The problem of lay-analyses

The theories of resistance and of repression, of the unconscious, of the ætiological significance of sexual life and of the importance of infantile experiences—these form the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis. In these pages, unfortunately, I have been able to describe only the separate elements and not their inter-connections and their bearing upon one another. But I am obliged now to turn to the alterations which gradually took place in the technique of the analytic method.

The means which I first adopted for overcoming the patient’s resistance, by pressing and encouraging him, had been indispensable for the purpose of giving me a first general survey of what was to be expected. But in the long run it proved to be too much of a strain upon both sides and, further, it seemed open to certain obvious criticisms. It therefore gave place to another method which was in one sense its opposite. Instead of urging the patient to say something upon some particular subject, I now asked him to abandon himself to a process of free association, i. e. to say whatever came into his head, while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts. It was essential, however, that he should bind himself to report literally everything that occurred to his self-perception and not to give way to critical objections which sought to put certain associations on one side on the ground that they were not sufficiently important or that they were irrelevant or that they were altogether meaningless. There was no necessity to repeat explicitly the insistence upon the need for candor on the patient’s part in reporting his thoughts, for it was the precondition of the whole analytic treatment.

It may seem surprising that this method of free association, carried out subject to the observation of the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis, should have achieved what was expected of it, namely the bringing into consciousness of the repressed material which was held back by resistances. We must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free. The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental activities onto a particular subject. We shall be justified in assuming that nothing will occur to him that has not some reference to that situation. His resistance against reproducing the repressed material will now be expressed in two ways. Firstly, it will be shown by critical objections; and it was to deal with these that the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis was invented. But if the patient observes that rule and so overcomes his reticences, the resistance will find another means of expression. It will so arrange it that the repressed material itself will never occur to the patient but only something which approximates to it in an allusive way; and the greater the resistance, the more remote will be the substitutive association which the patient has to report from the actual idea that the analyst is in search of. The analyst, who listens composedly, but without any constrained effort, to the stream of associations and who, from his experience, has a general notion of what to expect can make use of the material brought to light by the patient according to two possibilities. If the resistance is slight, he will be able, from the patient’s allusions, to infer the unconscious material itself; or if the resistance is stronger, he will be able to recognize from the associations, as they seem to become more remote from the subject, the character of the resistance itself and will explain it to the patient. Uncovering the resistance, however, is the first step towards overcoming it. Thus the work of analysis involves an art of interpretation, the successful handling of which may require tact and practice, but which is not hard to acquire. But it is not only in the saving of labour that the method of free association has an advantage over the earlier method. It exposes the patient to the least possible amount of compulsion, it never allows of contact being lost with the actual current situation, it guarantees to a great extent that no factor in the structure of the neurosis will be overlooked and that nothing will be introduced into it by the expectations of the analyst. It is left to the patient in all essentials to determine the course of the analysis and the arrangement of the material; any systematic handling of particular symptoms or complexes thus becomes impossible. In complete contrast to what happened with hypnosis and with the urging method, inter-related material makes its appearance at different times and at different points in the treatment. To a spectator, therefore—though, in fact, there can be none—an analytic treatment would seem completely obscure.

Another advantage of the method is that it need never break down. It must theoretically always be possible to have an association, provided that no conditions are made as to its character. Yet there is one case in which, in fact, a break down occurs with absolute regularity; from its very uniqueness, however, this case, too can be interpreted.

I now come to the description of a factor which adds an essential feature to my picture of analysis and which can claim alike technically and theoretically, to be regarded as of the first importance. In every analytic treatment, there arises, without the physician’s agency, an intense emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is not to be accounted for by the actual situation. It can be of a positive or of a negative character, and can vary between the extremes of a passionate, completely sensual love and the unbridled expression of an embittered defiance and hatred. This transference—to give it its shortened name—soon replaces, in the patient’s mind, the desire to be cured, and, so long as it is affectionate and moderate becomes the agent of the physician’s influence and neither more nor less than the main-spring of the joint work of analysis. Later on, when it has become passionate or has been converted into hostility, it becomes the principal tool of the resistance. It may then happen that it will paralyse the patient’s powers of associating and endanger the success of the treatment. Yet it would be senseless to try to evade it; for an analysis without transference is an impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that the transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. The transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence and, in fact, dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor that the hypnotists have named “suggestibility,” which is the agent of hypnotic rapport and the incalculable behavior of which led to such difficulties with the cathartic method. When there is no inclination to a transference of emotion such as this, or when it has become entirely negative, as happens in dementia præcox or paranoia, then there is also no possibility of influencing the patient by psychological means.

