by purely critical remarks.

The first task confronting psycho-analysis was to explain the neuroses; it took the two facts of resistance and transference as starting-points, and, giving due weight to the third fact of amnesia, accounts for them with its theories of repression, the sexual propelling forces in neurosis and the unconscious. Psycho-analysis has never claimed to provide a complete theory of human mentality as a whole, but only expected that what it offered should be applied to supplement and correct the knowledge acquired by other means. Now Alfred Adler's theory goes far beyond this point; it seeks at one stroke to explain the behaviour and character of human beings as well as the neurotic and psychotic manifestations in them. It is actually more suited to any other field than that of neurosis, although from motives connected with the history of its development it still places this in the foreground. For many years I had opportunities of studying Dr. Adler and have never refused to recognize his unusual ability, combined with a particularly speculative disposition. As an instance of the 'persecution' that he maintains he has suffered at my hands, I can point to the fact that after the Association was founded I made over to him the leadership of the Vienna society. Not until urgent demands were put forward by all the members of the society was I induced to take the chair again at its scientific meetings. When I had perceived how little gift Adler had in particular for appreciating the importance of unconscious material my view changed to an expectation that he would apply himself to the connections of {339} psycho-analysis with psychology and to discovering the biological foundations of instinctual processes; this idea was justified in a certain sense by his valuable work on the inferiority of organs. He did actually do something of the kind, but his work conveys an impression _as if_---to speak in his own jargon---it intended to prove that psycho-analysis was wrong in everything and that the sexual propelling forces had only been given so much significance by psycho-analysts in consequence of an undue credulity towards the statements of neurotics. Of the personal motive of his work I may also speak publicly, since he himself declared it in the presence of a small circle of members of the Vienna Society. 'Do you think it is much pleasure for me to stand all my life long in your shadow?' To be sure, I see nothing reprehensible in a younger man freely admitting the ambition which in any case one would surmise to be an incentive of his work. But even though a man is dominated by a motive of this kind he should know how to avoid being what the English, with their fine social tact, call 'unfair'---a word which can only be expressed in German by something much coarser. How little Adler was capable of this is shown by the profusion of petty outbursts of malice which disfigure his writings and by the indications they contain of an irrepressible mania on the question of priority. At the Vienna Psycho-analytical Society we once actually heard him claim priority in regard to the 'unity of the neuroses' and the 'dynamic conception' of neurosis. This caused me great astonishment, since I had always believed I had voiced these two principles before I had ever known Adler.

This craving of Adler's for a place in the sun has, however, had one result which is bound to be beneficial to psycho-analysis. When, after {340} irreconcilable scientific disagreements had come to light, I was obliged to bring about Adler's resignation from the editorial staff of the _Zentralblatt_, he left the Vienna society also and founded a new one, which at first adopted the charming title of 'The Society for Free Psycho-Analysis'. Unfortunately, however, the outside world unconnected with analysis is clearly as incapable of appreciating the differences between the views of two psycho-analysts as we Europeans are of detecting shades of difference in the faces of two Chinamen. 'Free' psycho-analysis remained under the shadow of 'official', 'orthodox' psycho-analysis and was treated as an appendage of the latter. Then Adler took a step for which we are thankful and severed all connection with psycho-analysis, designating his theory 'Individual Psychology'. There is room enough on God's earth, and anybody who can is fully entitled to cut any capers he likes on it without interference; but it is not a good thing for people who no longer understand one another and no longer agree together to remain under the same roof together. Adler's 'Individual Psychology' is now one of the many psychological movements adverse to psycho-analysis, and its further development is no concern of ours.

The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a 'system', which psycho-analysis was careful to avoid becoming. It is also a remarkably good example of 'secondary elaboration', such as occurs, for instance, in the process which dream-material undergoes by the action of waking thought. In Adler's case the place of dream-material is taken by the new material obtained through psycho-analytic study; this is then regarded exclusively from the standpoint of the ego, reduced to terms with which the ego is familiar, translated, twisted, and misunderstood {341} exactly as happens in dream-formation. Moreover, the Adlerian theory is characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies, so that it consists of three elements of quite dissimilar value: the useful contributions to the psychology of the ego, the superfluous but admissible introduction of a new jargon to describe analytical facts, and the distortions and perversions of these facts when they do not comply with presuppositions in regard to the ego. The first element has never been ginored by psycho-analysis, although it was not one that demanded special attention; psycho-analysis was more concerned to show that all the ego-trends contain libidinal components. The Adlerian theory emphasizes the opposite view, the egoistic constituent in all libidinal tendencies. This would have been an obvious gain if Adler did not misuse this conclusion by throughout denying the libidinal trends in favour of the egoistic component in them. His theory does what all patients do and what our waking thought in general does---namely, makes use of a _rationalization_, as Jones has called it, in order to conceal unconscious motives. Adler carries his theory to such lengths that he regards the ambition to mastery of the woman, to being _above_, as positively the strongest motive in the sexual act itself. I do not know if he has given vent to these monstrous ideas in his writings.

