Freud - Complete Works (398 page)

   Now, however, I must once more
damp your expectations. Society will not be in a hurry to grant us
authority. It is bound to offer us resistance, for we adopt a
critical attitude towards it; we point out to it that it itself
plays a great part in causing neuroses. Just as we make an
individual our enemy by uncovering what is repressed in him, so
society cannot respond with sympathy to a relentless exposure of
its injurious effects and deficiencies. Because we destroy
illusions we are accused of endangering ideals. It might seem,
therefore, as though the condition from which I expect such great
advantages for our therapeutic prospects will never be fulfilled.
And yet the situation is not so hopeless as one might think at the
present time. Powerful though men’s emotions and
self-interest may be, yet intellect is a power too - a power which
makes itself felt, not, it is true, immediately, but all the more
certainly in the end. The harshest truths are heard and recognized
at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions
they have roused have exhausted their fury. It has always been so,
and the unwelcome truths which we psycho-analysts have to tell the
world will have the same fate. Only it will not happen very
quickly; we must be able to wait.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2312

   (3) Finally, I have to explain to
you what I mean by the ‘general effect’ of our work,
and how I come to set hopes on it. What we have here is a very
remarkable therapeutic constellation, the like of which is perhaps
not to be found anywhere else and which will appear strange to you
too at first, until you recognize in it something you have long
been familiar with. You know, of course, that the psychoneuroses
are substitutive satisfactions of some instinct the presence of
which one is obliged to deny to oneself and others. Their capacity
to exist depends on this distortion and lack of recognition. When
the riddle they present is solved and the solution is accepted by
the patients these diseases cease to be able to exist. There is
hardly anything like this in medicine, though in fairy tales you
hear of evil spirits whose power is broken as soon as you can tell
them their name - the name which they have kept secret.

   In place of a single sick person
let us put society - suffering as a whole from neuroses, though
composed of sick and healthy members; and in place of individual
acceptance in the one case let us put general recognition in the
other. A little reflection will then show you that this
substitution cannot in any way alter the outcome. The success which
the treatment can have with the individual must occur equally with
the community. Sick people will not be able to let their various
neuroses become known - their anxious over-tenderness which is
meant to conceal their hatred, their agoraphobia which tells of
disappointed ambition, their obsessive actions which represent
self-reproaches for evil intentions and precautions against them -
if all their relatives and every stranger from whom they wish to
conceal their mental processes know the general meaning of such
symptoms, and if they themselves know that in the manifestations of
their illness they are producing nothing that other people cannot
instantly interpret. The effect, however, will not be limited to
the concealment of the symptoms which, incidentally, it is often
impossible to carry out; for this necessity for concealment
destroys the use of being ill. Disclosure of the secret will have
attacked, at its most sensitive point, the ‘aetiological
equation’ from which neuroses arise - it will have made the
gain from the illness illusory; and consequently the final outcome
of the changed situation brought about by the physician’s
indiscretion can only be that the production of the illness will be
brought to a stop.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2313

   If this hope seems Utopian to
you, you may remember that neurotic phenomena have actually been
dispelled already by this means, although only in quite isolated
instances. Think how common hallucinations of the Virgin Mary used
to be among peasant girls in former times. So long as such a
phenomenon brought a flock of believers and might lead to a chapel
being built on the sacred spot, the visionary state of these girls
was inaccessible to influence. To-day even our clergy have changed
their attitude to such things; they allow police and doctors to
examine the visionary, and now the Virgin makes only very rare
appearances.

   Or let me examine these
developments, which I have been describing as taking place in the
future, in an analogous situation which is on a smaller scale and
consequently easier to take in. Suppose a number of ladies and
gentlemen in good society have planned to have a picnic one day at
an inn in the country. The ladies have arranged among themselves
that if one of them wants to relieve a natural need she will
announce that she is going to pick flowers. Some malicious person,
however, has got wind of this secret and has had printed on the
programme which is sent round to the whole party: ‘Ladies who
wish to retire are requested to announce that they are going to
pick flowers.’ After this, of course, no lady will think of
availing herself of this flowery pretext, and, in the same way,
other similar formulas, which may be freshly agreed upon, will be
seriously compromised. What will be the result? The ladies will
admit their natural needs without shame and none of the men will
object.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2314

   Let us return to our more serious
case. A certain number of people, faced in their lives by conflicts
which they have found too difficult to solve, have taken flight
into neurosis and in this way won an unmistakable, although in the
long run too costly, gain from illness. What will these people have
to do if their flight into illness is barred by the indiscreet
revelations of psycho-analysis? They will have to be honest,
confess to the instincts that are at work in them, face the
conflict, fight for what they want, or go without it; and the
tolerance of society, which is bound to ensue as a result of
psycho-analytic enlightenment, will help them in their task.

