Freud - Complete Works (704 page)

   Our Impartial Person cannot be
either so ignorant or so perplexed as we thought to begin with.
There are unmistakable signs that he is trying to understand
psycho-analysis with the help of his previous knowledge, that he is
trying to link it up with something he already knows. The difficult
task now lies ahead of us of making it clear to him that he will
not succeed in this: that analysis is a procedure
sui
generis
, something novel and special, which can only be
understood with the help of
new
insights - or hypotheses, if
that sounds better. But he is still waiting for our answer to his
last remarks.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4333

   What you say about the special
personal influence of the analyst certainly deserves great
attention. An influence of the kind exists and plays a large part
in analysis - but not the same part as in hypnotism. It ought to be
possible to convince you that the situations in the two cases are
quite different. It may be enough to point out that we do not use
this personal influence, the factor of ‘suggestion’, to
suppress the symptoms of the illness, as happens with
hypnotic
suggestion. Further, it would be a mistake to
believe that this factor is the vehicle and promoter of the
treatment throughout its length. At its beginning, no doubt. But
later on it opposes our analytic intentions and forces us to adopt
the most far-reaching counter-measures. And I should like to show
by an example how far diverting a patient’s thoughts and
talking him out of things are from the technique of analysis. If a
patient of ours is suffering from a sense of guilt, as though he
had committed a serious crime, we do not recommend him to disregard
his qualms of conscience and do not emphasize his undoubted
innocence; he himself has often tried to do so without success.
What we do is to remind him that such a strong and persistent
feeling must after all be based on something real, which it may
perhaps be possible to discover.

   ‘It would surprise
me’, comments the Impartial Person, ‘if you were able
to soothe your patients by agreeing with their sense of guilt in
that way. But what
are
your analytic intentions? and
what

do
you do with your
patients?’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4334

II

   If I am to say anything
intelligible to you, I shall no doubt have to tell you something of
a psychological theory which is not known or not appreciated
outside analytic circles. It will be easy to deduce from this
theory what we want from our patients and how we obtain it. I shall
expound it to you dogmatically, as though it were a complete
theoretical structure. But do not suppose that it came into being
as such a structure, like a philosophical system. We have developed
it very slowly, we have wrestled over every small detail of it, we
have unceasingly modified it, keeping a continuous contact with
observation, till it has finally taken a shape in which it seems to
suffice for our purposes. Only a few years ago I should have had to
clothe this theory in other terms. Nor, of course, can I guarantee
to you that the form in which it is expressed to-day will remain
the final one. Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long
after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness,
immutability and infallibility for which human thought so deeply
longs. But such as it is, it is all that we can have. If you will
further bear in mind that our science is very young, scarcely as
old as the century, and that it is concerned with what is perhaps
the most difficult material that can be the subject of human
research, you will easily be able to adopt the correct attitude
towards my exposition. But interrupt me whenever you feel inclined,
if you cannot follow me or if you want further explanations.

   ‘I will interrupt you
before you have even begun. You say that you intend to expound a
new psychology to me; but I should have thought that psychology was
no new science. There have been psychologies and psychologists
enough; and I heard of great achievements in that field while I was
at college.’

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4335

   I should not dream of disputing
them. But if you look into the matter more closely you will have to
class these great achievements as belonging rather to the
physiology of the sense organs. The theory of mental life could not
be developed, because it was inhibited by a single essential
misunderstanding. What does it comprise to-day, as it is taught at
college? Apart from those valuable discoveries in the physiology of
the senses, a number of classifications and definitions of our
mental processes which, thanks to linguistic usage, have become the
common property of every educated person. That is clearly not
enough to give a view of our mental life. Have you not noticed that
every philosopher, every imaginative writer, every historian and
every biographer makes up his own psychology for himself, brings
forward his own particular hypotheses concerning the
interconnections and aims of mental acts - all more or less
plausible and all equally untrustworthy? There is an evident lack
of any common foundation. And it is for that reason too that in the
field of psychology there is, so to speak, no respect and no
authority. In that field everyone can ‘run wild’ as he
chooses. If you raise a question in physics or chemistry, anyone
who knows he possesses no ‘technical knowledge’ will
hold his tongue. But if you venture upon a psychological assertion,
you must be prepared to meet judgements and contradictions from
every quarter. In this field, apparently, there is no
‘technical knowledge’. Everyone has a mental life, so
everyone regards himself as a psychologist. But that strikes me as
an inadequate legal title. The story is told of how someone who
applied for a post as a children’s nurse was asked if she
knew how to look after babies. ‘Of course,’ she
replied, ‘why, after all, I was a baby once
myself.’

   ‘And you claim that you
have discovered this "common foundation" of mental life,
which has been overlooked by every psychologist, from observations
on
sick people
?’