Psycho-analysis recognized early that every neurotic symptom owes its existence to a compromise. Every symptom must therefore in some way comply with the demands of the ego which regulates repression, must offer some advantage, admit of some profitable utilization, or it would undergo the same fate as the original impulse itself which is being kept in check. The expression 'advantage by illness' represents this state of things; one is even justified in differentiating the {342} 'paranosic' gain to the ego, which is operative at the start, from an 'epinosic' aspect of it, which supervenes and relates to other purposes of the ego, when the symptom is required to be permanently maintained. It has also long been known that the withdrawal of this advantage by illness, or a disappearance of it in consequence of some change in external circumstances (reality), constitutes one of the mechanisms of a cure of the symptom. In the Adlerian doctrine the main emphasis falls on these easily verifiable and clearly intelligible connections, while it is altogether overlooked that on innumerable occasions the ego is merely making a virtue of necessity in submitting, because of the use it can make of it, to the very disagreeable symptom which is forced upon it---for instance, in accepting anxiety as a means to security. The ego is here playing the part of the clown in a circus who tries to convince the audience by his gestures that every figure of the _manège_ is performed at his command. But only the youngest among the spectators are deceived by it.

The second constituent of the Adlerian theory psycho-analysis must claim as its own. It is actually nothing else but psycho-analytic knowledge, which the author extracted from all the sources open to him during ten years of work in common and has now labelled as his own by changing the terminology of it. 'Insurance' (_Sicherung_), for instance, I myself consider a better word than 'protective measure' (_Schutzmassregel_) which I employ, but I cannot find any difference in their meaning. Again, a host of familiar features come to light in Adler's propositions when one restores the original 'phantasized' and 'phantasy' in place of 'manufactured (_fingiert_), fictive, and fiction'. This identity would be emphasized by psycho-analysis even if {343} the author had not for many years taken part in our common work.

The third element in the Adlerian theory, the distortions and misinterpretations put upon the disagreeable facts of analysis, constitutes that which henceforth definitely separates 'Individual Psychology' from psycho-analysis. As is known, the principle of Adler's system is that the governing motive of self-preservation in the individual, his 'will to power', expresses itself pre-eminently in the form of a 'masculine protest' in the conduct of life, in character-formation and in neurosis. This 'masculine protest', the motive-force at work, according to Adler's theory, is however nothing else but repression detached from its psychological mechanism and, moreover, sexualized in addition---which accords very badly with his vaunted ejection of sexuality from its place in mental life. The 'masculine protest' undoubtedly exists, but in making it the motor of mental life one is treating the observed fact like a spring-board which is left behind as one raises oneself from it. Let us consider one of the fundamental situations in which desire is felt in infancy, that of a child observing the sexual act between adults. When the life-story of those persons who later come into the physician's hands is subjected to analysis it is found that at that moment two currents of feeling took possession of the immature spectator; in the case of a boy, one is the impulse to put himself in the place of the active man, and the other, the opposing feeling, is to identify himself with the suffering woman. Between them these two impulses exhaust the pleasurable possibilities of the situation. The first alone can come under the head of the masculine protest, if this conception is to retain any meaning at all. The second, however, the further course of {344} which Adler either disregards or knows nothing about, is the one that assumes greater significance in the neurosis later. Adler has so merged himself in the jealous narrowness of the ego that he takes account only of those tendencies that are agreeable to the ego and are fostered by it; the situation of neurosis, in which these impulses rise up against the ego, is the very one that lies outside his horizon.

In the attempt---one which psycho-analysis has made necessary---to correlate the fundamental principle of his theory with the mental life of the child, Adler exhibits the most serious departures from actual observation and the most fundamental confusion of concepts. The biological, social and psychological meanings of 'masculine' and 'feminine' are here hopelessly mixed in an inextricable combination. It is quite impossible to suppose---and demonstrably so by observation---that the child---male or female---founds the plan of its life on an original depreciation of the female sex and takes the wish 'to be a real man' as its guiding principle. Children have, to begin with, no idea of the significance of a difference between the sexes; on the contrary, they start with the assumption that the same genital organ (the male) belongs to both sexes; they do not begin their enquiries into sexual problems with the question of sexual differences, while the social underestimation of the female sex is completely foreign to them. There are women in whose neurosis the wish to be a man has played no part. Whatever of the masculine protest can be shown to exist is easily traceable to a disturbance in the primary narcissism due to threats of castration or to early interference with sexual activities. All disputes about the psychogenesis of the neuroses must eventually be decided on the field {345} of the neuroses of childhood. Careful dissection of a neurosis in early childhood puts an end to all misapprehensions about the ætiology of the neuroses and to all doubts about the part played by the sexual impulses in them. That is why, in his criticism of Jung's work 'Conflicts in the Mind of the Child',[74] Adler had to resort to the imputation that the material of the case had been arranged in conformity with some tendency, 'probably by the father'.