It is perfectly true that psychoanalysis, like other psycho-therapeutic methods, employs the instrument of suggestion (or transference). But the difference is this: that in analysis it is not allowed to play the decisive part in determining the therapeutic results. It is used instead to induce the patient to perform a piece of mental work—the overcoming of his transference-resistances—which involves a permanent alteration in his mental economy. The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst, and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference-attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relations which had their origin in his earliest object-relationships during the repressed period of his childhood. In this way the transference is changed from the strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the analytic treatment. Nevertheless, its handling remains the most difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of analysis.

With the help of the method of free association and of the closely related art of interpretation, psychoanalysis succeeded in achieving something which appeared to be of no practical importance but which, in fact, necessarily led to a fresh attitude and a fresh scale of values in scientific thought. It became possible to prove that dreams have a meaning and to discover it. In classical antiquity great importance was attached to dreams as foretelling the future; but modern science would have nothing to do with them, it handed them over to superstition, declaring them to be purely “somatic” processes—a kind of spasm occurring in a mind that is otherwise asleep. It seemed quite inconceivable that anyone who had done serious scientific work could make his appearance as an “interpreter of dreams.” But by disregarding the excommunication pronounced upon dreams, by treating them as unexplained neurotic symptoms, as delusional or obsessional ideas, by neglecting their apparent content and by making their separate component images into subjects for free association, a different conclusion was reached. The numerous associations produced by the dreamer led to the discovery of a mental structure which could no longer be described as absurd or confused, which was on an equality with any other product of the mind, and of which the manifest dream was no more than a distorted, abbreviated and misunderstood translation and usually a translation into visual images. These latent dream-thoughts contained the meaning of the dream, while its manifest content was simply a make-believe, a façade, which could serve as a starting-point for the associations but not for the interpretation.

There were now a whole series of questions to be answered, among the most important of them being whether there was a motive for the formation of dreams, under what conditions it took place, by what methods the dream-thoughts (which are invariably full of sense) became converted into the dream (which is often senseless), and others besides. I attempted to solve all of these problems in The Interpretation of Dreams,^[11] which I published in the year 1900. I can only find space here for the briefest abstract of my investigation. When the latent dream-thoughts that are revealed by the analysis of a dream are examined, one of them is found to stand out from among the rest, which are intelligible and well known to the dreamer. These latter thoughts are residues of waking life (the day’s residues, as they are called technically); but the isolated thought is found to be an impulse in the form of a wish, often of a very repellent kind, which is foreign to the waking life of the dreamer and is consequently disavowed by him with surprise or indignation. This impulse is the actual constructor of the dream: it provides the energy for its production and makes use of the day’s residues as material; the dream which thus originates represents a situation in which the impulse is satisfied, it is the fulfilment of the wish which the impulse contains. It would not be possible for this process to take place without being favored by the presence of something in the nature of a state of sleep. The necessary mental precondition of sleep is the concentration of the ego upon the wish to sleep and the withdrawal of psychical energy from all the interests of life; since at the same time all the paths of approach to motility are blocked, the ego is also able to reduce the expenditure of energy by which at other times it maintains the repressions. The unconscious impulse makes use of this nocturnal relaxation of repression in order to push its way into consciousness with the dream. But the repressive resistance of the ego is not abolished in sleep, but merely reduced. Some of it remains in the shape of a censorship of dreams and forbids the unconscious impulse to express itself in the forms which it would properly assume. In consequence of the severity of the censorship of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are obliged to submit to being altered and softened so as to make the forbidden meaning of the dream unrecognizable. This is the explanation of dream-distortion, which accounts for the most striking characteristic of the manifest dream. We are therefore justified in asserting that a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed) wish. It will now be seen that dreams are constructed like neurotic symptoms: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego. Since they have a similar origin they are equally unintelligible and stand in equal need of interpretation.

