Freud - Complete Works (688 page)

An Autobiographical Study

4234

   I had already made attempts at
earlier stages of my work to arrive at some more general points of
view on the basis of psycho-analytic observation. In a short essay,
‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning’, I drew attention (and there was, of course,
nothing original in this) to the domination of the
pleasure-unpleasure principle
in mental life and to its
displacement by what is called the
reality principle
. Later
on I made an attempt to produce a ‘Metapsychology’. By
this I meant a method of approach according to which every mental
process is considered in relation to three co-ordinates, which I
described as
dynamic
,
topographical
, and
economic
respectively; and this seemed to me to represent
the furthest goal that psychology could attain. The attempt
remained no more than a torso; after writing two or three papers -
‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’,
‘Repression’, ‘The Unconscious’,
‘Mourning and Melancholia’, etc. - I broke off, wisely
perhaps, since the time for theoretical predications of this kind
had not yet come. In my latest speculative works I have set about
the task of dissecting our mental apparatus on the basis of the
analytic view of pathological facts and have divided it into an
ego
, an
id
, and a
super-ego
.¹ The
super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus complex and represents the
ethical standards of mankind.

   I should not like to create an
impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my
back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to
speculation. I have on the contrary always remained in the closest
touch with the analytic material and have never ceased working at
detailed points of clinical or technical importance. Even when I
have moved away from observation, I have carefully avoided any
contact with philosophy proper. This avoidance has been greatly
facilitated by constitutional incapacity. I was always open to the
ideas of G. T. Fechner and have followed that thinker upon many
important points. The large extent to which psycho-analysis
coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer - not only did he
assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of
sexuality but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression - is
not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read
Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher
whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing
way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long
time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with
the question of priority than with keeping my mind
unembarrassed.

  
¹
The Ego and the Id
.

An Autobiographical Study

4235

   The neuroses were the first
subject of analysis, and for a long time they were the only one. No
analyst could doubt that medical practice was wrong in separating
those disorders from the psychoses and in attaching them to the
organic nervous diseases. The theory of the neuroses belongs to
psychiatry and is indispensable as an introduction to it. It would
seem, however, that the analytic study of the
psychoses
is
impracticable owing to its lack of therapeutic results. Mental
patients are as a rule without the capacity for forming a positive
transference, so that the principal instrument of analytic
technique is inapplicable to them. There are nevertheless a number
of methods of approach to be found. Transference is often not so
completely absent but that it can be used to a certain extent; and
analysis has achieved undoubted successes with cyclical
depressions, light paranoic modifications, and partial
schizophrenias. It has at least been a benefit to science that in
many cases the diagnosis can oscillate for quite a long time
between assuming the presence of a psychoneurosis or of a dementia
praecox; for therapeutic attempts initiated in such cases have
resulted in valuable discoveries before they have had to be broken
off. But the chief consideration in this connection is that so many
things that in the neuroses have to be laboriously fetched up from
the depths are found in the psychoses on the surface, visible to
every eye. For that reason the best subjects for the demonstration
of many of the assertions of analysis are provided by the
psychiatric clinic. It was thus bound to happen before long that
analysis would find its way to the objects of psychiatric
observation. I was able very early (1896) to establish in a case of
paranoid dementia the presence of the same aetiological factors and
the same emotional complexes as in the neuroses. Jung explained
some most puzzling stereotypies in dements by bringing them into
relation with the patients’ life-histories; Bleuler
demonstrated the existence in various psychoses of mechanisms like
those which analysis had discovered in neurotics. Since then
analysts have never relaxed their efforts to come to an
understanding of the psychoses. Especially since it has been
possible to work with the concept of narcissism, they have managed,
now in this place and now in that, to get a glimpse beyond the
wall. Most of all, no doubt, was achieved by Abraham in his
elucidation of the melancholias. It is true that in this sphere all
our knowledge is not yet converted into therapeutic power; but the
mere theoretical gain is not to be despised, and we may be content
to wait for its practical application. In the long run even the
psychiatrists cannot resist the convincing force of their own
clinical material. At the present time German psychiatry is
undergoing a kind of ‘peaceful penetration’ by analytic
views. While they continually declare that they will never be
psycho-analysts, that they do not belong to the
‘orthodox’ school or agree with its exaggerations, and
in particular that they do not believe in the predominance of the
sexual factor, nevertheless the majority of the younger workers
take over one piece or another of analytic theory and apply it in
their own fashion to the material. All the signs point to the
proximity of further developments in the same direction.

An Autobiographical Study

4236

V

   I now watch from a distance the
symptomatic reactions that are accompanying the introduction of
psycho-analysis into the France which was for so long refractory.
It seems like a reproduction of something I have lived through
before, and yet it has peculiarities of its own. Objections of
incredible simplicity are raised, such as that French sensitiveness
is offended by the pedantry and crudity of psycho-analytic
terminology. (One cannot help being reminded of Lessing’s
immortal Chevalier Riccaut de la Marlinière.) Another
comment has a more serious ring (a Professor of Psychology at the
Sorbonne did not think it beneath him): the whole mode of thought
of psycho-analysis, so he declared, is inconsistent with the
génie latin
. Here the Anglo-Saxon allies of France,
who count as supporters of analysis, are explicitly thrown over.
Anyone hearing the remark would suppose that psycho-analysis had
been the favourite child of the
génie teutonique
and
had been clasped to its heart from the moment of birth.