I will not dwell any longer on the biological aspect of the Adlerian theory nor discuss whether either actual inferiority of organs or a subjective feeling of it---one does not know which---is really capable of carrying the weight of Adler's system. I will merely interpolate the remark that if it were so neurosis would be a by-product of general decrepitude, whereas observation shows that an impressive majority of ugly, misshapen, helpless and miserable creatures fail to react to their defects by neurosis. Nor will I deal with the very interesting proposition by which inferiority is referred back to feelings of childishness. It shows the disguise in which the factor of infantilism, so strongly emphasized by psycho-analysis, recurs in 'Individual Psychology'. On the other hand, I must point out how all the psychological acquisitions of psycho-analysis have been thrown to the winds by Adler. In his book _Der nervöse Charakter_ the unconscious is still mentioned as a psychological peculiarity, without however, any relation to the system. Later on he quite logically declared that it was a matter of indifference to him whether an idea was conscious or unconscious. Adler never from the beginning evinced any understanding of repression. In abstracting a paper read at the {346} Vienna Society (February, 1911) he writes: 'On the evidence of a case it must be pointed out that the patient had never repressed his libido, against which he was continually securing himself.'[75] Soon after, in a discussion at the Vienna Society, he said: 'If you ask where repression comes from, you are told "From civilization"; and if you ask where civilization comes from, you are told "From repression". You can see therefore it is nothing but playing with words.' A tithe of the acuteness and ingenuity with which Adler has unmasked the defensive devices of the 'nervous character' would have sufficed to show him the way out of this pettifogging kind of reasoning. What it means is simply that civilization is based upon the repressions effected by former generations, and that each fresh generation is required to maintain this civilization by effectuating the same repressions. I once heard of a child that thought people were laughing at it, and began to cry, because when it asked 'Where do eggs come from?' they told it 'From hens', and then when it went on to enquire where hens came from, they said 'From eggs'. But they were not playing with words; on the contrary, they were telling it the truth.

Equally empty and unproductive is all that Adler has to offer about dreams, the shibboleth of psycho-analysis. First he regarded dreams as a turning from the masculine to the feminine side, which is simply a translation of the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams into terms of the 'masculine protest'. Later on he found that the essence of dreams lies in enabling man to realize unconsciously things that consciously he has to go without. Adler must also be credited with priority in confounding the dream itself with the latent dream-thoughts, which {347} leads to the discovery of a 'prospective tendency' in them; Maeder followed his lead in this later. In this he overlooks only too readily that every interpretation of a dream that is on the surface entirely incomprehensible is based on the very method of dream-interpretation the assumptions and conclusions of which he disputes. In regard to resistance, Adler informs us that it serves the purposes of the patient's opposition to the physician. This is certainly true; it is as much as to say that it serves the purposes of the resistance. Where it comes from, however, or how it happens that its manifestations are at the disposal of the patient in this way is not enquired into, being a point of no interest to the ego. The detailed mechanism of symptoms and the manifestations of disease, the foundations of the manifold variety of diseases and their forms of expression, are disregarded _in toto_; for everything is pressed equally into the service of the masculine protest, self-assertion and the aggrandizement of personality. The system is complete; to produce it an enormous amount of labour in shuffling interpretations has been expended, while it has not furnished a single new observation. I imagine I have made it clear that it has nothing to do with psycho-analysis.

The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all; but we must not forget that, weighed down by the burden of its sexual desires, humanity is ready to accept anything when tempted with 'ascendancy over sexuality' as a bait.

Adler's defection took place before the Congress at Weimar in 1911; after this date the Swiss began theirs. The first signs of it, {348} curiously enough, were some remarks of Riklin's in popular articles in Swiss publications, by which the general public learned earlier than the closest colleagues in the work that psycho-analysis had got the better of some regrettable errors which had previously discredited it. In 1912 Jung boasted, in a letter from America, that his modifications of psycho-analysis had overcome the resistances of many people who had hitherto refused to have anything to do with it. I replied that that was nothing to boast of; the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psycho-analysis the quicker would he see resistances vanishing. This modification which the Swiss were so proud of introducing was again nothing else but a theoretical suppression of the sexual factor. I confess that from the beginning I regarded this 'advance' as too far-reaching an adjustment to the demands of reality.

These two reactionary movements veering away from psycho-analysis, which I must now compare with each other, show another point in common, in that they both court popular favour by means of certain lofty ideas, as if they were _sub specie æternitatis_. With Adler, the relativity of all knowledge and the right of the personality artificially to construe the substance of knowledge in an individual manner plays this part; by Jung the appeal is made to the age-old right of youth to throw off the fetters in which tyrannical age with its hidebound views would bind it. A few remarks must be devoted to exposing the fallacy of these ideas. The relativity of our knowledge is a consideration which may be used against every other science just as well as against psycho-analysis. Its use is prompted by well-known reactionary currents of present-day feeling, which are hostile to science, and it sets up an appearance of superiority to which no one {349} is entitled. No one among us can guess what the ultimate judgement of mankind about our tentative theories will be. There are instances in which rejection by the next three generations has been corrected by the succeeding one and changed into recognition. After he has listened carefully to the voice of criticism in himself and has paid some attention to the criticisms of his opponents, there is nothing for the individual worker to do but to stand fast for his own convictions which are based on experience. One must be content to behave honestly in this matter, not assuming the office of judge which is one reserved to the remote future. It is going very far wrong to stress the question of personal and arbitrary views in a scientific matter; it is clearly an attempt to rob psycho-analysis of its position as a science, after it has indeed already been depreciated by the previous consideration. Anyone who values highly the scientific mode of thought will rather seek all possible means and methods of circumscribing the influence of the personal arbitrary factor wherever it plays too great a part. It must be borne in mind, too, that all eagerness to defend is out of place. These arguments of Adler's are not intended seriously; they are intended only for use against opponents; when confronted with his own theories they keep at a respectful distance. Nor have they hindered his own followers from hailing him as the Messiah for whose appearance expectant humanity has been prepared by any number of forerunners. The Messiah is certainly no longer a relative phenomenon.