There is no difficulty in discovering the general function of dreaming. It serves the purpose of warding off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arouse the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interruption. External stimuli are warded off by being given a new interpretation and by being woven into some harmless situation; internal stimuli, caused by the pressure of instincts, are given free play by the sleeper and allowed to find satisfaction in the formation of dreams, so long as the latent dream-thoughts submit to the control of the censorship. But if they threaten to break free and the meaning of the dream becomes too plain, the sleeper cuts short the dream and awakens in terror. (Dreams of this class are known as anxiety-dreams). A similar failure in the function of dreaming occurs if an external stimulus becomes too strong to be warded off. (This is the class of awakening-dreams). I have given the name of dream-work to the process which, with the co-operation of the censorship, converts the latent thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. It consists in a peculiar way of treating the preconscious material of thought, so that its component parts become condensed, its mental emphasis becomes displaced, and the whole of it is translated into visual images or dramatized, and filled out by a deceptive secondary elaboration. The dream-work is an excellent example of the processes occurring in the deeper, unconscious layers of the mind, which differ considerably from the familiar normal processes of thought. It also displays a number of archaic characteristics, such as the use of a symbolism (in this case of a predominantly sexual kind) which it has since also been possible to discover in other spheres of mental activity.

We have explained that the unconscious impulse which causes the dream connects itself with part of the day’s residues, with some unexhausted interest of waking life; this lends the dream which is thus brought into being a double value for the work of analysis. It is true that, on the one hand, a dream that has been analysed reveals itself as the fulfilment of a repressed wish; but, on the other hand, it will be a continuation of some preconscious activity of the day before and will contain subject-matter of some kind or other, giving expression, for instance, to a determination, a warning, a reflection or once more to the fulfilment of a wish. Analysis exploits the dream in both directions as a means of obtaining knowledge alike of the patient’s conscious and of his unconscious processes. It also profits from the fact that dreams have access to the forgotten material of childhood, and so it happens that infantile amnesia is for the most part overcome in connection with the interpretation of dreams. In this respect dreams achieve a part of what was previously the task of hypnosis. On the other hand, I have never maintained the assertion which has so often been ascribed to me, that dream-interpretation shows that all dreams have a sexual content or are derived from sexual motive forces. It is easy to see that hunger, thirst, or the need to excrete, can produce dreams of satisfaction just as well as any repressed sexual or egoistic impulse. The case of young children affords us a convenient test of the validity of our theory of dreams. In them the various psychical systems are not yet sharply divided and the repressions have not yet grown deep, so that we often come upon dreams which are nothing more than undisguised fulfilments of impulses left over from waking life. Under the influence of imperative needs, adults may also produce dreams of this infantile type.

In the same way that psychoanalysis makes use of dream-interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make—symptomatic actions, as they are called. I investigated this subject in a series of papers which were published for the first time in book-form in 1904 under the title of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.^[12] In this widely circulated work I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed impulses and intentions. But what constitutes the enormous importance of dream-interpretation, as well as of this latter study, is not the assistance they give to the work of analysis but another of their qualities. Previously psychoanalysis had only been concerned with solving pathological phenomena and in order to explain them it had often been driven into making assumptions whose comprehensiveness was out of all proportion to the importance of the actual material under consideration. But when it came to dreams, it was no longer dealing with a pathological symptom, but with a phenomenon of normal mental life which might occur in any healthy person. If dreams turned out to be constructed like symptoms, if their explanation required the same assumptions—the repression of impulses, substitute-formation, compromise-formation, the dividing of the conscious and the unconscious into various psychical systems—then psychoanalysis was no longer a subsidiary science in the field of psycho-pathology, it was rather the foundation for a new and deeper science of the mind which would be equally indispensable for the understanding of the normal. Its postulates and findings could be carried over to other regions of mental happening; a path lay open to it that led far afield, into spheres of universal interest.

I must interrupt my account of the internal growth of psychoanalysis and turn to its external history. What I have so far described of its discoveries has related for the most part to the results of my own work; but I have filled in my account with material from later dates and have not distinguished between my own contributions and those of my pupils and followers.

For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer, I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned, abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals. In my essay “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” I mentioned, as an instance of the attitude adopted by psychiatric circles in Vienna, a conversation with an assistant at the Clinic, who had written a book against my theories, but had never read my Interpretation of Dreams. He had been told at the Clinic that it was not worth while. The man in question, who has since become a professor, has gone so far as to repudiate my report of the conversation and to throw doubts in general upon the accuracy of my recollection. I can only say that I stand by every word of the account I then gave.

