Freud - Complete Works (776 page)

   For our immediate purpose then,
this much follows from what has been said: there is no use in
trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations. We are
told that in certain happy regions of the earth, where nature
provides in abundance everything that man requires, there are races
whose life is passed in tranquillity and who know neither coercion
nor aggression. I can scarcely believe it and I should be glad to
hear more of these fortunate beings. The Russian Communists, too,
hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by
guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by
establishing equality in other respects among all the members of
the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves
are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least
important of the methods by which they keep their supporters
together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers. In any case,
as you yourself have remarked, there is no question of getting rid
entirely of human aggressive impulses; it is enough to try to
divert them to such an extent that they need not find expression in
war.

Why War?

4801

   Our mythological theory of
instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for
indirect
methods of combating war. If willingness to engage
in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious
plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it.
Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men
must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the
first place they may be relations resembling those towards a loved
object, though without having a sexual aim. There is no need for
psycho-analysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection,
for religion itself uses the same words: ‘Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself.’ This, however, is more easily said
than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of
identification. Whatever leads men to share important interests
produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the
structure of human society is to a large extent based on them.

   A complaint which you make about
the abuse of authority brings me to another suggestion for the
indirect combating of the propensity to war. One instance of the
innate and ineradicable inequality of men is their tendency to fall
into the two classes of leaders and followers. The latter
constitute the vast majority; they stand in need of an authority
which will make decisions for them and to which they for the most
part offer an unqualified submission. This suggests that more care
should be taken than hitherto to educate an upper stratum of men
with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager in the
pursuit of truth, whose business it would be to give direction to
the dependent masses. It goes without saying that the encroachments
made by the executive power of the State and the prohibition laid
by the Church upon freedom of thought are far from propitious for
the production of a class of this kind. The ideal condition of
things would of course be a community of men who had subordinated
their instinctual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else
could unite men so completely and so tenaciously, even if there
were no emotional ties between them. But in all probability that is
a Utopian expectation. No doubt the other indirect methods of
preventing war are more practicable, though they promise no rapid
success. An unpleasant picture comes to one’s mind of mills
that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their
flour.

Why War?

4802

   The result, as you see, is not
very fruitful when an unworldly theoretician is called in to advise
on an urgent practical problem. It is a better plan to devote
oneself in every particular case to meeting the danger with
whatever means lie to hand. I should like, however, to discuss one
more question, which you do not mention in your letter but which
specially interests me. Why do you and I and so many other people
rebel so violently against war? Why do we not accept it as another
of the many painful calamities of life? After all, it seems to be
quite a natural thing, to have a good biological basis and in
practice to be scarcely avoidable. There is no need to be shocked
at my raising this question. For the purpose of an investigation
such as this, one may perhaps be allowed to wear a mask of assumed
detachment. The answer to my question will be that we react to war
in this way because everyone has a right to his own life, because
war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it
brings individual men into humiliating situations, because it
compels them against their will to murder other men, and because it
destroys precious material objects which have been produced by the
labours of humanity. Other reasons besides might be given, such as
that in its present-day form war is no longer an opportunity for
achieving the old ideals of heroism and that owing to the
perfection of instruments of destruction a future war might involve
the extermination of one or perhaps both of the antagonists. All
this is true, and so incontestably true that one can only feel
astonished that the waging of war has not yet been unanimously
repudiated. No doubt debate is possible upon one or two of these
points. It may be questioned whether a community ought not to have
a right to dispose of individual lives; every war is not open to
condemnation to an equal degree; so long as there exist countries
and nations that are prepared for the ruthless destruction of
others, those others must be armed for war. But I will not linger
over any of these issues; they are not what you want to discuss
with me, and I have something different in mind. It is my opinion
that the main reason why we rebel against war is that we cannot
help doing so. We are pacifists because we are obliged to be for
organic reasons. And we then find no difficulty in producing
arguments to justify our attitude.

Why War?