Jung's _ad captandam benevolentiam_ argument rests on the unduly optimistic assumption that the progress of the human race, of culture and knowledge, has unrolled itself in an unbroken line; as if there had been no epigones, reactions and restorations after every {350} revolution, no generations who have taken a backward step and foregone the gains of their forefathers. Its approximation to the demands of the multitude, its abandonment of an innovation which proved unwelcome, makes it improbable from the start that Jung's revised version of psycho-analysis can justly claim to be a liberation for youth. In the last resort it is not the years of the doer that determine this but the character of the deed.

Of the two movements under discussion Adler's is indubitably the more significant; while radically false, it is marked by consistence and coherence. It is, moreover, in spite of all, founded upon a theory of the instincts. Jung's modification, on the other hand, disconnects the phenomena from their relation with impulse-life; and further, as its critics (Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones) have pointed out, it is so unintelligible, obscure, and confused that it is difficult to take up any standpoint in regard to it. Wherever one lays hold of anything, one must be prepared to hear that one has misunderstood it, and it is impossible to know how to arrive at a correct understanding of it. It is put forward too in a peculiarly vacillating manner, one moment as 'quite a minor deviation which does not justify the fuss that has been made about it' (Jung), and the next as a new message of salvation which is to begin a new epoch in psycho-analysis, in fact, reveal a new aspect of the universe for everything else.

When one thinks of the disagreement displayed in the various public and private expressions of Jung's views, one is bound to ask oneself how much of this is due to his own lack of clearness and how much to lack of sincerity. It must be admitted, however, that the exponents of the new doctrine find themselves in a difficult position. They are now {351} disputing things which formerly they themselves upheld, and not, moreover, on the ground of fresh observations by which they might have been taught something further, but in consequence of different interpretations of the same observations which make the things they see look different to them now from what they did before. For this reason they are unwilling to give up their connection with psycho-analysis, through which they became known to the world, and prefer to proclaim that psycho-analysis has changed. At the Congress in Munich I saw that I must clear up this confusion, and did so by declaring that I did not admit the innovations of the Swiss to be legitimate continuations and further developments of the psycho-analysis that originated with me. Outside critics (like Furtmüller) had already before this perceived the state of things, and Abraham truly says that Jung is in full retreat from psycho-analysis. I am naturally perfectly ready to allow that anyone has a right to think and to write what he likes; but he has no right to put it forward as something which it really is not.

Just as Adler's investigation brought something new to psycho-analysis---a contribution to the psychology of the ego---and then tried to recoup itself all too dearly for this liberality by throwing over all the fundamental analytic doctrines, so in the same way a new contribution formed the base of operations in the campaign started by Jung and his followers against psycho-analysis. They traced in detail (as Pfister did before them) the way in which the material of sexual ideas belonging to the family-complexes and the incestuous object-choice is made use of in representing the highest ethical and religious interests of man---that is, they have explained an important {352} instance of sublimation of the erotic instinctual forces and of their transformation into trends which can no longer be called erotic. This was in complete harmony with all the expectations of psycho-analysis, and would have agreed very well with the view that in dreams and neurosis a regressive dissolution of this, as of all other sublimations, becomes visible. But unfortunately, the world would have risen in indignation and protested that they were sexualizing ethics and religion! Now I cannot refrain from thinking teleologically for once and concluding that these discoverers were not equal to meeting the storm of righteous wrath they saw ahead. Perhaps it even began to rage in their own bosoms. The importance of theological tradition in the former history of so many Swiss is no less significant for their attitude to psycho-analysis than is the socialistic element in that of Adler for the line of development taken by his psychology. One is reminded of Mark Twain's famous story of the vicissitudes his watch underwent and of the remark with which he ends it: 'And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.'

I will now digress into the region of parables: Suppose that in a certain district there lived an upstart who boasted of ancient descent from a noble family living far off. It was proved to him, however, that his parents lived somewhere in the neighbourhood and were quite simple people. There was only one way out of the difficulty and he seized upon it. He could not any longer repudiate his parentage, so he asserted that they themselves were of an ancient noble strain, but that their fortunes had declined; and he proceeded to procure from some obliging office a document showing their descent. I think the Swiss must have behaved in much the same way. If ethics and religion {353} must not be sexualized, but had been something 'higher' from the start, and yet the descent of the ideas they contain from the family and Œdipus complex appeared undeniable, there could be only one thing to do---these complexes themselves could not from the beginning have had the significance that they seemed to express, but instead must have that higher 'anagogic' meaning (as Silberer terms it) which adapts them for incorporation into the abstract trains of thought of ethics and religious mysticism.

I am quite resigned to being told again that I have misunderstood the substance and tendency of the New-Zurich doctrines; but I must protest from the start against this contradiction of my interpretation of these doctrines (which is formed from the publications of this school) being laid to my door, instead of theirs. In no other way can I make intelligible to myself the whole range of Jung's innovations and grasp all its implications. All the changes that Jung has wrought in psycho-analysis flow from the ambition to eliminate all that is disagreeable in the family complexes, so that it may not evidence itself again in ethics and religion. For sexual libido an abstract term has been substituted, of which one may safely say that it remains mystifying and incomprehensible to fools and wise alike. The Œdipus complex was intended merely as something 'symbolic'; the mother in it means the unattainable, which one must renounce in the interests of civilization; the father who is killed in the Œdipus myth is the 'inner' father, from whom one must become free in order to be independent. Other details of the material of sexual ideas will undoubtedly undergo similar reinterpretation in the course of time. In the place of a conflict between erotic trends obnoxious to the ego and {354} the self-maintenance tendency of the ego there appears the conflict between the life-task and 'psychic inertia'; the neurotic's sense of guilt corresponds to the reproach of not properly fulfilling his 'life-task'. Thus a new religious-ethical system was created, which, just like the Adlerian system, must necessarily lead to new interpretations of the actual results of analysis, or else distort or ignore them. In truth this signifies but that a few of Culture's harmonics in the symphony of life have sounded again, while the dæmonic forces of the instinct-melody have once more passed unheard.