   Let us remember, however, that
our attitude to life ought not to be that of a fanatic for hygiene
or therapy. We must admit that the ideal prevention of neurotic
illnesses which we have in mind would not be of advantage to every
individual. A good number of those who now take flight into illness
would not, under the conditions we have assumed, support the
conflict but would rapidly succumb or would cause a mischief
greater than their own neurotic illness. Neuroses have in fact
their biological function as a protective contrivance and they have
their social justification: the ‘gain from illness’
they provide is not always a purely subjective one. Is there one of
you who has not at some time looked into the causation of a
neurosis and had to allow that it was the mildest possible outcome
of the situation? And should such heavy sacrifices be made in order
to eradicate the neuroses in particular, when the world is full of
other unavoidable misery?

   Are we, then, to abandon our
efforts to explain the hidden meaning of neurosis as being in the
last resort dangerous to the individual and harmful to the workings
of society? Are we to give up drawing the practical conclusion from
a piece of scientific insight? No; I think that in spite of this
our duty lies in the other direction. The gain from illness
provided by the neuroses is nevertheless on the whole and in the
end detrimental to individuals as well as to society. The
unhappiness that our work of enlightenment may cause will after all
only affect some individuals. The change-over to a more realistic
and creditable attitude on the part of society will not be bought
too dearly by these sacrifices. But above all, all the energies
which are to-day consumed in the production of neurotic symptoms
serving the purposes of a world of phantasy isolated from reality,
will, even if they cannot at once be put to uses in life, help to
strengthen the clamour for the changes in our civilization through
which alone we can look for the well-being of future
generations.

The Future Prospects Of Psycho-Analytic Therapy

2315

   I should therefore like to let
you go with an assurance that in treating your patients
psycho-analytically you are doing your duty in more senses than
one. You are not merely working in the service of science, by
making use of the one and only opportunity for discovering the
secrets of the neuroses; you are not only giving your patients the
most efficacious remedy for their sufferings that is available
to-day; you are contributing your share to the enlightenment of the
community from which we expect to achieve the most radical
prophylaxis against neurotic disorders along the indirect path of
social authority.

2316

THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS

(1910)

2317

Intentionally left blank

2318

THE ANTITHETICAL MEANING OF PRIMAL WORDS

In my
Interpretation of Dreams
I made a
statement about one of the findings of my analytic work which I did
not then understand. I will repeat it here by way of preface to
this review:

   ‘The way in which dreams
treat the category of contraries and contradictories is highly
remarkable. It is simply disregarded. "No" seems not to
exist so far as dreams are concerned. They show a particular
preference for combining contraries into a unity or for
representing them as one and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves
at liberty, moreover, to represent any element by its wishful
contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance
whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the
dream-thoughts as a positive or as a negative.’¹

   The dream-interpreters of
antiquity seem to have made the most extensive use of the notion
that a thing in a dream can mean its opposite. This possibility has
also occasionally been recognized by modern students of dreams, in
so far as they concede at all that dreams have a meaning and can be
interpreted.² Nor do I think that I shall be contradicted if I
assume that all who have followed me in interpreting dreams on
scientific lines have found confirmation of the statement quoted
above.

   I did not succeed in
understanding the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard
negation and to employ the same means of representation for
expressing contraries until I happened by chance to read a work by
the philologist Karl Abel, which was published in 1884 as a
separate pamphlet and included in the following year in the
author’s
Sprachwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen
[Philological Essays]. The subject is of sufficient interest to
justify my quoting here the full text of the crucial passages in
Abel’s paper (omitting, however, most of the examples). We
obtain from them the astonishing information that the behaviour of
the dream-work which I have just described is identical with a
peculiarity in the oldest languages known to us.

  
¹
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
),
p.
787
.

  
²
Cf. G. H. von Schubert (1814, Chapter
II).

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2319

   After stressing the antiquity of
the Egyptian language which must have been developed a very long
time before the first hieroglyphic inscriptions, Abel goes on
(1884, 4):

   ‘Now in the Egyptian
language, this sole relic of a primitive world, there are a fair
number of words with two meanings, one of which is the exact
opposite of the other. Let us suppose, if such an obvious piece of
nonsense can be imagined, that in German the word
"strong" meant both "strong" and
"weak"; that in Berlin the noun "light" was
used to mean both "light" and "darkness"; that
one Munich citizen called beer "beer", while another used
the same word to speak of water: this is what the astonishing
practice amounts to which the ancient Egyptians regularly followed
in their language. How could anyone be blamed for shaking his head
in disbelief? . . .’ (Examples omitted.)

   (Ibid., 7): ‘In view of
these and many similar cases of antithetical meaning (see the
Appendix) it is beyond doubt that in one language at least there
was a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its
opposite. However astonishing it may be, we are faced with the fact
and have to reckon with it.’

