Freud - Complete Works (472 page)

   Psycho-analysis has been obliged
to derive the mental life of adults from that of children, and has
had to take seriously the old saying that the child is father to
the man. It has traced the continuity between the infantile and
adult mind, and has also noted the transformations and
re-arrangements that occur in the process. In most of us there is a
gap in our memories covering the first years of our childhood, of
which only a few fragmentary recollections survive. Psycho-analysis
may be said to have filled in this gap and to have abolished
man’s infantile amnesia. (See the section on
‘Educational Interest’ below.)

   Some notable discoveries have
been made in the course of this investigation of the infantile
mind. Thus it has been possible to confirm, what has often already
been suspected, the extraordinarily important influence exerted by
the impressions of childhood (and particularly by its earliest
years) on the whole course of later development. This brings us up
against a psychological paradox - which for psycho-analysts alone
is no paradox - that it is precisely these most important of all
impressions that are not remembered in later years. Psycho-analysis
has been able to establish the decisive and indestructible
character of these earliest experiences in the clearest possible
way in the case of sexual life. ‘
On revient toujours
à ses premiers amours
’ is sober truth. The many
riddles in the sexual life of adults can only be solved if stress
is laid on the infantile factors in love. Theoretical light is
thrown on their influence by the consideration that an
individual’s first experiences in childhood do not occur only
by chance but also correspond to the first activities of his innate
or constitutional instinctual dispositions.

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   Another and far more surprising
discovery has been that, in spite of all the later development that
occurs in the adult, none of the infantile mental formations
perish. All the wishes, instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and
attitudes of childhood are still demonstrably present in maturity
and in appropriate circumstances can emerge once more. They are not
destroyed but merely overlaid - to use the spatial mode of
description which psycho-analytic psychology has been obliged to
adopt. Thus it is part of the nature of the mental past that,
unlike the historic past, it is not absorbed by its derivatives; it
persists (whether actually or only potentially) alongside what has
proceeded from it. The proof of this assertion lies in the fact
that the dreams of normal people revive their childhood characters
every night and reduce their whole mental life to an infantile
level. This same return to psychical infantilism
(‘regression’) appears in the neuroses and psychoses,
whose peculiarities may to a great extent be described as psychical
archaisms. The strength in which the residues of infancy are still
present in the mind shows us the amount of disposition to illness;
that disposition may accordingly be regarded as an expression of an
inhibition in development. The part of a person’s psychical
material which has remained infantile and has been repressed as
being unserviceable constitutes the core of his unconscious. And we
believe we can follow in our patients’ life-histories the way
in which this unconscious, held back as it is by the forces of
repression, lies in wait for a chance to become active and makes
use of its opportunities if the later and higher psychical
structures fail to master the difficulties of real life.

   In the last few years
psycho-analytic writers¹ have become aware that the principle
that ‘ontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny’ must be
applicable to mental life; and this has led to a fresh extension of
psycho-analytic interest.

  
¹
Abraham, Spielrein and Jung.

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(E) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM
THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

   The comparison between the
childhood of individual men and the early history of societies has
already proved its fruitfulness in several directions, even though
the study has scarcely more than begun. In this connection the
psycho-analytic mode of thought acts like a new instrument of
research. The application of its hypotheses to social psychology
enables us both to raise fresh problems and to see old ones in a
fresh light and contribute towards their solution.

   In the first place, it seems
quite possible to apply the psycho-analytic views derived from
dreams to products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy
tales.¹ The need to interpret such productions has long been
felt; some ‘secret meaning’ has been suspected to lie
behind them and it has been presumed that that meaning is concealed
by changes and transformations. The study made by psycho-analysis
of dreams and neuroses has given it the necessary experience to
enable it to guess the technical procedures that have governed
these distortions. But in a number of instances it can also reveal
the hidden motives which have led to this modification in the
original meaning of myths. It cannot accept as the first impulse to
the construction of myths a theoretical craving for finding an
explanation of natural phenomena or for accounting for cult
observances and usages which have become unintelligible. It looks
for that impulse in the same psychical ‘complexes’, in
the same emotional trends, which it has discovered at the base of
dreams and symptoms.

   A similar application of its
points of view, its hypotheses and its findings has enabled
psycho-analysis to throw light on the origins of our great cultural
institutions - on religion, morality, justice and philosophy.²
By examining the primitive psychological situations which were able
to provide the motive for creations of this kind, it has been in a
position to reject certain attempts at an explanation that were
based on too superficial a psychology and to replace them by a more
penetrating insight.

  
¹
Cf. Abraham, Rank and Jung.

  
²
For some first attempts in this direction,
see Jung (1912) and Freud (1912-13).

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   Psycho-analysis has established
an intimate connection between these psychical achievements of
individuals on the one hand and societies on the other by
postulating one and the same dynamic source for both of them. It
starts out from the basic idea that the principal function of the
mental mechanism is to relieve the individual from the tensions
created in him by his needs. One part of this task can be achieved
by extracting satisfaction from the external world; and for this
purpose it is essential to have control over the real world. But
the satisfaction of another part of these needs - among them
certain affective impulses - is regularly frustrated by reality.
This leads to the further task of finding some other means of
dealing with the unsatisfied impulses. The whole course of the
history of civilization is no more than an account of the various
methods adopted by mankind for ‘binding’ their
unsatisfied wishes, which, according to changing conditions
(modified, moreover, by technological advances) have been met by
reality sometimes with favour and sometimes with frustration.