In order to preserve this 'system' intact it was necessary to turn entirely away from observations and from the technique of psycho-analysis. Occasionally enthusiasm for the sacred cause even required a disregard for scientific logic, as when Jung finds the Œdipus complex not 'specific' enough for the causation of neurosis and attributes a specific character to 'inertia', the most universal characteristic of all matter, animate or inanimate! It is to be noted, by the way, that the 'Œdipus complex' represents only the content of the strivings of mental forces in the individual, and is not in itself a force, like 'psychic inertia'. The study of any individual human being has shown and always will show that the sexual complexes in their original sense are active in him. For this reason the investigation of individuals has been neglected and replaced by conclusions arrived at from points arising from study of the race. In the early childhood of every human being there is the greatest risk of coming upon the original, undisguised meaning of these misinterpreted complexes; consequently in therapy the precaution of dwelling as little as possible on this past history has been developed, and the {355} main emphasis is laid on reverting to the current conflict, in which, moreover, not the individual, personal element is the essential thing, but a general feature---'non-fulfilment of the life-task'. We know, however, that the current conflict of a neurotic becomes comprehensible and admits of solution only when it is referred back to the patient's previous history, when one goes back along the path that his libido took in his illness.

How the New-Zurich therapy shapes itself in accordance with these tendencies can best be conveyed in the words of a patient who had to experience it in his own person: 'This time not an atom of consideration was expended on the past or on transference. Wherever I believed I recognized the latter it was explained as a pure libido-symbol. The moral teaching was very fine and I followed it faithfully, but I did not advance a step. It was more annoying for me than for him, but how could I help it? ... Instead of freedom through analysis, every day brought fresh terrific demands on me, which had to be fulfilled if the neurosis were to be conquered---for instance, inward concentration by means of introversion, religious meditation, resuming life with my wife in loving devotion, etc. It was almost beyond one's strength; it went beyond a radical transformation of one's whole inner nature. I left the analysis as a poor sinner with intense feelings of contrition and the best resolutions, but at the same time in utter discouragement. Any clergyman would have advised what he recommended, but where was I to find the strength?' The patient did in fact mention that he had heard that analysis of the past and of transference must be gone through first. He was told that he had already had enough of that. Since it had not helped him sufficiently, the conclusion seems justified that the patient had _not {356} had enough_ of the first kind of analysis. Certainly the subsequent treatment, which no longer has any claim to be called psycho-analysis, did not improve matters. It is remarkable that the men of Zurich should have taken the long road round by Vienna in order to arrive at last at Berne which is so near, where Dubois cures neuroses by ethical encouragement in a less painful manner.[76]

The total incompatibility of this new movement with psycho-analysis also of course shows itself, first, in the treatment of repression, which is hardly mentioned nowadays in Jung's writings; again in the misapprehension in regard to dreams, which, in complete disregard of dream-psychology, like Adler, he confounds with the latent dream-thoughts; and in a loss of all understanding of the unconscious---in short, in all the essential points I should choose as characteristic of psycho-analysis. When Jung tells us that the incest-complex is merely 'symbolic', that it has no 'real' existence, that a savage feels no desire towards an old gammer but prefers a young and pretty woman, one is tempted to conclude that 'symbolic' and 'without real existence' simply mean what, in virtue of its power of expression and pathogenic effects, is described by psycho-analysis as 'existing unconsciously'---a description that disposes of the apparent contradictions.

When one remembers that the dream itself is something different from the latent dream-thoughts which it elaborates, something more, there {357} is nothing surprising in patients dreaming of things with which their minds have been filled during the treatment, whether it be the 'life-task', or 'being above or below'. The dreams of people being analysed are undoubtedly open to influence, in the same way as by stimuli produced for experimental purposes. One can determine a part of the material which appears in a dream; nothing in the essence or mechanism of dreams is altered by this. Nor do I believe that 'biographical' dreams, as they are called, occur outside analysis. If one analyses dreams which occurred before treatment, or if one considers the dreamer's own additions to what has been suggested to him in the cure, or if one avoids giving him any such instructions, then one may convince oneself how far removed it is from the purpose of a dream to produce attempted solutions of the life-task. Dreams are nothing but a form of thinking; one can never understand this form by reference to the content of the thoughts; only an appreciation of the work of dream-making will lead to it.

