Freud - Complete Works (675 page)

   And now, as a third point,
psycho-analysis has shown us, to our growing astonishment, the
enormously important part played by what is known as the
‘Oedipus complex’ - that is, the emotional relation of
a child to its two parents - in the mental life of human beings.
Our astonishment diminishes when we realize that the Oedipus
complex is the psychical correlate of two fundamental biological
facts: the long period of the human child’s dependence, and
the remarkable way in which its sexual life reaches a first climax
in the third to fifth years of life, and then, after a period of
inhibition, sets in again at puberty. And here, the discovery was
made that a third and extremely serious part of human intellectual
activity, the part which has created the great institutions of
religion, law, ethics, and all forms of civic life, has as its
fundamental aim the enabling of the individual to master his
Oedipus complex and to divert his libido from its infantile
attachments into the social ones that are ultimately desired. The
applications of psycho-analysis to the science of religion and
sociology (e. g. by the present writer, Theodor Reik and Oskar
Pfister), which have led to these findings, are still young and
insufficiently appreciated; but it cannot be doubted that further
studies will only confirm the certainty of these important
conclusions.

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   By way, as it were, of
postscript, I must also mention that educationists, too, cannot
avoid making use of the hints which they have received from the
analytic exploration of the mental life of children; and further
that voices have been raised among therapists (e.g. Groddeck and
Jelliffe), maintaining that the psycho-analytic treatment of
serious organic complaints shows promising results, since in many
of these affections some part is played by a psychical factor on
which it is possible to bring influence to bear.

   Thus we may express our
expectation that psycho-analysis, whose development and
achievements hitherto have been briefly and inadequately related in
these pages, will enter into the cultural development of the next
decades as a significant ferment, and will help to deepen our
understanding of the world and to fight against some things in life
which are recognized as injurious. It must not be forgotten,
however, that psycho-analysis alone cannot offer a complete picture
of the world. If we accept the distinction which I have recently
proposed of dividing the mental apparatus into an ego, turned
towards the external world and equipped with consciousness, and an
unconscious id, dominated by its instinctual needs, then
psycho-analysis is to be described as a psychology of the id (and
of its effects upon the ego). In each field of knowledge,
therefore, it can make only
contributions
, which require to
be completed from the psychology of the ego. If these contributions
often contain the essence of the facts, this only corresponds to
the important part which, it may be claimed, is played in our lives
by the mental unconscious that has so long remained unknown.

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THE RESISTANCES TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1925)

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4121

THE RESISTANCES TO PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A child in his nurse’s arms will turn
away screaming at the sight of a strange face; a pious man will
begin the new season with a prayer and he will also greet the first
fruits of the year with a blessing; a peasant will refuse to buy a
scythe unless it bears the trade-mark that was familiar to his
parents. The distinction between these situations is obvious and
would seem to justify one in looking for a different motive in each
of them.

   Nevertheless, it would be a
mistake to overlook what they have in common. In each case we are
dealing with unpleasure of the same kind. The child expresses it in
an elementary fashion, the pious man lulls it by an artifice, while
the peasant uses it as the motive for a decision. The source of
this unpleasure is the demand made upon the mind by anything that
is
new
, the psychical expenditure that it requires, the
uncertainty, mounting up to anxious expectancy, which it bring
along with it. It would be interesting to devote a whole study to
mental reactions to novelty; for under certain, no longer primary,
conditions we can observe behaviour of the contrary kind - a thirst
for stimulation which flings itself upon anything that is new
merely because it
is
new.

   In scientific affairs there
should be no place for recoiling from novelty. Science, in her
perpetual incompleteness and insufficiency, is driven to hope for
her salvation in new discoveries and new ways of regarding things.
She does well, in order not to be deceived, to arm herself with
scepticism and to accept nothing new unless it has withstood the
strictest examination. Sometimes, however, this scepticism shows
two unexpected features; it may be sharply directed against what is
new while it spares what is familiar and accepted, and it may be
content to reject things before it has examined them. But in
behaving thus it reveals itself as a prolongation of the primitive
reaction against what is new and as a cloak for the retention of
that reaction. It is a matter of common knowledge how often in the
history of scientific research it has happened that innovations
have met with intense and stubborn resistance, while subsequent
events have shown that the resistance was unjustified and that the
novelty was valuable and important. What provoked the resistance
was, as a rule, certain factors in the subject-matter of the
novelty, while, on the other side, several factors must have
combined to make the irruption of the primitive reaction
possible.