4803

   No doubt this requires some
explanation. My belief is this. For incalculable ages mankind has
been passing through a process of evolution of culture. (Some
people, I know, prefer to use the term ‘civilization’.)
We owe to that process the best of what we have become, as well as
a good part of what we suffer from. Though its causes and
beginnings are obscure and its outcome uncertain, some of its
characteristics are easy to perceive. It may perhaps be leading to
the extinction of the human race, for in more than one way it
impairs the sexual function; uncultivated races and backward strata
of the population are already multiplying more rapidly than highly
cultivated ones. The process is perhaps comparable to the
domestication of certain species of animals and it is undoubtedly
accompanied by physical alterations; but we are still unfamiliar
with the notion that the evolution of civilization is an organic
process of this kind. The
psychical
modifications that go
along with the process of civilization are striking and
unambiguous. They consist in a progressive displacement of
instinctual aims and a restriction of instinctual impulses.
Sensations which were pleasurable to our ancestors have become
indifferent or even intolerable to ourselves; there are organic
grounds for the changes in our ethical and aesthetic ideals. Of the
psychological characteristics of civilization two appear to be the
most important: a strengthening of the intellect, which is
beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the
aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and perils.
Now war is in the crassest opposition to the psychical attitude
imposed on us by the process of civilization, and for that reason
we are bound to rebel against it; we simply cannot any longer put
up with it. This is not merely an intellectual and emotional
repudiation; we pacifists have a
constitutional
intolerance
of war, an idiosyncrasy magnified, as it were, to the highest
degree. It seems, indeed, as though the lowering of aesthetic
standards in war plays a scarcely smaller part in our rebellion
than do its cruelties.

Why War?

4804

   And how long shall we have to
wait before the rest of mankind become pacifists too? There is no
telling. But it may not be Utopian to hope that these two factors,
the cultural attitude and the justified dread of the consequences
of a future war, may result within a measurable time in putting an
end to the waging of war. By what paths or by what side-tracks this
will come about we cannot guess. But one thing we
can
say:
whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time
against war.

   I trust you will forgive me if
what I have said has disappointed you, and I remain, with kindest
regards,

Sincerely yours,

SIGM. FREUD

4805

MY
CONTACT WITH JOSEF POPPER-LYNKEUS

(1932)

4806

Intentionally left blank

4807

MY CONTACT WITH JOSEF
POPPER-LYNKEUS

It was in the winter of 1899 that my book on
The Interpretation of Dreams
(though its title-page was
post-dated into the new century) at length lay before me. This work
was the product of the labours of four or five years and its origin
was unusual. Holding a lectureship in Nervous Diseases at the
University, I had attempted to support myself and my rapidly
increasing family by a medical practice among the so-called
‘neurotics’ of whom there were only too many in our
society. But the task proved harder than I had expected. The
ordinary methods of treatment clearly offered little or no help:
other paths must be followed. And how was it by any means possible
to give patients help when one understood nothing of their illness,
nothing of the causes of their sufferings or of the meaning of
their complaints? So I eagerly sought direction and instruction
from the great Charcot in Paris and from Bernheim at Nancy;
finally, an observation made by my teacher and friend, Josef Breuer
of Vienna, seemed to open a new prospect for understanding and
therapeutic success.

   For these new experiments made it
a certainty that the patients whom we described as neurotic were in
some sense suffering from
mental
disturbances and ought
therefore to be treated by psychological methods. Our interest
therefore necessarily turned to psychology. The psychology which
ruled at that time in the academic schools of philosophy had very
little to offer and nothing at all for our purposes: we had to
discover from the start both our methods and the theoretical
hypotheses behind them. So I worked in this direction, first in
collaboration with Breuer and afterwards independently of him. In
the end I made it a part of my technique to require my patients to
tell me without criticism whatever occurred to their minds, even if
they were ideas which did not seem to make sense or which it was
distressing to report.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4808

   When they fell in with my
instructions they told me their dreams, amongst other things, as
though they were of the same kind as their other thoughts. This was
a plain hint that I should assign as much importance to these
dreams as to other, intelligible, phenomena. They, however, were
not
intelligible, but strange, confused, absurd: like
dreams, in fact - which for that very reason, were condemned by
science as random and senseless twitchings of the organ of the
mind. If my patients were right - and they seemed only to be
repeating the ancient beliefs held by unscientific men for
thousands of years - I was faced by the task of ‘interpreting
dreams’ in a way that could stand up against scientific
criticism.