It is not difficult to find an effective refutation of Jung's misconceptions of psycho-analysis and deviations from it. Every analysis conducted in a proper manner, and in particular any analysis of a child, strengthens the convictions upon which the theory of psycho-analysis is founded, and shows the fallacy of the misinterpretations in both Jung's and Adler's systems. In the days before he became so enlightened Jung himself carried out and published such an analysis of a child; it remains to be seen whether he will undertake a new interpretation of its results with the help of a different 'uniform trend of the facts', to use an expression that Adler employs in this connection. {358}

The view that the sexual representation of 'higher' thoughts in dreams and neurosis is nothing but an archaic mode of expression is naturally irreconcilable with the fact that in neurosis these sexual complexes prove to be the channels of such quantities of libido as are withdrawn from utilization in real life. If they were nothing more than a jargon of sexual terms, the distribution of the libido could not have been affected in any way through them. Jung still admits this himself in his _Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie_ and formulates the task of therapy as detachment of these complexes from their libido-cathexis. This can never be achieved, however, by turning one's back upon them and urging the patient to sublimate, but only by exhaustive examination of them, so that they may be made fully and completely conscious. The first piece of reality which the patient must deal with is his illness. Efforts to spare him this task point to the physician's incapacity to help him to overcome the resistances, or else to the physician's dread of the results of his own work.

In conclusion I will say that by his 'modification' of psycho-analysis Jung has given us a counterpart to Lichtenberg's famous knife. He has changed the hilt and put a new blade into it; because the same name is scratched on it we are to regard this instrument as the former one.

I think I have made clear, on the contrary, that the new teaching which aims at replacing psycho-analysis signifies abandonment of analysis and defection from it. Some may perhaps be inclined to fear that this defection must have more serious consequences for analysis than if it had originated with persons who had been less closely connected with the movement and had done less to advance it. I do not share this apprehension. {359}

Men are strong as long as they represent a strong idea; they become powerless when they oppose it. Psycho-Analysis will survive this loss and gain new adherents in place of these others. I can only conclude with the wish that fate may grant an untroubled ascension to all who have been discommoded by their sojourn in the underworld of psycho-analysis. May it be vouchsafed to the others to carry their work in the depths peacefully to an end.

February, 1914.

NOTES

[1]: First published in the _Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift_, 1893, No. 37. [Translated by J. Bernays.]

[2]: First published in the _Neurologisches Zentralblatt_, 1893, Nos. 1 and 2. [Translated by John Rickman.]

[3]: Delbœuf and Binet have clearly recognised the possibility of such a therapy, as the following quotations show. Delbœuf: _Le Magnétisme animal_, Paris, 1889: 'Since then it has been possible to understand how the magnetist helps in bringing about recovery. He restores the patient to the condition in which the illness established itself and then with his words he attacks the illness, now _in statu nascendi_.' --- Binet: _Les Altérations de la personnalité_, 1892, p. 243: '... Perhaps we shall see that by bringing back the patient by a mental device to the moment when the symptom appeared for the first time we make him more susceptible to suggestive therapy'.---In P. Janet's interesting book _L'Automatisme psychologique_, Paris, 1889, there is a description of a cure obtained in an hysterical girl by the employment of a method analogous to ours.

[4]: In the text it is not possible to separate what is new in the content of this provisional communication from what is also to be found in other authors, e.g. Möbius and Strümpell, who have put forward similar views on hysteria. The nearest approach to our theoretical and therapeutic deductions is found in a few recently published remarks of Benedikt's which we propose to consider elsewhere.

[5]: [There is no satisfactory translation of this highly expressive German word, which is obviously allied to _krank_ = ill.---Ed.]

[6]: [This is the first occasion on which this term was used. Later it became the author's technical term for the _unconscious_ process by which thoughts are excluded from consciousness.---Ed.]

[7]: First published in _Archives de Neurologie_, No. 77, 1893. [Translated by M. Meyer.]

[8]: I will state by the way that that important feature of hysterical paralyses of the leg emphasized by Charcot, following Todd---namely, that an hysteric drags his leg like a dead mass instead of performing the circumduction of the hip commonly carried out in hemiplegia---is easily explained by a characteristic of the neurosis already mentioned. In organic hemiplegia, the proximal part of the extremity is always more or less intact; the patient can move the hip and uses it to perform the circumduction movement that carries the leg forward. In hysteria, the proximal part (the hip) does not enjoy that privilege; the paralysis is as complete as in the distal part, and as a result the leg must be dragged _en masse_.

[9]: See No. II of this volume, above, p. 24.

[10]: First published in the _Neurologisches Zentralblatt_, 1894, Nos. 10 and 11. [Translated by John Rickman.]

[11]: _Etat mental des hystériques_, Paris, 1893 and 1894. --- Quelques définitions récentes de l'hystérie, _Archives de Neurologie_, 1893, XXXV---XXXVI.

[12]: See No. II of this volume, above, p. 24.

[13]: See No. II of this volume, above, p. 24.

[14]: These examples are more fully described in _Studien über Hysterie_, Breuer and Freud. 1895.

[15]: Oppenheim: Hysteria is an intensified expression of emotion. The 'expression of emotion', however, represents that quantity of the psychical excitation which normally undergoes conversion.

[16]: Strümpell: In hysteria the disturbance lies in the psycho-physical sphere, where body and mind have their connection with each other.

[17]: In the second edition of his ingenious paper, '_Quelques definitions, etc._', Janet has himself dealt with the objection that splitting of consciousness occurs also in the psychoses and in psychasthenia, so-called, but in my judgement he has not solved the difficulty satisfactorily. It is essentially this objection that has forced him to regard hysteria as a form of degeneration. He cannot, however, adequately distinguish the hysterical splitting of consciousness from the psychotic and other such forms by any characterization.

