Freud - Complete Works (687 page)

An Autobiographical Study

4227

   At that time I was only
fifty-three. I felt young and healthy, and my short visit to the
new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt
as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received
by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at
Worcester to deliver my
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
it
seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream:
psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become
a valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since
our visit; it is extremely popular among the lay public and is
recognized by a number of official psychiatrists as an important
element in medical training. Unfortunately, however, it has
suffered a great deal from being watered down. Moreover, many
abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name,
and there are few opportunities for any thorough training in
technique or theory. In America, too, it has come in conflict with
Behaviourism, a theory which is naïve enough to boast that it
has put the whole problem of psychology completely out of
court.

   In Europe during the years
1911-13 two secessionist movements from psycho-analysis took place,
led by men who had previously played a considerable part in the
young science, Alfred Adler and C. G. Jung. Both movements seemed
most threatening and quickly obtained a large following. But their
strength lay, not in their own content, but in the temptation which
they offered of being freed from what were felt as the repellent
findings of psycho-analysis even though its actual material was no
longer rejected. Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a
fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical
character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the
importance of infantile sexuality and of the Oedipus complex as
well as the necessity for any analysis of childhood. Adler seemed
to depart still further from psycho-analysis; he entirely
repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation
both of character and of the neuroses solely to men’s desire
for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional
inferiorities, and threw all the psychological discoveries of
psycho-analysis to the winds. But what he had rejected forced its
way back into his closed system under other names; his
‘masculine protest’ is nothing else than repression
unjustifiably sexualized. The criticism with which the two heretics
were met was a mild one; I only insisted that both Adler and Jung
should cease to describe their theories as
‘psycho-analysis’. After a lapse of ten years it can be
asserted that both of these attempts against psycho-analysis have
blown over without doing any harm.

An Autobiographical Study

4228

   If a community is based on
agreement upon a few cardinal points, it is obvious that people who
have abandoned that common ground will cease to belong to it. Yet
the secession of former pupils has often been brought up against me
as a sign of my intolerance or has been regarded as evidence of
some special fatality that hangs over me. It is a sufficient answer
to point out that in contrast to those who have left me, like Jung,
Adler, Stekel, and a few besides, there are a great number of men,
like Abraham, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Rank, Jones, Brill, Sachs,
Pfister, van Emden, Reik, and others, who have worked with me for
some fifteen years in loyal collaboration and for the most part in
uninterrupted friendship. I have only mentioned the oldest of my
pupils, who have already made a distinguished name for themselves
in the literature of psycho-analysis; if I have passed over others,
that is not to be taken as a slight, and indeed among those who are
young and have joined me lately talents are to be found on which
great hopes may be set. But I think I can say in my defence that an
intolerant man, dominated by an arrogant belief in his own
infallibility, would never have been able to maintain his hold upon
so large a number of intellectually eminent people, especially if
he had at his command as few practical attractions as I had.

An Autobiographical Study

4229

   The World War, which broke up so
many other organizations, could do nothing against our
‘International’. The first meeting after the war took
place in 1920, at The Hague, on neutral ground. It was moving to
see how hospitably the Dutch welcomed the starving and impoverished
subjects of the Central European states; and I believe this was the
first occasion in a ruined world on which Englishmen and Germans
sat at the same table for the friendly discussion of scientific
interests. Both in Germany and in the countries of Western Europe
the war had actually stimulated interest in psycho-analysis. The
observation of war neuroses had at last opened the eyes of the
medical profession to the importance of psychogenesis in neurotic
disturbances, and some of our psychological conceptions, such as
the ‘gain from illness’ and the ‘flight into
illness’, quickly became popular. The last Congress before
the German collapse, which was held at Budapest in 1918, was
attended by official representatives of the allied governments of
the Central European powers, and they agreed to the establishment
of psycho-analytic Centres for the treatment of war neuroses. But
this point was never reached. Similarly too the comprehensive plans
made by one of our leading members, Dr. Anton von Freund, for
establishing in Budapest a centre for analytic study and treatment
came to grief as a result of the political upheavals that followed
soon afterwards and of the premature death of their irreplaceable
author. At a later date some of his ideas were put into execution
by Max Eitingon, who in 1920 founded a psycho-analytical clinic in
Berlin. During the brief period of Bolshevik rule in Hungary,
Ferenczi was still able to carry on a successful course of
instruction as the official representative of psycho-analysis at
the University of Budapest. After the war our opponents were
pleased to announce that events had produced a conclusive argument
against the validity of the theses of analysis. The war neuroses,
they said, had proved that sexual factors were unnecessary to the
aetiology of neurotic disorders. But their triumph was frivolous
and premature. For on the one hand no one had been able to carry
out a thorough analysis of a case of war neurosis, so that in fact
nothing whatever was known for certain as to their motivation and
no conclusions could be drawn from this uncertainty; while on the
other hand psycho-analysis had long before arrived at the concept
of narcissism and of narcissistic neuroses, in which the
subject’s libido is attached to his own ego instead of to an
object. Though on other occasions, therefore, the charge was
brought against psycho-analysis of having made an unjustifiable
extension of the concept of sexuality, yet, when it became
convenient for controversial ends, this crime was forgotten and we
were once more held down to the narrowest meaning of the word.