   The author goes on to reject an
explanation of these circumstances which suggests that two words
might happen by chance to have the same sound, and is equally firm
in repudiating an attempt to refer it to the low stage of mental
development in Egypt:

   (Ibid., 9): ‘But Egypt was
anything but a home of nonsense. On the contrary, it was one of the
cradles of the development of human reason. . . . It
recognized a pure and dignified morality and formulated a great
part of the Ten Commandments at a time when the peoples in whose
hands civilization rests to-day were in the habit of slaughtering
human victims as a sacrifice to bloodthirsty idols. A people that
kindled the torch of justice and culture in so dark an age cannot
surely have been completely stupid in everyday speech and
thought. . . . Men who were able to make glass and
raise and move huge blocks by machinery must at least have
possessed sufficient sense not to regard a thing as being
simultaneously both itself and its opposite. How are we then to
reconcile this with the fact that the Egyptians allowed themselves
such a strangely contradictory language? . . . that
they used to give one and the same phonetic vehicle to the most
mutually inimical thoughts, and used to bind together in a kind of
indissoluble union things that were in the strongest opposition to
each other?’

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2320

   Before any explanation is
attempted, mention must also be made of a further stage in this
unintelligible behaviour of the Egyptian language. ‘Of all
the eccentricities of the Egyptian vocabulary perhaps the most
extraordinary feature is that, quite apart from the words that
combine antithetical meanings, it possesses other compound words in
which two vocables of antithetical meanings are united so as to
form a compound which bears the meaning of only one of its two
constituents. Thus in this extraordinary language there are not
only words meaning equally "strong" or "weak",
and "command" or "obey"; but there are also
compounds like "old-young", "far-near",
"bind-sever",
"outside-inside" . . . which, in spite of
combining the extremes of difference, mean only "young",
"near", "bind" and "inside"
respectively       So that in these compound words
contradictory concepts have been quite intentionally combined, not
in order to produce a third concept, as occasionally happens in
Chinese, but only in order to use the compound to express the
meaning of one of its contradictory parts - a part which would have
had the same meaning by itself . . .’

   However, the riddle is easier to
solve than it appears to be. Our concepts owe their existence to
comparisons. ‘If it were always light we should not be able
to distinguish light from dark, and consequently we should not be
able to have either the concept of light or the word for it . .
.’ ‘It is clear that everything on this planet is
relative and has an independent existence only in so far as it is
differentiated in respect of its relations to other
things . . .’ ‘Since every concept is in
this way the twin of its contrary, how could it be first thought of
and how could it be communicated to other people who were trying to
conceive it, other than by being measured against its
contrary . . .’ (Ibid., 15): ‘Since the
concept of strength could not be formed except as a contrary to
weakness, the word denoting "strong" contained a
simultaneous recollection of "weak", as the thing by
means of which it first came into existence. In reality this word
denoted neither "strong" nor "weak", but the
relation and difference between the two, which created both of them
equally . . .’ ‘Man was not in fact able
to acquire his oldest and simplest concepts except as contraries to
their contraries, and only learnt by degrees to separate the two
sides of an antithesis and think of one without conscious
comparison with the other.’

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2321

   Since language serves not only to
express one’s own thoughts but essentially to communicate
them to others the question may be raised how it was that the
‘primal Egyptian’ made his neighbour understand
‘which side of the twin concept he meant on any particular
occasion’. In the written language this was done with the
help of the so-called ‘determinative’ signs which,
placed after the alphabetical ones, assign their meaning to them
and are not themselves intended to be spoken. (Ibid., 18):
‘If the Egyptian word "
ken
" is to mean
"strong", its sound, which is written alphabetically, is
followed by the picture of an upright armed man; if the same word
has to express "weak", the letters which represent the
sound are followed by the picture of a squatting, limp figure. The
majority of other words with two meanings are similarly accompanied
by explanatory pictures.’ Abel thinks that in speech the
desired meaning of the spoken word was indicated by gesture.

   According to Abel it is in the
‘oldest roots’ that antithetical double meanings are
found to occur. In the subsequent course of the language’s
development this ambiguity disappeared and, in Ancient Egyptian at
any rate, all the intermediate stages can be followed, down to the
unambiguousness of modern vocabularies. ‘A word that
originally bore two meanings separates in the later language into
two words with single meanings, in a process whereby each of the
two opposed meanings takes over a particular phonetic
"reduction" (modification) of the original root.’
Thus, for example, in hieroglyphics the word
‘
ken
’, ‘strong-weak’, already
divides into ‘
ken
’, ‘strong’ and
‘
kan
’, ‘weak’. ‘In other
words, the concepts which could only be arrived at by means of an
antithesis became in course of time sufficiently familiar to
men’s minds to make an independent existence possible for
each of their two parts and accordingly to enable a separate
phonetic representative to be formed for each part.