[18]: The group of typical phobias, of which agoraphobia is a model, cannot be traced back to the psychical mechanism mentioned above; on the contrary, the mechanism of agoraphobia differs from that of true obsessions, and of the phobias derived from them, in _one_ decisive particular---there is here no repressed idea from which the affect of anxiety would be detached. The anxiety of these phobias has another origin.

[19]: See No. II of this volume, above, p. 24.

[20]: First published in the _Neurologisches Zentralblatt_, 1895, Nr. 2. [Translated by John Rickman.]

[21]: E. Hecker: Über larvierte und abortive Angstzustände bei Neurasthenie. _Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde_, Dec. 1893. Morbid anxiety is actually quoted as one of the principal symptoms of neurasthenia in a paper by Kaan: Der neurasthenische Angstaffekt bei Zwangsvorstellungen und der primordiale Grübelzwang. Wien, 1893.

[22]: See No. IV of this volume, above, p. 59.

[23]: See No. VII of this volume, p. 128.

[24]: Möbius: _Neuropathologische Beiträge_, Heft 2, 1894.

[25]: Peyer: Die nervösen Affektionen des Darmes. _Wiener Klinik_, January, 1893.

[26]: See No. IV of this volume, above, p. 59.

[27]: [This term is here used in its original sense of conscious sexual feeling; it was only later employed by the author as a technical term in his theory of mental dynamics.---Ed.]

[28]: First published in the _Wiener Klinische Rundschau_, 1895. [Translated by John Rickman.]

[29]: See No. V of this volume, above, p. 76.

[30]: E. Hecker: Über larvierte und abortive Angstzustände bei Neurasthenie, _Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde_, Dec., 1893.

[31]: First published in the _Revue Neurologique_, 1895, t. III. [Translated by M. Meyer.]

[32]: I am very glad to find that the authors of the most recent work on this subject express opinions very similar to mine. Cf. Gélineau, _Des peurs maladives ou phobies_, 1894, and Hack Tuke, On Imperative Ideas, _Brain_, 1894.

[33]: Cf. the popular German song:

Auf jedes weiße Blatt Papier möcht' ich es schreiben: Dein ist mein Herz und soll es ewig, ewig bleiben.

[34]: See. No. II of this volume, p. 24.

[35]: See No. V of this volume, p. 76.

[36]: First published in the _Revue Neurologique_, 1896, t. IV [Translated by M. Meyer.]

[37]: See No. V of this volume, above, p. 76.

[38]: For the symptomatology and ætiology of the anxiety-neurosis see my paper cited above, No. V of this volume, p. 76.

[39]: [The first use of this term by the author to designate his technique.---Ed.]

[40]: See J. Breuer and Sigmund Freud. _Studien über Hysterie_. 1895.

[41]: First published in the _Neurologisches Zentralblatt_, Oct., 1896, No. 10. [Translated by John Rickman.]

[42]: See No. IV of this volume, above, p. 59.

[43]: I myself am inclined to think that the tales of outrage which hysterics so frequently relate may be obsessive fictions which arise in the memory-trace of the trauma that occurred in childhood.

[44]: In a paper on the Anxiety-Neurosis (see No. V of this volume, p. 87) I mentioned that 'anxiety-neurosis can be evoked in maturing girls by their first meeting with the sexual problem; in these cases it is typically combined with hysteria'. I now know that the occasion on which such 'virginal anxiety' breaks out in young girls does not indeed represent their _first_ encounter with sexuality; but that an experience of a sexually passive nature had previously occurred in their childhood, the memory of which is awakened by the 'first encounter'.

[45]: A psychological theory of repression should also throw light on the question why it is only ideas with a sexual content that can be repressed. The following hints may assist us: The formation of ideas with a sexual content produces, as is well-known, excitation-processes in the genital organs similar to sexual experience itself. We may suppose that this somatic excitation transposes itself into the psychical sphere. As a rule this kind of effect is much stronger during actual experiences than during the recollection of them. But if the sexual experience occurs at a time of sexual immaturity and the memory of it is aroused during or after maturity, then the exciting effect of the recollection will be very much stronger than that of the experience itself; because in the meantime puberty has increased to an incomparable degree the capacity of the sexual apparatus for response. An inverted relation of this kind between real experience and memory appears to be the psychological condition of repression. Through the delay in the maturing of the sexual functions in comparison with that of the psychical functions, sexual life affords a unique possibility for this inversion of relative effectiveness. _The traumas of childhood act subsequently as fresh experiences_---_then, however, unconsciously_. I must postpone psychological discussions of wider range until another time. Let me say, however, that the period of 'sexual maturity' here referred to does not coincide with puberty, but comes earlier (eighth to tenth year).

[46]: See No. V of this volume, above, p. 76.

[47]: Cf. _Studien über Hysterie_.

[48]: A subsequent exacerbation removed the success of the treatment, which was in any case not very great, and at this later stage she no longer saw the offensive images of strange genitals, but had the idea that strangers saw _her_ genitals as soon as they were _behind_ her.

_Subsequent note by the Author for this Translation_. 1922.

