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Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3670

   A soldier in whom these affective
motives were very powerful and clearly conscious would, if he was a
healthy man, have been obliged to desert or pretend to be ill. Only
the smallest proportion of war neurotics, however, were
malingerers; the emotional impulses which rebelled in them against
active service and drove them into illness were operative in them
without becoming conscious to them. They remained unconscious
because other motives, such as ambition, self-esteem, patriotism,
the habit of obedience and the example of others, were to start
with more powerful until, on some appropriate occasion, they were
overwhelmed by the other, unconsciously operating motives.

   This insight into the causation
of the war neuroses led to a method of treatment which seemed to be
well-grounded and also proved highly effective in the first
instance. It seemed expedient to treat the neurotic as a malingerer
and to disregard the psychological distinction between conscious
and unconscious intentions, although he was known not to be a
malingerer. Since his illness served the purpose of withdrawing him
from an intolerable situation, the roots of the illness would
clearly be undermined if it was made even more intolerable to him
than active service. Just as he had fled from the war into illness,
means were now adopted which compelled him to flee back from
illness into health, that is to say, into fitness for active
service. For this purpose painful electrical treatment was
employed, and with success. Physicians are glossing over the facts
in retrospect when they assert that the strength of this electrical
current was the same as had always been employed in functional
disorders. This would only have been effective in the mildest
cases; nor did it fit in with the underlying argument that a war
neurotic’s illness had to be made painful so that the balance
of his motives would be tipped in favour of recovery.

   This painful form of treatment
introduced in the German army for therapeutic purposes could no
doubt also be employed in a more moderate fashion. If it was used
in the Vienna Clinics, I am personally convinced that it was never
intensified to a cruel pitch by the initiative of Professor
Wagner-Jauregg. I cannot vouch for other physicians whom I did not
know. The psychological education of medical men is in general
decidedly deficient and more than one of them may have forgotten
that the patient whom he was seeking to treat as a malingerer was,
after all, not one.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3671

   This therapeutic procedure,
however, bore a stigma from the very first. It did not aim at the
patient’s recovery, or not in the first instance; it aimed,
above all, at restoring his fitness for service. Here Medicine was
serving purposes foreign to its essence. The physician himself was
under military command and had his own personal dangers to fear -
loss of seniority or a charge of neglecting his duty - if he
allowed himself to be led by considerations other than those
prescribed for him. The insoluble conflict between the claims of
humanity, which normally carry decisive weight for a physician, and
the demands of a national war was bound to confuse his
activity.

   Moreover, the successes of
treatment by a strong electric current, which were brilliant to
begin with, turned out afterwards not to be lasting. A patient who,
having been restored to health by it, was sent back to the Front,
could repeat the business afresh and have a relapse, by means of
which he at least gained time and escaped the danger which was at
the moment the immediate one. If he was once more under fire his
fear of the electric current receded, just as during the treatment
his fear of active service had faded. In the course of the war
years, too, a rapidly increasing fatigue in the popular spirit made
itself felt more and more, and a growing dislike of fighting, so
that the treatment I have described began to fail in its effects.
In these circumstances some of the army doctors gave way to the
inclination, characteristic of Germans, to carry through their
intentions regardless of all else - which should never have
happened. The strength of the current, as well as the severity of
the rest of the treatment, were increased to an unbearable point in
order to deprive war neurotics of the advantage they gained from
their illness. The fact has never been contradicted that in German
hospitals there were deaths at that time during treatment and
suicides as a result of it. I am quite unable to say, however,
whether the Vienna Clinics, too, passed through this phase of
therapy.

Introduction To Psycho-Analysis And The War Neuroses

3672

   I am in a position to bring
forward conclusive evidence of the final break-down of the
electrical treatment of the war neuroses. In 1918 Dr. Ernst Simmel,
head of a hospital for war neuroses at Posen, published a pamphlet
in which he reported the extraordinarily favourable results
achieved in severe cases of war neurosis by the psychotherapeutic
method introduced by me. As a result of this publication, the next
Psycho-Analytical Congress, held in Budapest in September 1918, was
attended by official delegates of the German, Austrian and
Hungarian Army Command, who promised that Centres should be set up
for the purely psychological treatment of war neuroses. This
promise was made although the delegates can have been left in no
doubt that with this considerate, laborious and tedious kind of
treatment it was impossible to count on the quickest restoration of
these patients to fitness for service. Preparations for the
establishment of Centres of this kind were actually under way, when
the revolution broke out and put an end to the war and to the
influence of the administrative offices which had hitherto been
all-powerful. But with the end of the war the war neurotics, too,
disappeared - a final but impressive proof of the psychical
causation of their illnesses.

Vienna,
23. 2. 20.    

