Freud - Complete Works (716 page)
Psycho-Analysis
4407
THE EXTERNAL HISTORY OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
The beginnings of psycho-analysis
may be marked by two dates: 1895, which saw the publication of
Breuer and Freud’s
Studies on Hysteria
, and 1900,
which saw that of Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams
. At
first the new discoveries aroused no interest either in the medical
profession or among the general public. In 1907 the Swiss
psychiatrists, under the leadership of E. Bleuler and C. G. Jung,
began to concern themselves in the subject; and in 1908 there took
place at Salzburg a first meeting of adherents from a number of
different countries. In 1909 Freud and Jung were invited to America
by G. Stanley Hall to deliver a series of lectures on
psycho-analysis at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. From that
time forward interest grew rapidly in Europe; it expressed itself,
however, in a very forcible rejection of the new teachings - a
rejection which often showed an unscientific colouring.
The reasons for this hostility
were to be found, from the medical point of view, in the fact that
psycho-analysis lays stress upon psychical factors, and from the
philosophical point of view, in its assuming as an underlying
postulate the concept of unconscious mental activity; but the
strongest reason was undoubtedly the general disinclination of
mankind to concede to the factor of sexuality the importance that
is assigned to it by psycho-analysis. In spite of this widespread
opposition, however, the movement in favour of psycho-analysis was
not to be checked. Its adherents formed themselves into an
International Association, which passed successfully through the
ordeal of the World War, and at the present time (1925) comprises
local groups in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, London, Switzerland,
Holland, Moscow and Calcutta, as well as two in the United States.
There are three periodicals representing the views of these
societies: the
Internationale Zeitschrift für
Psychoanalyse
,
Imago
(which is concerned with the
application of psycho-analysis to non-medical fields of knowledge),
and the
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis
.
During the years 1911-13 two
former adherents, Alfred Adler, of Vienna, and C. G. Jung, of
Zurich, seceded from the psycho-analytic movement and founded
schools of thought of their own, which, in view of the general
hostility to psycho-analysis, could be certain of a favourable
reception, but which remained scientifically sterile. In 1921 Dr.
M. Eitingon founded in Berlin the first public psycho-analytic
clinic and training-school, and this was soon followed by a second
in Vienna.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breuer and Freud,
Studies on
Hysteria
(1895
d
); Freud,
Traumdeutung
(1900);
Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens
(1904);
Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
(1905);
Vorlesungen zur
Einführung in die Psychoanalyse
(1916). Freud’s
complete works have been published in German (Gesammelte Schriften)
(1925), and in Spanish (
Obras completas
) (1923); the greater
part of them has been translated into English and other languages.
Short accounts of the subject-matter and history of psycho-analysis
will be found in: Freud,
Über Psychoanalyse
(the
lectures delivered at Worcester, U.S.A.) (1909);
Zur Geschichte
der psychoanalytischen Bewegung
(1914);
Selbstdarstellung
(in Grote’s collection
Die
Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen
) (1925).
Particularly accessible to English readers are: Ernest Jones,
Papers on Psycho-Analysis
, and A. A. Brill,
Psychoanalysis
.
4408
ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY OF B’NAI B’RITH
(1941 [1926])
4409
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4410
ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY OF
B’NAI B’RITH
Most honourable Grand President, honourable
Presidents, dear Brethren,-
I thank you for the honours you
have paid me to-day. You know why it is that you cannot hear the
sound of my own voice. You have heard one of my friends and pupils
speak of my scientific work; but a judgement on such things is hard
to form and for a long while yet it may not be reached with any
certainty. Allow me to add something to what has been said by one
who is both my friend and the physician who cares for me. I should
like to tell you shortly how I became a B.B. and what I have looked
for from you.
It happened that in the years
from 1895 onwards I was subjected to two powerful impressions which
combined to produce the same effect on me. On the one hand, I had
gained my first insight into the depths of the life of the human
instincts; I had seen some things that were sobering and even, at
first, frightening. On the other hand, the announcement of my
unpleasing discoveries had as its result the severance of the
greater part of my human contacts; I felt as though I were despised
and universally shunned. In my loneliness I was seized with a
longing to find a circle of picked men of high character who would
receive me in a friendly spirit in spite of my temerity. Your
society was pointed out to me as the place where such men were to
be found.