   An investigation of primitive
peoples shows mankind caught up, to begin with, in a childish
belief in its own omnipotence.¹ A whole number of mental
structures can thus be understood as attempts to deny whatever
might disturb this feeling of omnipotence and so to prevent
emotional life from being affected by reality until the latter
could be better controlled and used for purposes of satisfaction.
The principle of avoiding unpleasure dominates human actions until
it is replaced by the better one of adaptation to the external
world.
Pari passu
with men’s progressive control over
the world goes a development in their
Weltanschauung
, their
view of the universe as a whole. They turn away more and more from
their original belief in their own omnipotence, rising from an
animistic phase through a religious to a scientific one. Myths,
religion and morality find their place in this scheme as attempts
to seek a compensation for the lack of satisfaction of human
wishes.

   Our knowledge of the neurotic
illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our
understanding of the great social institutions. For the neuroses
themselves have turned out to be attempts to find
individual
solutions for the problems of compensating for unsatisfied wishes,
while the institutions seek to provide
social
solutions for
these same problems. The recession of the social factor and the
predominance of the sexual one turns these neurotic solutions of
the psychological problem into caricatures which are of no service
except to help us in explaining such important questions.

  
¹
Cf. Ferenczi (1913
c
) and Freud
(1912-13), Chapter III.

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(F) THE INTEREST OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS FROM
THE POINT OF VIEW

OF THE SCIENCE OF AESTHETICS

   Psycho-analysis throws a
satisfactory light upon some of the problems concerning arts and
artists; but others escape it entirely. In the exercising of an art
it sees once again an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes
- in the first place in the creative artist himself and
subsequently in his audience or spectators. The motive forces of
artists are the same conflicts which drive other people into
neurosis and have encouraged society to construct its institutions.
Whence it is that the artist derives his creative capacity is not a
question for psychology. The artist’s first aim is to set
himself free and, by communicating his work to other people
suffering from the same arrested desires, he offers them the same
liberation.¹ He represents his most personal wishful
phantasies as fulfilled; but they only become a work of art when
they have undergone a transformation which softens what is
offensive in them, conceals their personal origin and, by obeying
the laws of beauty, bribes other people with a bonus of pleasure.
Psycho-analysis has no difficulty in pointing out, alongside the
manifest part of artistic enjoyment, another that is latent though
far more potent, derived from the hidden sources of instinctual
liberation. The connection between the impressions of the
artist’s childhood and his life-history on the one hand and
his works, as reactions to those impressions, on the other is one
of the most attractive subjects of analytic examination.²

   For the rest, most of the
problems of artistic creation and appreciation await further study,
which will throw the light of analytic knowledge on them and assign
them their place in the complex structure presented by the
compensation for human wishes. Art is a conventionally accepted
reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and
substitutes are able to provoke real emotions. Thus art constitutes
a region half-way between a reality which frustrates wishes and the
wish-fulfilling world of the imagination - a region in which, as it
were, primitive man’s strivings for omnipotence are still in
full force.

  
¹
Cf. Rank (1907).

  
²
Cf. Rank (1912). See also, for the
application of psycho-analysis to aesthetic problems, my book on
jokes (Freud, 1905
c
).

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(G) THE SOCIOLOGICAL INTEREST OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

   It is true that psycho-analysis
has taken the individual mind as its subject, but in investigating
the individual it could not avoid dealing with the emotional basis
of the relation of the individual to society. It has found that the
social feelings invariably contain an erotic element - an element
which, if it is over-emphasized and then repressed, becomes one of
the marks of a particular group of mental disorders.
Psycho-analysis has recognized that in general the neuroses are
asocial in their nature and that they always aim at driving the
individual out of society and at replacing the safe monastic
seclusion of earlier days by the isolation of illness. The intense
feeling of guilt which dominates so many neuroses has been shown to
be a social modification of neurotic anxiety.

   On the other hand,
psycho-analysis has fully demonstrated the part played by social
conditions and requirements in the causation of neurosis. The
forces which, operating from the ego, bring about the restriction
and repression of instinct owe their origin essentially to
compliance with the demands of civilization. A constitution and a
set of childhood experiences which, in other cases, would
inevitably lead to a neurosis will produce no such result where
this compliance is absent or where these demands are not made by
the social circle in which the particular individual is placed. The
old assertion that the increase in nervous disorders is a product
of civilization is at least a half-truth. Young people are brought
into contact with the demands of civilization by upbringing and
example; and if instinctual repression occurs independently of
these two factors, it is a plausible hypothesis to suppose that a
primaeval and prehistoric demand has at last become part of the
organized and inherited endowment of mankind. A child who produces
instinctual repressions spontaneously is thus merely repeating a
part of the history of civilization. What is to-day an act of
internal restraint was once an external one, imposed, perhaps, by
the necessities of the moment; and, in the same way, what is now
brought to bear upon every growing individual as an external demand
of civilization may some day become an internal disposition to
repression.