3673

THE ‘UNCANNY’

(1919)

3674

Intentionally left blank

3675

THE ‘UNCANNY’

I

It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels
impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when
aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty
but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other
strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued
emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on
a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the
study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to
interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and
this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one
which has been neglected in the specialist literature of
aesthetics.

   The subject of the
‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly
related to what is frightening - to what arouses dread and horror;
equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly
definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites
fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling
is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term.
One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to
distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie
within the field of what is frightening.

   As good as nothing is to be found
upon this subject in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which
in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful,
attractive and sublime - that is, with feelings of a positive
nature - and with the circumstances and the objects that call them
forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and
distress. I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological
literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by Jentsch (1906).
But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination
of the literature, especially the foreign literature, relating to
this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may
easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; so that my
paper is presented to the reader without any claim to priority.

The 'Uncanny'

3676

   In his study of the
‘uncanny’ Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the
obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in
their sensitivity to this quality of feeling. The writer of the
present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a
special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of
perception would be more in place. It is long since he has
experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny
impression, and he must start by translating himself into that
state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of
experiencing it. Still, such difficulties make themselves
powerfully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not
on that account despair of finding instances in which the quality
in question will be unhesitatingly recognized by most people.

   Two courses are open to us at the
outset. Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached
to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or
we can collect all those properties of persons, things,
sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us
the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of
the uncanny from what all these examples have in common. I will say
at once that both courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is
that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of
old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances
the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in
what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually
begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and was only
later confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this
discussion, however, I shall follow the reverse course.

   The German word
‘
unheimlich
’ is obviously the opposite of
‘
heimlich
’ [‘homely’],
‘
heimisch
’ [‘native’] - the opposite
of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is
‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is
not
known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new
and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable
of inversion. We can only say that what is novel can easily become
frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by
any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and
unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.

The 'Uncanny'

3677

   On the whole, Jentsch did not get
beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He
ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of
uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would
always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way
about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the
less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in
regard to the objects and events in it.

   It is not difficult to see that
this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed
beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ =
‘unfamiliar’. We will first turn to other languages.
But the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps
only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign. Indeed,
we get an impression that many languages are without a word for
this particular shade of what is frightening.

   I should like to express my
indebtedness to Dr. Theodor Reik for the following excerpts:-

  
LATIN
: (K. E. Georges,
Deutchlateinisches Wörterbuch
, 1898). An uncanny place:
locus suspectus
; at an uncanny time of night:
intempesta
nocte
.

  
GREEK
: (Rost’s and
Schenkl’s Lexikons).
ξέυος
(i. e. strange, foreign).

  
ENGLISH:
(from the dictionaries of
Lucas, Bellows, Flügel and Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable,
uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of
a man) a repulsive fellow.

  
FRENCH:
(Sachs-Villatte).
Inquiétant
,
sinistre
,
lugubre
,
mal
à son aise
.

  
SPANISH
: (Tollhausen, 1889).
Sospechoso
,
de mal aguëro
,
lúgubre
,
siniestro
.

   The Italian and Portuguese
languages seem to content themselves with words which we should
describe as circumlocutions. In Arabic and Hebrew
‘uncanny’ means the same as ‘daemonic’,
‘gruesome’.

The 'Uncanny'

3678

   Let us therefore return to the
German language. In Daniel Sanders’s
Wörterbuch der
Deutschen Sprache
(1860,
1
, 729), the following entry,
which I here reproduce in full, is to be found under the word
‘
heimlich
’. I have laid stress on one or two
passages by italicizing them.

  
Heimlich
, adj., subst.
Heimlichkeit
(pl.
Heimlichkeiten
): I. Also
heimelich
,
heimelig
, belonging to the house, not
strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.

   (
a
) (Obsolete) belonging
to the house or the family, or regarded as so belonging (cf. Latin
familiaris
, familiar):
Die Heimlichen
, the members of
the household;
Der heimliche Rat
(Gen. xli, 45; 2 Sam.
xxiii. 23; 1 Chron. xii. 25; Wisd. viii. 4), now more usually
Geheimer Rat
[Privy Councillor].

   (
b
) Of animals: tame,
companionable to man. As opposed to wild, e. g. ‘Animals
which are neither wild nor
heimlich
’, etc. ‘Wild
animals . . . that are trained to be
heimlich
and accustomed to men.’ ‘If these young creatures are
brought up from early days among men they become quite
heimlich
, friendly’ etc. - So also: ‘It (the
lamb) is so
heimlich
and eats out of my hand.’
‘Nevertheless, the stork is a beautiful,
heimelich
bird.’