That you were Jews could only be
agreeable to me; for I was myself a Jew, and it had always seemed
to me not only unworthy but positively senseless to deny the fact.
What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith
nor national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was
brought up without any religion though not without a respect for
what are called the ‘ethical’ standards of human
civilization. Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm
I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the
warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty
of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and
Jews irresistible - many obscure emotional forces, which were the
more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as
a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a
common mental construction. And beyond this there was a perception
that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two
characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the
difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew I found myself
free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of
their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition
and to do without agreement with the ‘compact
majority’.
Address To The Society Of B'nai B'rith
4411
So it was that I became one of
you, took my share in your humanitarian and national interests,
gained friends among you and persuaded my own few remaining friends
to join our society. There was no question whatever of my
convincing you of my new theories; but at a time when no one in
Europe listened to me and I still had no disciples even in Vienna,
you gave me your kindly attention. You were my first audience.
For some two thirds of the long
period that has elapsed since my entry I persisted with you
conscientiously, and found refreshment and stimulation in my
relations with you. You have been kind enough to-day not to hold it
up against me that during the last third of the time I have kept
away from you. I was overwhelmed with work, and demands connected
with it forced themselves on me; the day ceased to be long enough
for me to attend your meetings, and soon my body began to rebel
against a late evening meal. Finally came the years of my illness,
which prevents me from being with you even to-day.
I cannot tell whether I have been
a genuine B.B. in your sense. I am almost inclined to doubt it; so
many exceptional circumstances have arisen in my case. But of this
I can assure you - that you meant much to me and did much for me
during the years in which I belonged to you. I ask you therefore to
accept my warmest thanks both for those years and for to-day.
Yours in W. B. & E
Sigm. Freud
4412
KARL ABRAHAM
(1926)
Dr. Karl Abraham, President of the Berlin
group, of which he was the founder, and President at the time of
the International Psycho-Analytical Association, died in Berlin on
December 25. He had not reached the age of fifty when he succumbed
to an internal complaint against which his powerful physique had
had to contend ever since the spring. At the Homburg Congress he
had seemed, to the great joy of us all, to have recovered; but a
relapse brought us painful disappointment.
We bury with him -
integer
vitae scerisque purus
- one of the firmest hopes of our
science, young as it is and still so bitterly assailed, and a part
of its future that is now, perhaps, unrealizable. Among all those
who followed me along the dark paths of psycho-analytic research,
he won so pre-eminent a place that only one other name could be set
beside his. It is likely that the boundless trust of his colleagues
and pupils would have called him to the leadership; and he would
without doubt have been a model leader in the pursuit of truth, led
astray neither by the praise or blame of the many nor by the
seductive illusion of his own phantasies.
I write these lines for friends
and fellow-workers who knew and valued Abraham as I did. They will
find it easy to understand what the loss of this friend, so much
younger than I am, means to me; and they will forgive me if I make
no further attempt to express what it is so hard to put into words.
An account of Abraham’s scientific personality and an
appreciation of his work will be undertaken for our journal by
another hand.
4413
TO ROMAIN ROLLAND
(1926)
Unforgettable one! By what troubles and
sufferings must you have fought your way up to such a height of
humanity as yours!
Long years before I saw you, I
had honoured you as an artist and as an apostle of the love of
mankind. I was myself a disciple of the love of mankind, not from
sentimental motives or in pursuit of an ideal, but for sober,
economic reasons, because, our inborn instincts and the world
around us being what they are, I could not but regard that love as
no less essential for the survival of the human race than such
things as technology.
And when at last I came to know
you personally, I was surprised to find that you can value strength
and energy so highly and that you yourself embody such force of
will.
May the next decade bring you
nothing but fulfilments!
Most cordially yours
Sigm. Freud, aetat. 70.
4414
PREFATORY NOTE TO A PAPER BY E.
PICKWORTH FARROW
(1926)
The author of this paper is known
to me as a man of strong and independent intelligence. Probably
through being somewhat self-willed he failed to get on to good
terms with two analysts with whom he made the attempt. He thereupon
proceeded to make a systematic application of the procedure of
self-analysis which I myself employed in the past for the analysis
of my own dreams. His findings deserve attention precisely on
account of the peculiar character of his personality and of his
technique.