   The source of our findings does
not seem it me to deprive them of their value. Embryology, to take
an example, would not deserve to be trusted if it could not give a
plain explanation of the origin of innate malformations. I have
told you of people whose thoughts go their own way, so that they
are obliged to worry over problems to which they are perfectly
indifferent. Do you think that academic psychology could ever make
the smallest contribution towards explaining an abnormality such as
that? And, after all, we all of us have the experience at
night-time of our thoughts going their own way and creating things
which we do not understand, which puzzle us, and which are
suspiciously reminiscent of pathological products. Our dreams, I
mean. The common people have always firmly believed that dreams
have a sense and a value - that they mean something. Academic
psychology has never been able to inform us what this meaning is.
It could make nothing of dreams. If it attempted to produce
explanations, they were non-psychological - such as tracing them to
sensory stimuli, or to an unequal depth of sleep in different
portions of the brain, and so on. But it is fair to say that a
psychology which cannot explain dreams is also useless for an
understanding of normal mental life, that it has no claim to be
called a science.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4336

   ‘You are becoming
aggressive; so you have evidently got on to a sensitive spot. I
have heard, it is true, that in analysis great value is attached to
dreams, that they are interpreted, and that memories of real events
are looked for behind them, and so on. But I have heard as well
that the interpretation of dreams is left to the caprice of
analysts, and that they themselves have never ceased disputing over
the way of interpreting dreams and the justification for drawing
conclusions from them. If that is so, you ought not to underline so
heavily the advantage that analysis has won over academic
psychology.’

   There is really a great deal of
truth in what you say. It is true that the interpretation of dreams
has come to have unequalled importance both for the theory and the
practice of analysis. If I seem to be aggressive, that is only a
way of defending myself. And when I think of all the mischief some
analysts have done with the interpretation of dreams I might lose
heart and echo the pessimistic pronouncement of our great satirist
Nestroy when he says that every step forward is only half as big as
it looks at first. But have you ever found that men do anything but
confuse and distort what they get hold of? By the help of a little
foresight and self-discipline most of the dangers of
dream-interpretation can be avoided with certainty. But you will
agree that I shall never come to my exposition if we let ourselves
be led aside like this.

   ‘Yes. If I understood
rightly, you wanted to tell me about the fundamental postulate of
the new psychology.’

   That was not what I wanted to
begin with. My purpose is to let you hear what pictures we have
formed of the structure of the mental apparatus in the course of
our analytic studies.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4337

   ‘What do you mean by the
"mental apparatus"? and what, may I ask, is it
constructed of?’

   It will soon be clear what the
mental apparatus is; but I must beg you not to ask what material it
is constructed of. That is not a subject of psychological interest.
Psychology can be as indifferent to it as, for instance, optics can
be to the question of whether the walls of a telescope are made of
metal or cardboard. We shall leave entirely on one side the
material
line of approach, but not so the
spatial
one. For we picture the unknown apparatus which serves the
activities of the mind as being really like an instrument
constructed of several parts (which we speak of as
‘agencies’), each of which performs a particular
function and which have a fixed spatial relation to one another: it
being understood that by spatial relation - ‘in front
of’ and ‘behind’, ‘superficial’ and
‘deep’- we merely mean in the first instance a
representation of the regular succession of the functions. Have I
made myself clear?

   ‘Scarcely. Perhaps I shall
understand it later. But, in any case, here is a strange anatomy of
the soul - a thing which, after all, no longer exists at all for
the scientists.’

   What do you expect? It is a
hypothesis like so many others in the sciences: the very earliest
ones have always been rather rough. ‘Open to revision’
we can say in such cases. It seems to me unnecessary for me to
appeal here to the ‘as if’ which has become so popular.
The value of a ‘fiction’ of this kind (as the
philosopher Vaihinger would call it) depends on how much one can
achieve with its help.

The Question Of Lay Analysis

4338

   But to proceed. Putting ourselves
on the footing of everyday knowledge, we recognize in human beings
a mental organization which is interpolated between their sensory
stimuli and the perception of their somatic needs on the one hand
and their motor acts on the other, and which mediates between them
for a particular purpose. We call this organization their
‘
Ich
’. Now there is nothing new in this. Each
one of us makes this assumption without being a philosopher, and
some people even in spite of being philosophers. But this does not,
in our opinion, exhaust the description of the mental apparatus.
Besides this ‘I’, we recognize another mental region,
more extensive, more imposing and more obscure than the
‘I’, and this we call the ‘
Es
’. The
relation between the two must be our immediate concern.

   You will probably protest at our
having chosen simple pronouns to describe our two agencies or
provinces instead of giving them orotund Greek names. In
psycho-analysis, however, we like to keep in contact with the
popular mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts
scientifically serviceable rather than to reject them. There is no
merit in this; we are obliged to take this line; for our theories
must be understood by our patients, who are often very intelligent,
but not always learned. The impersonal ‘it’ is
immediately connected with certain forms of expression used by
normal people. ‘It shot through me,’ people say;
‘there was something in me at that moment that was stronger
than me.’ ‘
C’était plus fort que
moi
.’

   In psychology we can only
describe things by the help of analogies. There is nothing peculiar
in this; it is the case elsewhere as well. But we have constantly
to keep changing these analogies, for none of them lasts us long
enough. Accordingly, in trying to make the relation between the ego
and the id clear, I must ask you to picture the ego as a kind of
façade of the id, as a frontage, like an external, cortical,
layer of it. We can hold on to this last analogy. We know that
cortical layers owe their peculiar characteristics to the modifying
influence of the external medium on which they abut. Thus we
suppose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (of the
id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world
(of reality). This will show you how in psycho-analysis we take
spatial ways of looking at things seriously. For us the ego is
really something superficial and the id something deeper - looked
at from outside, of course. The ego lies between reality and the
id, which is what is truly mental.