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2322

   Proof of the existence of
contradictory primal meanings, which is easily established in
Egyptian, extends, according to Abel, to the Semitic and
Indo-European languages as well. ‘How far this may happen in
other language-groups remains to be seen; for although antithesis
must have been present originally to the thinking minds of every
race, it need not necessarily have become recognizable or have been
retained everywhere in the meanings of words.’

   Abel further calls attention to
the fact that the philosopher Bain, apparently without knowledge
that the phenomenon actually existed, claimed this double meaning
of words on purely theoretical grounds as a logical necessity. The
passage in question¹ begins with these sentences:

   ‘The essential relativity
of all knowledge, thought or consciousness cannot but show itself
in language. If everything that we can know is viewed as a
transition from something else, every experience must have two
sides; and either every name must have a double meaning, or else
for every meaning there must be two names.’

   From the ‘Appendix of
Examples of Egyptian, Indo-Germanic and Arabic Antithetical
Meanings’ I select a few instances which may impress even
those of us who are not experts in philology. In Latin
‘
altus
’ means ‘high’ and
‘deep’, ‘
sacer
’ ‘sacred’
and ‘accursed’; here accordingly we have the complete
antithesis in meaning without any modification of the sound of the
word. Phonetic alteration to distinguish contraries is illustrated
by examples like ‘
clamare
’ (‘to
cry’) - ‘
clam
’ (‘softly’,
‘secretly’); ‘
siccus
’
(‘dry’) - ‘
succus
’
(‘juice’). In German ‘
Boden
’
[‘garret’ or ‘ground’] still means the
highest as well as the lowest thing in the house. Our
‘
bös
’ (‘bad’) is matched by a
word ‘
bass
’ (‘good’); in Old Saxon
‘
bat
’ (‘good’) corresponds to the
English ‘bad’, and the English ‘to lock’ to
the German
‘
Lücke
’,’
Loch
’
[‘hole’]. We can compare the German
‘
kleben
’ [‘to stick’] with the
English ‘to cleave’ (‘to split’); the
German words ‘
stumm
’ [‘dumb’] and
‘
Stimme
’ [‘voice’], and so on. In
this way perhaps even the much derided derivation
lucus a non
lucendo
² would have some sense in it.

  
¹
Bain (1870, 1, 54).

  
²
[‘
Lucus
’ (Latin for
‘a grove’) is said to be derived from
‘
lucere
’ (‘to shine’) because it
does not shine there. (Attributed to Quintilian.)]

The Antithetical Meaning Of Primal Words

2323

   In his essay on ‘The Origin
of Language’ Abel (1885, 305) calls attention to further
traces of ancient difficulties in thinking. Even to-day the
Englishman in order to express ‘
ohne
’ says
‘without’ (‘
mitohne
’
[‘with-without’] in German), and the East Prussian does
the same. The word ‘with’ itself, which to-day
corresponds to the German ‘
mit
’, originally
meant ‘without’ as well as ‘with’, as can
be recognized from ‘withdraw and ‘withhold’. The
same transformation can be seen in the German
‘
wider
’ (‘against’) and
‘
wieder
’ (‘together with’).

   For comparison with the
dream-work there is another extremely strange characteristic of the
ancient Egyptian language which is significant. ‘In Egyptian,
words can - apparently, we will say to begin with -
reverse
their sound as well as their sense
. Let us suppose that the
German word "
gut
" ["good"] was Egyptian:
it could then mean "bad" as well as "good", and
be pronounced "tug" as well as "gut". Numerous
examples of such reversals of sound, which are too frequent to be
explained as chance occurrences, can be produced from the Aryan and
Semitic languages as well. Confining ourselves in the first
instance to Germanic languages we may note:
Topf
[pot] -
pot; boat - tub; wait -
täuwen
[tarry]; hurry -
Ruhe
[rest]; care - reck;
Balken
[beam] -
Klobe
[log], club. If we take the other Indo-Germanic
languages into consideration, the number of relevant instances
grows accordingly; for example,
capere
[Latin for
"take"] -
packen
[German for "seize"];
ren
[Latin for "kidney"] -
Niere
[German
for "kidney"]; leaf -
folium
[Latin for
"leaf"];
dum-a
[Russian for "thought"],
q
υμός
[Greek for "spirit", "courage"] -
mêdh
,
mûdha
[Sanscrit for
"mind"],
Mut
[German for "courage"];
rauchen
[German for "to smoke"] -
Kur-ít
[Russian for "to smoke"];
kreischen
[German for "to shriek"] - to shriek,
etc.’