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4122

   A particularly bad reception was
accorded to psycho-analysis, which the present writer began to
develop nearly thirty years ago from the discoveries of Josef
Breuer (of Vienna) on the origin of neurotic symptoms. It cannot be
disputed that it possessed the quality of novelty, even though it
made use of plenty of material which was well known from other
sources (quite apart from Breuer’s discoveries), such as the
lessons from the teachings of Charcot, the great neuropathologist,
and impressions derived from the sphere of hypnotic phenomena. Its
original significance was purely therapeutic: it aimed at creating
a new and efficient method for treating neurotic illnesses. But
connections which could not be foreseen in the beginning caused
psycho-analysis to reach out far beyond its original aim. It ended
by claiming to have set our whole view of mental life upon a new
basis and therefore to be of importance for every field of
knowledge that is founded on psychology. After a decade of complete
neglect it suddenly became a subject of general interest - and set
loose a storm of indignant opposition.

   The
forms
in which the
resistance to psycho-analysis found expression need not now be
considered. It is enough to say that the struggle over this
innovation is by no means at an end, though it is already possible
to see what direction it will take. Its opponents have not
succeeded in suppressing the movement. Psycho-analysis, of which
twenty years ago I was the only spokesman, has since attracted the
support of numerous valuable and active workers, medical and
non-medical, who make use of it as a procedure for the treatment of
nervous diseases, as a method of psychological research and as an
auxiliary instrument for scientific work in the most various
departments of intellectual life. In the following pages our
interest will be directed only to the
motives
of the
resistance to psycho-analysis, with particular stress upon the
composite character of that resistance and upon the differing
amount of weight carried by its components.

The Resistances To Psycho-Analysis

4123

   From a clinical standpoint the
neuroses must necessarily be put alongside the intoxications and
such disorders as Graves’ disease. These are conditions
arising from an excess or a relative lack of certain highly active
substances, whether produced inside the body or introduced into it
from outside - in short, they are disturbances of the chemistry of
the body, toxic conditions. If someone succeeded in isolating and
demonstrating the hypothetical substance or substances concerned in
neuroses, he would have no need to worry about opposition from the
medical profession. For the present, however, no such avenue of
approach to the problem is open. At the moment we can only start
from the symptoms presented by a neurosis - symptoms which in the
case of hysteria, for instance, consist of a combination of somatic
and mental disturbances. Now Charcot’s experiments as well as
Breuer’s clinical observations taught us that the somatic
symptoms of hysteria are psychogenic too - that is, that they are
precipitates of mental processes that have run their course. By
putting a subject into a state of hypnosis it was possible at will
to produce the somatic symptoms of hysteria artificially.

   Psycho-analysis took hold of this
new realization and began to consider the problem of the nature of
the psychical processes which led to these unusual consequences.
But the direction taken by this enquiry was not to the liking of
the contemporary generation of physicians. They had been brought up
to respect only anatomical, physical and chemical factors. They
were not prepared for taking psychical ones into account and
therefore met them with indifference or antipathy. They obviously
had doubts whether psychical events allowed of any exact scientific
treatment whatever. As an excessive reaction against an earlier
phase during which medicine had been dominated by what was known as
the ‘philosophy of Nature’, they regarded such
abstractions as those with which psychology is obliged to work as
nebulous, fantastic and mystical; while they simply refused to
believe in remarkable phenomena which might have been the
starting-point of research. The symptoms of hysterical neuroses
were looked upon as shamming and the phenomena of hypnotism as a
hoax. Even the psychiatrists, upon whose attention the most unusual
and astonishing mental phenomena were constantly being forced,
showed no inclination to examine their details or enquire into
their connections. They were content to classify the variegated
array of symptoms and trace them back, so far as they could manage,
to somatic, anatomical or chemical aetiological disturbances.
During this materialistic or, rather, mechanistic period, medicine
made tremendous advances, but it also showed a short-sighted
misunderstanding of the most important and most difficult among the
problems of life.

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4124

   It is easy to understand why
doctors, with an attitude of this kind towards the mind, should
have had no liking for psycho-analysis and should have demurred to
its demand for learning many things afresh and for seeing many
things in a different light. But as a compensation it might be
supposed that the new theory would be all the more likely to meet
with applause from philosophers. For philosophers were accustomed
to putting abstract concepts (or, as unkind tongues would say, hazy
words) in the forefront of their explanations of the universe, and
it would be impossible that they should object to the extension of
the sphere of psychology for which psycho-analysis had paved the
way. But here another obstacle arose. The philosophers’ idea
of what is mental was not that of psycho-analysis. The overwhelming
majority of philosophers regard as mental only the phenomena of
consciousness. For them the world of consciousness coincides with
the sphere of what is mental. Everything else that may take place
in the ‘mind’ - an entity so hard to grasp - is
relegated by them to the organic determinants of mental processes
or to processes parallel to mental ones. Or, more strictly
speaking, the mind has no contents other than the phenomena of
consciousness, and consequently psychology, the science of the
mind, has no other subject-matter. And on this point the
layman’s view is the same.