4415
THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
(1927)
4416
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4417
THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
I
When one has lived for quite a long time in a
particular civilization and has often tried to discover what its
origins were and along what path it has developed, one sometimes
also feels tempted to take a glance in the other direction and to
ask what further fate lies before it and what transformations it is
destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the value of such an
enquiry is diminished from the outset by several factors. Above
all, because there are only a few people who can survey human
activity in its full compass. Most people have been obliged to
restrict themselves to a single, or a few, fields of it. But the
less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure
must prove to be his judgement of the future. And there is the
further difficulty that precisely in a judgement of this kind the
subjective expectations of the individual play a part which it is
difficult to assess; and these turn out to be dependent on purely
personal factors in his own experience, on the greater or lesser
optimism of his attitude to life, as it has been dictated for him
by his temperament or by his success or failure. Finally, the
curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience
their present naïvely, as it were, without being able to form
an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a
distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become
the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to
judge the future.
Thus anyone who gives way to the
temptation to deliver an opinion on the probable future of our
civilization will do well to remind himself of the difficulties I
have just pointed out, as well as of the uncertainty that attaches
quite generally to any prophecy. It follows from this, so far as I
am concerned, that I shall make a hasty retreat before a task that
is too great, and shall promptly seek out the small tract of
territory which has claimed my attention hitherto, as soon as I
have determined its position in the general scheme of things.
The Future Of An Illusion
4418
Human civilization, by which I
mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above
its animal status and differs from the life of beasts - and I scorn
to distinguish between culture and civilization -, presents, as we
know, two aspects to the observer. It includes on the one hand all
the knowledge and capacity that men have acquired in order to
control the forces of nature and extract its wealth for the
satisfaction of human needs, and, on the other hand, all the
regulations necessary in order to adjust the relations of men to
one another and especially the distribution of the available
wealth. The two trends of civilization are not independent of each
other: firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly
influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the
existing wealth makes possible; secondly, because an individual man
can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another one,
in so far as the other person makes use of his capacity for work,
or chooses him as a sexual object; and thirdly, moreover, because
every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though
civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human
interest. It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in
isolation, they should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the
sacrifices which civilization expects of them in order to make a
communal life possible. Thus civilization has to be defended
against the individual, and its regulations, institutions and
commands are directed to that task. They aim not only at effecting
a certain distribution of wealth but at maintaining that
distribution; indeed, they have to protect everything that
contributes to the conquest of nature and the production of wealth
against men’s hostile impulses. Human creations are easily
destroyed, and science and technology, which have built them up,
can also be used for their annihilation.
The Future Of An Illusion
4419
One thus gets an impression that
civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority
by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the
means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume
that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of
civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the
cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is
not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made
continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to
make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with
certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of
human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again,
many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization
has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think
that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which
would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by
renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that,
undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the
acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be the golden
age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be
realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built up
on coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem
certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings
would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for
acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact
that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore
anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of
people these are strong enough to determine their behaviour in
human society.
This psychological fact has a
decisive importance for our judgement of human civilization.
Whereas we might at first think that its essence lies in
controlling nature for the purpose of acquiring wealth and that the
dangers which threaten it could be eliminated through a suitable
distribution of that wealth among men, it now seems that the
emphasis has moved over from the material to the mental. The
decisive question is whether and to what extent it is possible to
lessen the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed on men, to
reconcile men to those which must necessarily remain and to provide
a compensation for them. It is just as impossible to do without
control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with
coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and
unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and
they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and
the individuals composing them support one another in giving free
rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of
individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognize as
their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and
undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization
depends. All is well if these leaders are persons who possess
superior insight into the necessities of life and who have risen to
the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes. But there is
a danger that in order not to lose their influence they may give
way to the mass more than it gives way to them, and it therefore
seems necessary that they shall be independent of the mass by
having means to power at their disposal. To put it briefly, there
are two widespread human characteristics which are responsible for
the fact that the regulations of civilization can only be
maintained by a certain degree of coercion - namely, that men are
not spontaneously fond of work and that arguments are of no avail
against their passions.