As soon as I realized the inevitable nature of what I had come up against, my sensitiveness greatly diminished. Moreover, my isolation gradually came to an end. To begin with, a small circle of pupils gathered round me in Vienna; and then, after 1906, came the news that the psychiatrists at Zurich, E. Bleuler, his assistant C. G. Jung, and others, were taking a lively interest in psychoanalysis. We got into personal touch with one another, and at Easter 1908, the friends of the young science met at Salzburg, agreed upon the regular repetition of similar informal congresses and arranged for the publication of a periodical which was edited by Jung and was given the title of Jahrbuch für psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Forschungen. It was brought out under the direction of Bleuler and myself and ceased publication at the beginning of the Great War. At the same time that the Swiss psychiatrists joined the movement, interest in psychoanalysis began to be aroused all over Germany, it became the subject of a large number of written comments as well as of lively discussions at scientific congresses. But its reception was nowhere friendly or even benevolently impartial. After the briefest acquaintance with psychoanalysis, German science was united in rejecting it.

Even today it is, of course, impossible for me to foresee the final judgment of posterity upon the value of psychoanalysis for psychiatry, psychology and the mental sciences in general. But I fancy that, when the history of the phase we have lived through comes to be written, German science will not have cause to be proud of those who represented it. I am not thinking of the fact that they rejected psychoanalysis or of the decisive way in which they did so; both of these things were easily intelligible, they were only to be expected and at any rate they threw no discredit upon the character of the opponents of analysis. But for the degree of arrogance which they displayed, for their conscienceless contempt of logic, and for the coarseness and bad taste of their attacks, there could be no excuse. It may be said that it is childish of me to give free rein to such feelings as these now, after fifteen years have passed; nor would I do so unless I had something more to add. Years later, during the Great War, when a chorus of enemies were bringing against the German nation the charge of barbarism, a charge which sums up all that I have written above, it none the less hurt deeply to feel that my own experience would not allow me to contradict it.

One of my opponents boasted of silencing his patients as soon as they began to talk of anything sexual and evidently thought that this technique gave him a right to judge the part played by sexuality in the neuroses. Apart from emotional resistances, which were so easily explicable by the psychoanalytical theory that it was impossible to be misled by them, it seemed to me that the main obstacle to agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded psychoanalysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which had gone to its making. Since, in their opinion, analysis had nothing to do with observation or experience, they believed that they themselves were justified in rejecting it without experience. Others again, who did not feel so strongly convinced of this, repeated in their resistance the classical manœuvre of not looking through the microscope so as to avoid seeing what they had denied. It is remarkable, indeed, how incorrectly most people act when they are obliged to form a judgment of their own upon some new subject. I have heard for years from “benevolent” critics—and I am told the same thing even today—that psychoanalysis is right up to such-and-such a point, but that there it begins to exaggerate and to generalize without justification. But I know that, while nothing is more difficult than to draw such a line, only a few weeks or days earlier the critic has been completely ignorant of the whole subject.

The result of the official anathema against psychoanalysis was that the analysts began to come closer together. At the second Congress, held at Nuremberg in 1910, they formed themselves, on the proposal of S. Ferenczi, into an “International Psycho-Analytical Association,” divided into a number of local societies, but under a common president. The Association survived the Great War and still exists, consisting today of branch societies in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Great Britain, Holland, Russia and India as well as two in the United States.^[13] I arranged that C. G. Jung should be appointed as the first President, which turned out later to have been a most unfortunate step. At the same time a second journal devoted to psychoanalysis was started, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, edited by Adler and Stekel, and a little later a third, Imago, edited by two non-medical analysts, H. Sachs and O. Rank, and intended to deal with the application of analysis to the mental sciences. Soon afterwards Bleuler published a paper in defence of psychoanalysis.^[14] Though it was a relief to find honesty and straight-forward logic for once taking part in the dispute yet I could not feel completely satisfied by Bleuler’s essay. He strove too eagerly after an appearance of impartiality; nor is it a matter of chance that it is to him that our science owes the valuable concept of ambivalence. In later papers Bleuler adopted such a critical attitude towards the theoretical structure of analysis and rejected or threw doubts upon such essential parts of it, that I could not help asking myself in astonishment what could be left of it for him to admire. Yet not only has he subsequently uttered the strongest pleas in favor of “depth psychology,” but he based his comprehensive study of schizophrenia upon it. Nevertheless Bleuler did not for long remain a member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association; he resigned from it as a result of misunderstandings with Jung, and the Burghölzli^[15] was lost to analysis.