An Autobiographical Study

4230

   If the preliminary cathartic
period is left on one side, the history of psycho-analysis falls
from my point of view into two phases. In the first of these I
stood alone and had to do all the work myself: this was from 1895-6
until 1906 or 1907. In the second phase, lasting from then until
the present time, the contributions of my pupils and collaborators
have been growing more and more in importance, so that to-day, when
a grave illness warns me of the approaching end, I can think with a
quiet mind of the cessation of my own labours. For that very
reason, however, it is impossible for me in this
Autobiographical Study
to deal as fully with the progress of
psycho-analysis during the second phase as I did with its gradual
rise during the first phase, which was concerned with my own
activity alone. I feel that I should only be justified in
mentioning here those new discoveries in which I still played a
prominent part, in particular, therefore, those made in the sphere
of narcissism, of the theory of the instincts, and of the
application of psycho-analysis to the psychoses.

   I must begin by adding that
increasing experience showed more and more plainly that the Oedipus
complex was the nucleus of the neurosis. It was at once the climax
of infantile sexual life and the point of junction from which all
of its later developments proceeded. But if so, it was no longer
possible to expect analysis to discover a factor that was specific
in the aetiology of the neuroses. It must be true, as Jung
expressed it so well in the early days when he was still an
analyst, that neuroses have no peculiar content which belongs
exclusively to them but that neurotics break down at the same
difficulties that are successfully overcome by normal people. This
discovery was very far from being a disappointment. It was in
complete harmony with another one: that the depth-psychology
revealed by psycho-analysis was in fact the psychology of the
normal mind. Our path had been like that of chemistry: the great
qualitative differences between substances were traced back to
quantitative variations in the proportions in which the same
elements were combined.

An Autobiographical Study

4231

   In the Oedipus complex the libido
was seen to be attached to the image of the parental figures. But
earlier there was a period in which there were no such objects.
There followed from this fact the concept (of fundamental
importance for the libido theory) of a state in which the
subject’s libido filled his own ego and had that for its
object. This state could be called
narcissism
or self-love.
A moment’s reflection showed that this state never completely
ceases. All through the subject’s life his ego remains the
great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent
out and into which the libido can stream back again from the
objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed
into object-libido, and
vice versa
. An excellent instance of
the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the
state of being in love, whether in a sexual or sublimated manner,
which goes so far as involving a sacrifice of the self. Whereas
hitherto in considering the process of repression attention had
only been paid to what was repressed, these ideas made it possible
to form a correct estimate of the repressing forces too. It had
been said that repression was set in action by the instincts of
self-preservation operating in the ego (the
‘ego-instincts’) and that it was brought to bear upon
the libidinal instincts. But since the instincts of
self-preservation were now recognized as also being of a libidinal
nature, as being narcissistic libido, the process of repression was
seen to be a process occurring within the libido itself;
narcissistic libido was opposed to object-libido, the interest of
self-preservation was defending itself against the demands of
object-love, and therefore against the demands of sexuality in the
narrower sense as well.

An Autobiographical Study

4232

   There is no more urgent need in
psychology than for a securely founded theory of the instincts on
which it might then be possible to build further. Nothing of the
sort exists, however, and psycho-analysis is driven to making
tentative efforts towards some such theory. It began by drawing a
contrast between the ego-instincts (the instinct of
self-preservation, hunger) and the libidinal instincts (love), but
later replaced it by a new contrast between narcissistic and
object-libido. This was clearly not the last word on the subject;
biological considerations seemed to make it impossible to remain
content with assuming the existence of only a single class of
instincts.

   In the works of my later years
(
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
,
Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego
, and
The Ego and the Id
, I have
given free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long,
to speculation, and I have also contemplated a new solution of the
problem of the instincts. I have combined the instincts for
self-preservation and for the preservation of the species under the
concept of
Eros
and have contrasted with it an
instinct
of death
or
destruction
which works in silence. Instinct
in general is regarded as a kind of elasticity of living things, an
impulsion towards the restoration of a situation which once existed
but was brought to an end by some external disturbance. This
essentially conservative character of instincts is exemplified by
the phenomena of the
compulsion to repeat
. The picture which
life presents to us is the result of the concurrent and mutually
opposing action of Eros and the death instinct.

An Autobiographical Study

4233

   It remains to be seen whether
this construction will turn out to be serviceable. Although it
arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical
ideas of psycho-analysis, it goes far beyond psycho-analysis. I
have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible
to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as
lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct in
psycho-analysis. But this reproach rests on a complete
misconception of the facts. Clear basic concepts and sharply drawn
definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as
the latter seek to fit a region of facts into the frame of a
logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is
one, such clear-cut general concepts are superfluous and indeed
impossible. Zoology and Botany did not start from correct and
adequate definitions of an animal and a plant; to this very day
biology has been unable to give any certain meaning to the concept
of life. Physics itself, indeed, would never have made any advance
if it had had to wait until its concepts of matter, force,
gravitation, and so on, had reached the desirable degree of clarity
and precision. The basic ideas or most general concepts in any of
the disciplines of science are always left indeterminate at first
and are only explained to begin with by reference to the realm of
phenomena from which they were derived; it is only by means of a
progressive analysis of the material of observation that they can
be made clear and can find a significant and consistent meaning. I
have always felt it as a gross injustice that people have refused
to treat psycho-analysis like any other science. This refusal found
an expression in the raising of the most obstinate objections.
Psycho-analysis was constantly reproached for its incompleteness
and insufficiencies; though it is plain that a science based upon
observation has no alternative but to work out its findings
piecemeal and to solve its problems step by step. Again, when I
endeavoured to obtain for the sexual function the recognition which
had so long been withheld from it, psycho-analytic theory was
branded as ‘pan-sexualism’. And when I laid stress on
the hitherto neglected importance of the part played by the
accidental impressions of early youth, I was told that
psycho-analysis was denying constitutional and hereditary factors -
a thing which I had never dreamt of doing. It was a case of
contradiction at any price and by any methods.