   What, then, can a philosopher say
to a theory which, like psycho-analysis, asserts that on the
contrary what is mental is in itself
unconscious
and that
being conscious is only a
quality
, which may or may not
accrue to a particular mental act and the withholding of which may
perhaps alter that act in no other respect? He will naturally say
that anything both unconscious and mental would be an
impossibility, a
contradictio in adjecto
, and he will fail
to observe that in making this judgement he is merely repeating his
own definition of what is mental, a definition which may perhaps be
too narrow. It is easy for philosophers to feel this certainty,
since they have no acquaintance with the material whose
investigation has compelled analysts to believe in unconscious
mental acts. Philosophers have never taken account of hypnosis,
they have not concerned themselves with the interpreting of dreams
- on the contrary, like doctors, they regard dreams as the
meaningless products of reduced mental activity during sleep - they
are scarcely aware that there are such things as obsessions and
delusions and they would find themselves in a most embarrassing
situation if they were asked to explain them on the basis of their
own psychological premisses. Analysts, too, refuse to say what the
unconscious is, but they can indicate the domain of phenomena whose
observation has obliged them to assume its existence. Philosophers,
who know no kind of observation other than self-observation, cannot
follow them into that domain.

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4125

   So it comes about that
psycho-analysis derives nothing but disadvantages from its middle
position between medicine and philosophy. Doctors regard it as a
speculative system and refuse to believe that, like every other
natural science, it is based on a patient and tireless elaboration
of facts from the world of perception; philosophers, measuring it
by the standard of their own artificially constructed systems, find
that it starts from impossible premisses and reproach it because
its most general concepts (which are only now in process of
evolution) lack clarity and precision.

   This state of affairs is enough
to account for the reluctant and hesitant reception of analysis in
scientific quarters. But it does not explain the outbursts of
indignation, derision and scorn which, in disregard of every
standard of logic and good taste, have characterized the
controversial methods of its opponents. A reaction of such a kind
suggests that resistances other than purely intellectual ones were
stirred up and that powerful emotional forces were aroused. And
there are indeed plenty of things to be found in the theory of
psycho-analysis calculated to produce such an effect as this upon
the passions of men of every kind and not of scientists alone.
Above all there is the very important place in the mental life of
human beings which psycho-analysis assigns to what are known as the
sexual instincts. Psycho-analytic theory maintained that the
symptoms of neuroses are distorted substitutive satisfactions of
sexual instinctual forces, the direct satisfaction of which has
been frustrated by internal resistances. Later on, when analysis
had extended beyond its original field of work and began to be
applied to normal mental life, it sought to show that these same
sexual components, which could be diverted from their immediate
aims and directed to other things, made the most important
contributions to the cultural achievements of the individual and of
society. These views were not entirely new. The incomparable
significance of sexual life had been proclaimed by the philosopher
Schopenhauer in an intensely impressive passage. Moreover, what
psycho-analysis called sexuality was by no means identical with the
impulsion towards a union of the two sexes or towards producing a
pleasurable sensation in the genitals; it had far more resemblance
to the all-inclusive and all-preserving Eros of Plato’s
Symposium
.

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4126

   But the opponents of
psycho-analysis forgot its illustrious forerunners; they fell upon
it as though it had made an assault upon the dignity of the human
race. They accused it of ‘pan-sexualism’, though the
psycho-analytic theory of the instincts had always been strictly
dualistic and had at no time failed to recognize, alongside the
sexual instincts, others to which it actually ascribed force enough
to suppress the sexual instincts. (These mutually opposing forces
were described to begin with as the sexual instincts and the ego
instincts. A later theoretical development changed them into Eros
and the instinct of death or destruction.) The suggestion that art,
religion and social order originated in part in a contribution from
the sexual instincts was represented by the opponents of analysis
as a degradation of the highest cultural values. They emphatically
declared that men have other interests besides this eternal one of
sex, overlooking in their zeal the fact that animals too have other
interests - indeed they are subject to sexuality, not permanently
like men, but only in bouts occurring at specific periods -
overlooking, too, the fact that the existence of these other
interests in men had never been disputed and that nothing can be
altered in the value of a cultural achievement by its being shown
to have been derived from elementary animal instinctual
sources.