The Future Of An Illusion
4420
I know the objections which will
be raised against these assertions. It will be said that the
characteristic of human masses depicted here, which is supposed to
prove that coercion cannot be dispensed with in the work of
civilization, is itself only the result of defects in the cultural
regulations, owing to which men have become embittered, revengeful
and inaccessible. New generations, who have been brought up in
kindness and taught to have a high opinion of reason, and who have
experienced the benefits of civilization at an early age, will have
a different attitude to it. They will feel it as a possession of
their very own and will be ready for its sake to make the
sacrifices as regards work and instinctual satisfaction that are
necessary for its preservation. They will be able to do without
coercion and will differ little from their leaders. If no culture
has so far produced human masses of such a quality, it is because
no culture has yet devised regulations which will influence men in
this way, and in particular from childhood onwards.
It may be doubted whether it is
possible at all, or at any rate as yet, at the present stage of our
control over nature, to set up cultural regulations of this kind.
It may be asked where the number of superior, unswerving and
disinterested leaders are to come from who are to act as educators
of the future generations, and it may be alarming to think of the
enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before
these intentions can be carried out. The grandeur of the plan and
its importance for the future of human civilization cannot be
disputed. It is securely based on the psychological discovery that
man is equipped with the most varied instinctual dispositions,
whose ultimate course is determined by the experiences of early
childhood. But for the same reason the limitations of man’s
capacity for education set bounds to the effectiveness of such a
transformation in his culture. One may question whether, and in
what degree, it would be possible for a different cultural
environment to do away with the two characteristics of human masses
which make the guidance of human affairs so difficult. The
experiment has not yet been made. Probably a certain percentage of
mankind (owing to a pathological disposition or an excess of
instinctual strength) will always remain asocial; but if it were
feasible merely to reduce the majority that is hostile towards
civilization to-day into a minority, a great deal would have been
accomplished - perhaps all that
can
be accomplished.
The Future Of An Illusion
4421
I should not like to give the
impression that I have strayed a long way from the line laid down
for my enquiry. Let me therefore give an express assurance that I
have not the least intention of making judgements on the great
experiment in civilization that is now in progress in the vast
country that stretches between Europe and Asia. I have neither the
special knowledge nor the capacity to decide on its practicability,
to test the expediency of the methods employed or to measure the
width of the inevitable gap between intention and execution. What
is in preparation there is unfinished and therefore eludes an
investigation for which our own long-consolidated civilization
affords us material.
The Future Of An Illusion
4422
II
We have slipped unawares out of the economic
field into the field of psychology. At first we were tempted to
look for the assets of civilization in the available wealth and in
the regulations for its distribution. But with the recognition that
every civilization rests on a compulsion to work and a renunciation
of instinct and therefore inevitably provokes opposition from those
affected by these demands, it has become clear that civilization
cannot consist principally or solely in wealth itself and the means
of acquiring it and the arrangements for its distribution; for
these things are threatened by the rebelliousness and destructive
mania of the participants in civilization. Alongside of wealth we
now come upon the means by which civilization can be defended -
measures of coercion and other measures that are intended to
reconcile men to it and to recompense them for their sacrifices.
These latter may be described as the mental assets of
civilization.
For the sake of a uniform
terminology we will describe the fact that an instinct cannot be
satisfied as a ‘frustration’, the regulation by which
this frustration is established as a ‘prohibition’ and
the condition which is produced by the prohibition as a
‘privation’. The first step is to distinguish between
privations which affect everyone and privations which do not affect
everyone but only groups, classes or even single individuals. The
former are the earliest; with the prohibitions that established
them, civilization - who knows how many thousands of years ago? -
began to detach man from his primordial animal condition. We have
found to our surprise that these privations are still operative and
still form the kernel of hostility to civilization. The instinctual
wishes that suffer under them are born afresh with every child;
there is a class of people, the neurotics, who already react to
these frustrations with asocial behaviour. Among these instinctual
wishes are those of incest, cannibalism and lust for killing. It
sounds strange to place alongside one another wishes which everyone
seems united in repudiating and others about which there is so much
lively dispute in our civilization as to whether they shall be
permitted or frustrated; but psychologically it is justifiable to
do so. Nor is the attitude of civilization to these oldest
instinctual wishes by any means uniform. Cannibalism alone seems to
be universally proscribed and - to the non-psycho-analytic view -
to have been completely surmounted. The strength of the incestuous
wishes can still be detected behind the prohibition against them;
and under certain conditions killing is still practised, and indeed
commanded, by our civilization. It is possible that cultural
developments lie ahead of us in which the satisfaction of yet other
wishes, which are entirely permissible to-day, will appear just as
unacceptable as cannibalism does now.