The fragmentary account of this analysis in the text above was written while the patient was still undergoing treatment. Very shortly after, her condition became so much more serious that the treatment had to be broken off. She was transferred to an institution and there went through a period of severe hallucinations having all the signs of dementia præcox. [The original footnote applies to this period.] Contrary to expectation, however, she recovered and returned home, had another child which was quite healthy, and was able for a long period (12 to 15 years) to carry out all her duties in a satisfactory manner. The only sign of her previous psychosis was said to be that she avoided the company of all relatives, whether of her own family or of her husband's. At the end of this period, affected by very adverse changes in her circumstances, she again became ill. Her husband had become unable to work and the relatives she had avoided were obliged to support the family. She was again sent to an institution and died there soon after, of a pneumonia which rapidly supervened.

[49]: [The first use of this technical term.---Ed.]

[50]: First published in the _Wiener klinische Rundschau_, 1896, Nr. 22 to 26. Amplification of a lecture delivered at the Society of Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, May 2, 1896. [Translated by Cecil M. Baines.]

[51]: We purposely refrain from discussing what type of association unites the two memories (whether their relation is temporal, causal or that of similarity of content, etc.) and from asking what psychological character (conscious or unconscious) is to be attributed to these 'memories'.

[52]: _Wiener Medizinische Blätter_. 18. April 1896.

[53]: First published in the _Wiener klinische Rundschau_, 1898, Nos. 2, 4, 5, and 7. [Translated by J. Bernays.]

[54]: First published in the _Wiener Medizinische Presse_, 1905, No. 1. Lecture delivered before the College of Physicians, in Vienna, December 12, 1904. [Translated by J. Bernays.]

[55]: [I know that the physical Often influences the moral.]

[56]: From Löwenfeld: _Psychische Zwangserscheinungen_. 1904. [This chapter was written at Dr. Löwenfeld's request as a part of the section on psychotherapy in the latter's book.---Translated by J. Bernays.]

[57]: First published in Löwenfeld's _Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_, IV te Auflage, 1906. [Translated by J. Bernays.]

[58]: See No. V of this volume, p. 76.

[59]: See _Studien über Hysterie_, 1895.

[60]: See Nos. VIII and IX of this volume, pp. 138 and 155.

[61]: See No. IV of this volume, p. 59.

[62]: First published in the _Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse_, Bd. VI. 1914. [Translated by Joan Riviere.]

[63]: _Über Psychoanalyse_. Fünf Vorlesungen. Dritte Auflage, 1916. Appeared simultaneously in English in the _American Journal of Psychology_, March, 1910; translated into Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Italian.

[64]: _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, Bd. I, S. 69.

[65]: Havelock Ellis: The Doctrines of the Freud School.

[66]: G. Greve: Sobre Psicologia y Psicoterapia de ciertos Estados angustiosos. _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, Bd. I, S. 594.

[67]: The publications of both authors have appeared in a collected form. A. A. Brill: _Psychoanalysis, its Theories and practical Applications_, 1912. (Third edition, 1922; Saunders, Philadelphia.) Ernest Jones: _Papers on Psycho-Analysis_, 1912. (Third edition, 1923; Baillière, Tindall & Cox, London.)

[68]: The first _official_ recognition of dream-interpretation and psychoanalysis in Europe was extended to them by the psychiatrist Jelgersma, Rector of the University of Leiden, in his official address on February 9, 1914.

[69]: Rank: _Der Künstler_; analyses of poets by Sadger, Reik and others; my little monograph _Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci_; Abraham's analysis of Segantini.

[70]: _Die psychoanalytische Methode_. 1913. Vol. I of Meumann and Messmer's Pedagogium.

[71]: Adler und Furtmüller: _Heilen und Bilden_. 1913.

[72]: See my two articles, entitled _Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse_, in _Scientia_. XIV. 1913.

[73]: [Since this was written, in 1914, there have been further changes, notably the founding of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna, which took over publication of the four official periodicals mentioned in the text, and the founding of an English branch of it, The International Psycho-Analytical Press, now in London. One of the objects for which the latter was constituted was to publish the second official organ of the International Psycho-Analytical Association instituted for English-speaking countries in 1920, with the title of _The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis_, directed by Prof. Freud and edited by Ernest Jones. Another object was the publication of the International Psycho-Analytical Library, of which the present volume forms No. 7.---Ed.]

[74]: _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, Bd. I, S. 122. See also _Analytical Psychology_, by C. G. Jung. 1917. Chap. II. (Translation.)

[75]: _Korrespondenzblatt_, Nr. 5. Zürich, April 1911.

[76]: I know the objections there are to making use of a patient's statements, and I will therefore expressly state that my informant is a trustworthy person, very well capable of forming a judgement. He gave me this information quite voluntarily and I make use of his communication without asking his consent, because I cannot admit that a psycho-analytic technique should claim the protection of secrecy.

Transcriber’s Note

The following typos in the original text have been corrected.

p. 25 - accustomed to see egularly + accustomed to see regularly

p. 46 - remains to be dicovered + remains to be discovered

p. 76 - general paralysis of the insance + general paralysis of the insane

p. 120 - is not yet clearly eludicated + is not yet clearly elucidated

p. 177 - analysis of the voices In the first place + analysis of the voices. In the first place

p. 229 - I have conluded that such negative cases + I have concluded that such negative cases

p. 234 - attacks of dypsnœa + attacks of dyspnœa

p. 260 - I am quite conviced + I am quite convinced

p. 357 - Nor do I belive that + Nor do I believe that