   In France the interest in
psycho-analysis began among the men of letters. To understand this,
it must be borne in mind that from the time of the writing of
The Interpretation of Dreams
psycho-analysis ceased to be a
purely medical subject. Between its appearance in Germany and in
France lies the history of its numerous applications to departments
of literature and of aesthetics, to the history of religions and to
prehistory, to mythology, to folklore, to education, and so on.
None of these things have much to do with medicine; in fact it is
only through psycho-analysis that they are connected with it. I
have no business, therefore, to go into them in detail in these
pages. I cannot pass them over completely in silence, however, for
on the one hand they are essential to a correct appreciation of the
nature and value of psycho-analysis, and on the other hand I have,
after all, undertaken to give an account of my life-work. The
beginnings of the majority of these applications of psycho-analysis
will be found in my works. Here and there I have gone a little way
along the path in order to gratify my non-medical interests. Later
on, others (not only doctors, but specialists in the various fields
as well) have followed in my tracks and penetrated far into the
different subjects. But since my programme limits me to a mention
of my own share in these applications of psycho-analysis, I can
only give a quite inadequate picture of their extent and
importance.

An Autobiographical Study

4237

   A number of suggestions came to
me out of the Oedipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually
dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a
terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so too did the overwhelming
effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such
tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one
realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured
in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more
than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the
hero’s sinning without his knowledge and against his
intentions was evidently a right expression of the
unconscious
nature of his criminal tendencies. From
understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to
understanding a tragedy of character -
Hamlet
, which had
been admired for three hundred years without its meaning being
discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely
be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have
come to grief, like his numberless fellows in the real world, over
the Oedipus complex. For Hamlet was faced with the task of taking
vengeance on another for the two deeds which are the subject of the
Oedipus desires; and before that task his arm was paralysed by his
own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet
very
soon after his father’s death.¹ The suggestions made by
me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on
by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto
Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of
material made by dramatists. In his large volume on the incest
theme (Rank, 1912) he was able to show how often imaginative
writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Oedipus
situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the
way in which the material has been transformed, modified, and
softened.

  
¹
(
Footnote added
1935:) This is a
construction which I should like explicitly to withdraw. I no
longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford
was the author of the works which have so long been attributed to
him. Since the publication of J. T. Looney’s volume
‘
Shakespeare
’
Identified
, I am almost
convinced that in fact Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, is concealed
behind this pseudonym.

An Autobiographical Study

4238

   It was tempting to go on from
there to an attempt at an analysis of poetic and artistic creation
in general. The realm of imagination was seen to be a
‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from
the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide
a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up
in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an
unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike
the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more
to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art,
were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as
dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises,
since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the
forces of repression. But they differed from the asocial,
narcissistic products of dreaming in that they were calculated to
arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to evoke
and to satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too.
Besides this, they made use of the perceptual pleasure of formal
beauty as what I have called an ‘incentive bonus’. What
psycho-analysis was able to do was to take the interrelations
between the impressions of the artist’s life, his chance
experiences, and his works, and from them to construct his
constitution and the instinctual impulses at work in it - that is
to say, that part of him which he shared with all men. With this
aim in view, for instance, I made Leonardo da Vinci the subject of
a study, which is based on a single memory of childhood related by
him and which aims chiefly at explaining his picture of ‘The
Madonna and Child with St. Anne’. Since then my friends and
pupils have undertaken numerous analyses of artists and their
works. It does not appear that the enjoyment of a work of art is
spoiled by the knowledge gained from such an analysis. The layman
may perhaps expect too much from analysis in this respect, for it
must be admitted that it throws no light on the two problems which
probably interest him the most. It can do nothing towards
elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the
means by which the artist works - artistic technique.

An Autobiographical Study

4239

   I was able to show from a short
story by W. Jensen called
Gradiva
, which has no particular
merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the
same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar
to us in the ‘dream-work’ are thus also operative in
the processes of imaginative writing. My book on
Jokes and their
Relation to the Unconscious
was a side-issue directly derived
from
The Interpretation of Dreams
. The only friend of mine
who was at that time interested in my work remarked to me that my
interpretations of dreams often impressed him as being like jokes.
In order to throw some light on this impression, I began to
investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical
methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means
used in the ‘dream-work’ - that is to say,
condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its
opposite or by something very small, and so on. This led to an
economic enquiry into the origin of the high degree of pleasure
obtained from hearing a joke. And to this the answer was that it
was due to the momentary suspension of the expenditure of energy
upon maintaining repression, owing to the attraction exercised by
the offer of a bonus of pleasure (
fore-pleasure
).