   To begin with, I naturally
understood no more about my patients’ dreams than the
dreamers did themselves. But by applying to these dreams, and more
particularly to my own dreams, the procedure which I had already
used for the study of other abnormal psychological structures, I
succeeded in answering most of the questions which could be raised
by an interpretation of dreams. There were many such questions:
What do we dream about? Why do we dream at all? What is the origin
of all the strange characteristics which distinguish dreams from
waking life? - and many more such questions besides. Some of the
answers were easily given and turned out to confirm views that had
already been put forward; but others involved completely new
hypotheses with regard to the structure and functioning of the
apparatus of the mind. People dream about the things that have
engaged their minds during the waking day. People dream in order to
allay impulses that seek to disturb sleep, and in order to be able
to sleep on. But why was it possible for dreams to present such a
strange appearance, so confusedly senseless, so obviously
contrasted with the content of waking thought, in spite of being
concerned with the same material? There could be no doubt that
dreams were only a substitute for a rational process of thought and
could be interpreted - that is to say, translated into a rational
process. But what needed explaining was the fact of the
distortion
which the dream-work had carried out upon the
rational and intelligible material.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4809

   Dream-distortion was the
profoundest and most difficult problem of dream life. And light was
thrown on it by the following consideration, which placed dreams in
a class along with other psychopathological formations and revealed
them, as it were, as the normal psychoses of human beings. For our
mind, that precious instrument by whose means we maintain ourselves
in life, is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is rather to be
compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment
and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior
class. The whole flux of our mental life and everything that finds
expression in our thoughts are derivations and representatives of
the multifarious instincts that are innate in our physical
constitution. But these instincts are not all equally susceptible
to direction and education, or equally ready to fall in with the
demands of the external world and of human society. A number of
them have retained their primitive, ungovernable nature; if we let
them have their way, they would infallibly bring us to ruin.
Consequently, learning by experience, we have developed
organizations in our mind which, in the form of inhibitions, set
themselves up against the direct manifestations of the instincts.
Every impulse in the nature of a wish that arises from the sources
of instinctual energy must submit itself to examination by the
highest agencies of our mind, and, if it is not approved, is
rejected and restrained from exercising any influence upon our
movements - that is, from coming into execution. Often enough,
indeed, such wishes are even forbidden to enter consciousness,
which is habitually unaware even of the existence of these
dangerous instinctual sources. We describe such impulses as being
repressed
from the point of view of consciousness, and as
surviving only in the unconscious. If what is repressed contrives
somehow to force its way into consciousness or into movement or
into both, we are no longer normal: at that point the whole range
of neurotic and psychotic symptoms arise. The maintenance of the
necessary inhibitions and repressions imposes upon our mind a great
expenditure of energy, from which it is glad to be relieved. A good
opportunity for this seems to be offered at night by the state of
sleep, since sleep involves a cessation of our motor functions. The
situation seems safe, and the severity of our internal police-force
may therefore be relaxed. It is not entirely withdrawn, since one
cannot be certain: it may be that the unconscious never sleeps at
all. And now the reduction of pressure upon the repressed
unconscious produces its effect. Wishes arise from it which during
sleep might find the entrance to consciousness open. If we were to
know them we should be appalled, alike by their subject-matter,
their unrestraint and indeed the mere possibility of their
existence. This, however, occurs only seldom, and when it does we
awake as speedily as possible, in a state of fear. But as a rule
our consciousness does not experience the dream as it really was.
It is true that the inhibitory forces (the
dream censorship
,
as we may call them) are not completely awake, but neither are they
wholly asleep. They have had an influence on the dream while it was
struggling to find an expression in words and pictures, they have
got rid of what was most objectionable, they have altered other
parts of it till they are unrecognizable, they have severed real
connections while introducing false ones, until the honest but
brutal wishful phantasy which lay behind the dream has turned into
the manifest dream as we remember it - more or less confused and
almost always strange and incomprehensible. Thus the dream (or the
distortion which characterizes it) is the expression of a
compromise, the evidence of a conflict between the mutually
incompatible impulses and strivings of our mental life. And do not
let us forget that the same process, the same interplay of forces,
which explains the dreams of a normal sleeper, gives us the key to
understanding all the phenomena of neurosis and psychosis.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4810

