Freud - Complete Works (482 page)
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] Now director
of the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag [International
Psycho-Analytical Publishing House] and editor of the
Zeitschrift
and
Imago
from their
inception.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2893
In 1907 the situation changed all
at once and contrary to all expectations. It appeared that
psycho-analysis had unobtrusively awakened interest and gained
friends, and that there were even some scientific workers who were
ready to acknowledge it. A communication from Bleuler had informed
me before this that my works had been studied and made use of in
the Burghölzli. In January 1907, the first member of the
Zurich clinic came to Vienna - Dr. Eitingon.¹ 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 the Burghölzli, a first meeting took place at
Salzburg in the spring of 1908, which brought together 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 psychoanalytische
und psychopathologische Forschungen
, under the direction of
Bleuler and Freud and edited by Jung, which first appeared in 1909.
This publication gave expression to an intimate co-operation
between Vienna and Zurich.
I have repeatedly acknowledged
with gratitude the great services rendered by the Zurich School of
Psychiatry in the spread of psycho-analysis, particularly by
Bleuler and Jung, and I have no hesitation in doing so again, even
in the greatly altered circumstances of the present. True, it was
not the support of the Zurich School which first directed the
attention of the scientific world to psycho-analysis at that time.
What had happened was that 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 a very emphatic repudiation,
mostly a quite passionate one; whereas in Zurich, on the contrary,
agreement on general lines was the dominant note. Moreover, nowhere
else did such a compact little group of adherents exist, or could a
public clinic be placed at the service of psycho-analytic
researches, or was there a clinical teacher who included
psycho-analytic theories as an integral part of his psychiatric
course. The Zurich group thus became the nucleus of the small 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. In relation to Western
Europe, which contains the great centres of our 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
intellectual activity is so lively; a focus of infection there was
bound to be of great importance for the spread of the
‘psychical epidemic’, as Hoche of Freiburg has called
it.
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] The
subsequent founder of the ‘Psycho-Analytic Policlinic’
in Berlin.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2894
According to the evidence of a
colleague who witnessed developments at the Burghölzli, it
appears that psycho-analysis awakened interest there very early. In
Jung’s work on occult phenomena, published in 1902, 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, an informal society was also started, in the
middle of 1907, in the Burghölzli, where the problems of
psycho-analysis were discussed at regular meetings. In the alliance
between the Vienna and 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
become possible to arrive at rapid experimental confirmation of
psycho-analytic observations and to demonstrate directly to
students certain connections which an analyst would only have been
able to tell them about. The first bridge linking up experimental
psychology with psycho-analysis had been built.
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 adducing 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
praecox, so that their sources in the life-history and 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-analytic
point of view was placed on an equal footing with the clinical
systematic one, completed this success.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2895
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. As early as in 1897
I had published the analysis of a case of schizophrenia, which
however was of a paranoid character, so that the solution of it
could not take away from the impression made by 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 agreement of this
mechanism with that of hysteria, which had already been discovered.
At that time no light had yet been thrown on the differences
between the two mechanisms. For I was then already aiming at a
libido theory of the neuroses, which was to explain all neurotic
and psychotic phenomena as proceeding from abnormal vicissitudes of
the libido, that is, as diversions from its normal employment. This
point of view was missed by the Swiss investigators. As far as I
know, even to-day Bleuler maintains the view that the various forms
of dementia praecox have an organic causation; and at the Salzburg
Congress in 1908 Jung, whose book on this disease had appeared in
1907, supported the toxic theory of its causation, which takes no
account of the libido theory, although it is true that it does not
rule it out. Later on (1912) he came to grief on this same point,
by making too much of the material which he had previously refused
to employ.
There is a third contribution
made by the Swiss School, probably to be ascribed entirely to Jung,
which I do not value so highly as others do whose concern with
these matters is more remote. I refer to the theory of
‘complexes’ which grew out of the
Diagnostische
Assoziationsstudien
[
Studies in Word-Association
]
(1906). It has neither itself produced a psychological theory, not
has it proved capable of easy incorporation into the context of
psycho-analytic theory. The word ‘complex’, on the
other hand, had become naturalized, so to speak, in psycho-analytic
language; it is a convenient and often indispensable term for
summing up a psychological state descriptively. 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 the
construction of clearer concepts. Analysts began to speak among
themselves of a ‘return of a complex’ where they meant
a ‘return of the repressed’, or fell into the habit of
saying ‘I have a complex against him’, where the only
correct expression would have been ‘a resistance against
him’.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2896
In the years following 1907, when
the schools of Vienna and Zurich were united, psycho-analysis made
the extraordinary surge forward of which the momentum 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 doctors
who are practising or studying it, as well as by the frequency of
the attacks made on it at Congresses and in learned societies. It
has penetrated into the most distant lands and has everywhere not
merely startled psychiatrists but commanded the attention of the
educated public and of scientific workers in other fields. Havelock
Ellis, who has followed its development with sympathy though
without ever calling himself an adherent, wrote in 1911 in a report
for the Australasian Medical Congress: ‘Freud’s
psycho-analysis is now 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.’¹
A physician from Chile (probably a German) spoke at the
International Congress at Buenos Aires in 1910 in support of the
existence of infantile sexuality and commended highly the effects
of psycho-analytic therapy on obsessional symptoms.² An
English neurologist in Central India (Berkeley-Hill) informed me,
through a distinguished colleague who was visiting Europe, that the
analyses of Mohammedan Indians which he had carried out showed that
the aetiology of their neuroses was no different from what we find
in our European patients.
¹
Havelock Ellis, 1911.
²
G. Greve, 1910.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2897
The introduction of
psycho-analysis into North America was accompanied by 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 a number of lectures
in German. To our great surprise, we found the members of that
small but highly esteemed University for the study of education 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, in
academic circles at least, to discuss freely and scientifically
everything that in ordinary life is regarded as objectionable. The
five lectures which I improvised in Worcester appeared in an
English translation in the
American Journal of Psychology
,
and were shortly afterwards published in German under the title
Über Psychoanalyse
. Jung read a paper on diagnostic
association experiments and another on conflicts in the mind of the
child. We were rewarded with the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
During that week of celebrations at Worcester, psycho-analysis was
represented by five men: besides Jung and myself, there were
Ferenczi, who had joined me for the journey, Ernest Jones, then at
the University of Toronto (Canada) and now in 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 became reconciled 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 in all probability would otherwise quickly
have 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 at 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.¹
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] See
Putnam’s
Addresses on Psycho-Analysis
, 1921. Putnam
died in 1918.
On The History Of The Psycho-Analytic Movement
2898
For the further spread of this
movement Brill and Jones deserve the greatest credit: in their
writings they drew their countrymen’s attention with
unremitting assiduity to the easily observable fundamental facts of
everyday life, of dreams and neurosis. Brill has contributed still
further to this effect by his medical practice and by his
translations of my works, and Jones by his instructive lectures and
by his skill in debate at congresses in America.¹ The absence
of any deep-rooted scientific tradition in America and the much
less stringent rule of official authority there have been of
decided advantage to the impetus given by Stanley Hall. It was
characteristic of that country that from the beginning professors
and superintendents of mental hospitals showed as much interest in
analysis as independent practitioners. But it is clear that
precisely for this reason the ancient centres of culture, where the
greatest resistance has been displayed, must be the scene of the
decisive struggle over psycho-analysis.