Official disapproval could not hinder the spread of psychoanalysis either in Germany or in other countries. I have elsewhere^[16] followed the stages of its growth and given the names of those who were its first representatives. In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to the Clark University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was President, and to spend a week giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that body’s foundation. Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had introduced psychoanalysis into his courses some years before; there was a touch of the “king-maker” about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them. We also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist, who, in spite of his age, was an enthusiastic supporter of psychoanalysis and threw the whole weight of a personality that was universally respected into the defence of the cultural value of analysis and the purity of its aims. He was an estimable man, in whom, as a reaction against a predisposition to obsessional neurosis, an ethical bias predominated; and the only thing in him that we could regret was his inclination to attach psychoanalysis to a particular philosophical system and to make it the servant of moral aims. Another event of this time, which made a lasting impression upon me, was a meeting with William James, the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

At that time I was only 53, 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 onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psycho-Analysis, it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis 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 Behaviorism, 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 1911–1913, two secessionist movements from psychoanalysis 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 psychoanalysis without the necessity of rejecting its actual material. 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 Œdipus complex, as well as the necessity for any analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psychoanalysis; 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 inferiority, and threw all the psychological discoveries of psychoanalysis 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 “psychoanalysis.” After a lapse of ten years, it can be asserted that both of these attempts against psychoanalysis have blown over without doing any harm.

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 psychoanalysis; 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 intelligent people, especially if he had at his command as few practical attractions as I had.

The Great 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 psychoanalysis. The observation of war neuroses had at last opened the eyes of the medical profession to the importance of psycho-genesis in neurotic disturbances, and some of our psychological conceptions, such as the “advantage of being ill” and the “flight into illness,” suddenly 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 psychoanalytic stations 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 disorders of the time and of the premature death of their generous author. At a later date some of his ideas were put into execution by Max Eitingon, who, in 1920, founded a psychoanalytical clinic in Berlin. During the brief period of Bolshevist rule in Hungary, Ferenczi was able to carry on a successful course of instruction as the official representative of psychoanalysis at the University of Budapest. After the war, our opponents announced with great joy 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 ætiology 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, psychoanalysis 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 psychoanalysis of having made an unjustifiable extension of the concept of sexuality, yet, when it became convenient for polemical ends, this crime was forgotten and we were once more held down to the narrowest meaning of the word.

If the preliminary cathartic period is left on one side, the history of psychoanalysis 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 1895–96 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 today, when a grave illness warns me of the approaching end, I can think with a quiet mind of the cessation of my own labors. For that very reason, however, it is impossible for me in this Autobiographical Study to deal as fully with the progress of psychoanalysis 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 psychoanalysis to the psychoses.

I must begin by saying that increasing experience showed more and more plainly that the Œdipus complex was the nucleus of the neuroses. 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 ætiology 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 psychoanalysis 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.

In the Œdipus complex, the libido is attached to the image of the parents. But earlier there has been 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 fills his own ego and has 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 the attachments to objects (the objectcathexes^[17]) radiate out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being converted into object-libido, and vice versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this conversion can go is afforded by the sexual or sublimated devotion which involves 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 also possible to form a correct estimate of the repressing forces. 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 interests of self-preservation defended themselves against the demands of object-love, that is, against the demands of sexuality in the narrower sense.

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 psychoanalysis 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)^[18] I have given free rein to the inclination to speculation which I kept down for so long and I have also taken stock of 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 working of Eros and the death-instinct together and against each other.

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 psychoanalysis, it goes far beyond psychoanalysis. 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 psychoanalysis. But this reproach is based upon a complete misconception of the facts. Clear fundamental concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a department of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clearcut 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 fundamental concepts or most general ideas 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 had already made attempts at earlier stages of my work to arrive at some more general points of view, starting from the observations of psychoanalysis. In a short essay, “Formulations regarding the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,”^[19] published in 1911, I drew attention (and there was, of course, nothing original in this), to the domination of the “pleasure-pain principle” in mental life and to its displacement by the so-called “reality principle.” Later on (1915–17), 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 coördinates, which I described as dynamic, topographical, and economic respectively; and this seemed to me to represent the farthest 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^[20]—I broke off, wisely perhaps, since the time for theoretical predictions 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, and id, and a super-ego.^[21] The super-ego is the heir of the Œdipus 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 psychoanalysis 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 psychoanalysis, 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.

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 analytical 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 præcox; 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 upon the surface, visible to every eye. So that 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. At a very early date (1896) I was able to establish, in a case of paranoid dementia, the presence of the same ætiological factors and the same emotional complexes as in the neuroses. Jung explained some most puzzling stereotypes 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 melancholia. 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 have been unable to 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 psychoanalysts, 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.