   I must apologize if I have
hitherto talked so much about myself and my work on the problems of
the dream; but it was a necessary preliminary to what follows. My
explanation of dream-distortion seemed to me new: I had nowhere
found anything like it. Years later (I can no longer remember when)
I came across Josef Popper-Lynkeus’s book
Phantasien eines
Realisten
. One of the stories contained in it bore the title of
‘Träumen wie Wachen’, and it could not fail to
arouse my deepest interest. There was a description in it of a man
who could boast that he had never dreamt anything nonsensical. His
dreams might be fantastic, like fairy tales, but they were not
enough out of harmony with the waking world for it to be possible
to say definitely that ‘they were impossible or absurd in
themselves’. Translated into my manner of speech this meant
that in the case of this man no dream-distortion occurred; and the
reason produced for its absence put one at the same time in
possession of the reason for its occurrence. Popper allowed the man
complete insight into the reasons for his peculiarity. He made him
say: ‘Order and harmony reign both in my thoughts and in my
feelings, nor do the two struggle with each other.... I am one and
undivided. Other people are divided and their two parts - waking
and dreaming - are almost perpetually at war with each
other.’ And again, on the question of the interpretation of
dreams: ‘That is certainly no easy task; but with a little
attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt
always succeed. - You ask why it is that for the most part it does
not
succeed? In you other people there seems always to be
something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in
a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being
which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often
seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the
deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so
at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or
dreaming.’

   Now, if we leave psychological
terminology out of account, this was the very same explanation of
dream-distortion that I had arrived at from my study of dreams.
Distortion was a compromise, something in its very nature
disingenuous, the product of a conflict between thought and
feeling, or, as I had put it, between what is conscious and what is
repressed. Where a conflict of this kind was not present and
repression was unnecessary, dreams could not be strange or
senseless. The man who dreamed in a way no different from that in
which he thought while awake was granted by Popper the very
condition of internal harmony which, as a social reformer, he aimed
at producing in the body politic. And if Science informs us that
such a man, wholly without evil and falseness and devoid of all
repressions, does not exist and could not survive, yet we may guess
that, so far as an approximation to this ideal is possible, it had
found its realization in the person of Popper himself.

My Contact With Josef Popper-Lynkeus

4811

   Overwhelmed by meeting with such
wisdom, I began to read all his works - his books on Voltaire, on
Religion, on War, on the Universal Provision of Subsistence, etc. -
till there was built up clearly before my eyes a picture of this
simple-minded, great man, who was a thinker and a critic and at the
same time a kindly humanitarian and reformer. I reflected much over
the rights of the individual which he advocated and to which I
should gladly have added my support had I not been restrained by
the thought that neither the processes of Nature nor the aims of
human society quite justified such claims. A special feeling of
sympathy drew me to him, since he too had clearly had painful
experience of the bitterness of the life of a Jew and of the
hollowness of the ideals of present-day civilization. Yet I never
saw him in the flesh. He knew of me through common acquaintances,
and I once had occasion to answer a letter from him in which he
asked for some piece of information. But I never sought him out. My
innovations in psychology had estranged me from my contemporaries,
and especially from the older among them: often enough when I
approached some man whom I had honoured from a distance, I found
myself repelled, as it were, by his lack of understanding for what
had become my whole life to me. And after all Josef Popper had been
a physicist: he had been a friend of Ernst Mach. I was anxious that
the happy impression of our agreement upon the problem of
dream-distortion should not be spoilt. So it came about that I put
off calling upon him till it was too late and I could now only
salute his bust in the gardens in front of our Rathaus.