   (
c
) Intimate, friendlily
comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense
of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four
walls of his house. ‘Is it still
heimlich
to you in
your country where strangers are felling your woods?’
‘She did not feel too
heimlich
with him.’
‘Along a high,
heimlich
, shady
path . . ., beside a purling, gushing and babbling
woodland brook.’ ‘To destroy the
Heimlichkeit
of
the home,’ ‘I could not readily find another spot so
intimate and
heimlich
as this.’ ‘We pictured it
so comfortable, so nice, so cosy and
heimlich
.’
‘In quiet
Heimlichkeit
, surrounded by close
walls.’ ‘A careful housewife, who knows how to make a
pleasing
Heimlichkeit
(
Häuslichkeit
) out of the
smallest means.’ ‘The man who till recently had been so
strange to him now seemed to him all the more
heimlich
.’ ‘The protestant land-owners do not
feel . . .
heimlich
among their catholic
inferiors.’ ‘When it grows
heimlich
and still,
and the evening quiet alone watches over your cell.’
‘Quiet, lovely and
heimlich
, no place more fitted for
their rest.’ ‘He did not feel at all
heimlich
about it.’ - Also, ‘The place was so peaceful, so
lonely, so shadily-
heimlich
.’ ‘The in- and
outflowing waves of the current, dreamy and
lullaby-
heimlich
.’ Cf. in especial
Unheimlich
.
Among Swabian Swiss authors in especial, often as a trisyllable:
‘How
heimelich
it seemed to Ivo again of an evening,
when he was at home.’ ‘It was so
heimelig
in the
house.’ ‘The warm room and the
heimelig
afternoon.’ ‘When a man feels in his heart that he is
so small and the Lord so great - that is what is truly
heimelig
.’ ‘Little by little they grew at ease
and
heimelig
among themselves.’ ‘Friendly
Heimeligkeit
.’ ‘I shall be nowhere more
heimelich
than I am here.’ ‘That which comes
from afar . . . assuredly does not live quite
heimelig
(
heimatlich
,
freundnachbarlich
) among
the people.’ ‘The cottage where he had once sat so
often among his own people, so
heimelig
, so happy.’
‘The sentinel’s horn sounds so
heimelig
from the
tower, and his voice invites so hospitably.’ ‘You go to
sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully
heim’lig
.’ -
This form of the word deserves
to become general in order to protect this perfectly good sense of
the word from becoming obsolete through an easy confusion with
II. Cf.: ‘"
The Zecks are all
‘heimlich
’
."
(in sense II)
"‘Heimlich
’
? 
. . .
What do you understand by
‘heimlich
’
?
"
"
Well, . . . they are like a buried spring
or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having
the feeling that water might come up there again
."
"
Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich
’
; you call
it ‘heimlich
’
. Well, what makes you think that
there is something secret and untrustworthy about this
family?"
’(Gutzkow)
.

  
(
d
) Especially in
Silesia: gay, cheerful; also of the weather.

   II. Concealed, kept from sight,
so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from
others. To do something
heimlich
, i.e. behind
someone’s back; to steal away
heimlich
;
heimlich
meetings and appointments; to look on with
heimlich
pleasure at someone’s discomfiture; to sigh
or weep
heimlich
; to behave
heimlich
, as though there
was something to conceal;
heimlich
love-affair, love, sin;
heimlich
places (which good manners oblige us to conceal) (1
Sam. v. 6). ‘The
heimlich
chamber’ (privy) (2
Kings x. 27.). Also, ‘the
heimlich
chair’.
‘To throw into pits or
Heimlichkeiten
’. -
‘Led the steeds
heimlich
before Laomedon.’ -
‘As secretive,
heimlich
, deceitful and malicious
towards cruel masters . . . as frank, open,
sympathetic and helpful towards a friend in misfortune.’
‘You have still to learn what is
heimlich
holiest to
me.’ ‘The
heimlich
art’ (magic).
‘Where public ventilation has to stop, there
heimlich
machinations begin.’ ‘Freedom is the whispered
watchword of
heimlich
conspirators and the loud battle-cry
of professed revolutionaries.’ ‘A holy,
heimlich
effect.’ ‘I have roots that are most
heimlich
. I
am grown in the deep earth.’ ‘My
heimlich
pranks.’ ‘If he is not given it openly and scrupulously
he may seize it
heimlich
and unscrupulously.’
‘He had achromatic telescopes constructed
heimlich
and
secretly.’ ‘Henceforth I desire that there should be
nothing
heimlich
any longer between us.’ - To
discover, disclose, betray someone’s
Heimlichkeiten
;
‘to concoct
Heimlichkeiten
behind my back’.
‘In my time we studied
Heimlichkeit
’ ‘The
hand of understanding can alone undo the powerless spell of the
Heimlichkeit
(of hidden gold).’ ‘Say, where is
the place of concealment . . . in what place of
hidden
Heimlichkeit
?’ ‘Bees, who make the lock
of
Heimlichkeiten
’ (i. e. sealing-wax). ‘Learned
in strange
Heimlichkeiten
(magic arts).