The problem of lay-analyses

I now watch from a distance the symptomatic reactions that are accompanying the introduction of psychoanalysis into the France which was for so long refractory. It seems like a reproduction of something I have lived through before, and yet it has peculiarities of its own. Objections of incredible simplicity are raised, such as that French sensitiveness is offended by the pedantry and crudity of psychoanalytical terminology. (One cannot help being reminded of Lessing’s immortal Chevalier Riccaut de la Marlinière.^[22]) Another comment has a more serious ring (a Professor of Psychology at the Sorbonne did not think it beneath him): the whole method of thought of psychoanalysis is inconsistent with the génie latin. Here the Anglo-Saxon allies of France, who count as supporters of analysis, are explicitly thrown over. Anyone hearing such words would suppose that psychoanalysis had been the favourite child of the génie teutonique and had been clasped to its heart from the moment of birth.

In France the interest in psychoanalysis began among the men of letters. To understand this, it must be borne in mind that from the time of the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalysis ceased to be a purely medical subject. Between its appearance in Germany and in France lies the history of its numerous applications to departments of literature and of æsthetics, to the history of religions and to pre-history, to my theology, to folk-lore, to education, and so on. None of these things have much to do with medicine; in fact it is only through psychoanalysis that they are connected with it. I have no business, therefore, to go into them in detail in these pages.^[23] I cannot pass them over completely in silence, however, for, on the one hand, they are essential to a correct appreciation of the nature and value of psychoanalysis, and, on the other hand, I have, after all, undertaken to give an account of my lifework. The beginnings of the majority of these applications of psychoanalysis will be found in my works. Here and there I have gone a little way along the path in order to gratify my non-medical interests. Later on, others (not only doctors, but specialists in the various fields as well) have followed in my tracks and penetrated far into the different subjects. But since my programme limits me to a mention of my own share in these applications of psychoanalysis, I can only give a quite inadequate picture of their extent and importance.

A number of suggestions came to me out of the Œdipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so, too, did the overwhelming effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the unconscious nature of his criminal tendencies. From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character—Hamlet, which had been admired for 300 years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have broken down, like his numberless fellows in the real world, at the Œdipus complex; for Hamlet was faced with the task of taking vengeance upon another for the two deeds which are the subject of the Œdipus desires, and before that task his arm was paralysed by his own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet very soon after his father’s death. The suggestions made by me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of material made by dramatists. In his large volume upon the incest theme^[24] he was able to show how often imaginative writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Œdipus situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the way in which the material has been transformed, modified and softened.

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

I was able to show from a short story by W. Jensen called Gradiva, which has no particular merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar to us in the “dream-work” are thus also operative in the processes of imaginative writing.

My book upon Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious^[25] was a side-issue, indirectly derived from The Interpretation of Dreams. The only friend of mine who was at that time interested in my work remarked to me that my interpretations of dreams often impressed him as being like jokes. In order to throw some light on this impression, I began to investigate jokes and found that their essence lay in the technical methods employed in them, and that these were the same as the means used in the “dream-work”—that is to say, condensation, displacement, the representation of a thing by its opposite or by a triviality, and so on. This led to an economic enquiry as to the origin of the high degree of pleasure obtained from hearing a joke. And to this the answer was that it was due to the momentary suspension of the energy expended upon maintaining repression owing to the attraction exercised by the offer of a premium of pleasure (“fore-pleasure”).

I myself set a higher value upon my contributions to the psychology of religion, which began in 1907 with the establishment of a remarkable similarity between obsessive acts and religious practices or ritual. Without as yet understanding the deeper connections, I described the obsessional neurosis as a distorted private religion and religion as a kind of universal obsessional neurosis. Later on, in 1912, the explicit indications of Jung as to the far-reaching analogies between the mental products of neurotics and of primitive peoples, led me to turn my attention to that subject. In four essays, which were collected into a book with the title of Totem and Taboo,^[26] I showed that the dread of incest was even more marked among primitive than among civilized races and had given rise to very special measures of defence against it; I examined the relations between taboo prohibitions (the earliest form in which moral restrictions make their appearance) and emotional ambivalence; and I discovered under the primitive scheme of the universe, known as animism, the principle of the over-estimation of the importance of psychical reality, the principle of “the omnipotence of thoughts,” which also lies at the root of magic. I developed the comparison with the obsessional neurosis at every point, and showed how many of the postulates of primitive mental life are still in force in that remarkable disorder. Above all, however, I was attracted by totemism, the first system of organization in primitive tribes, a system in which the beginnings of social order are united with a rudimentary religion and the implacable domination of a small number of taboo prohibitions. The being that is honored is ultimately always an animal, from which the clan also claims to be descended. Many indications pointed to the conclusion that every race, even the most highly developed, had once passed through the stage of totemism.

The chief literary sources of my studies in this field were the well known works of J. G. Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy and The Golden Bough), a mine of valuable facts and opinions. But Frazer effected little towards elucidating the problems of totemism; he had more than once fundamentally altered his views on the subject, and the other ethnologists and prehistorians seemed in equal uncertainty and disagreement. My starting-point was the striking correspondence between the two taboo-injunctions of totemism (not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same totem-clan) and the two elements of the Œdipus complex (killing the father and taking the mother to wife). I was therefore tempted to equate the totem animal with the father; and, in fact, primitive peoples themselves do this explicitly, by honouring it as the forefather of the clan. There next came to my help two facts from psychoanalysis, a lucky observation of a child made by Ferenczi, which made it possible to speak of an “infantile return of totemism,” and the analysis of early animal-phobias in children, which so often showed that the animal was a substitute for the father, a substitute onto which the fear of the father derived from the Œdipus complex had been displaced. Not much was lacking to enable me to recognize the killing of the father as the nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of religion.

This missing element was supplied when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work, The Religion of the Semites. Its author (a man of genius, who was both a physicist and a biblical expert) introduced the so-called totem-feast as an essential part of the totemistic religion. Once a year the totem animal, which was at other times regarded as sacred, was solemnly killed in the presence of all the members of the clan, was devoured and was then mourned over. The mourning was followed by a great festival. When I further took into account Darwin’s conjecture that men originally lived in hordes, each under the domination of a single, powerful, violent and jealous male, there rose before me, out of all these components, the following hypothesis, or, I would rather say, vision. The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy, but also their ideal. After the deed, they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and regret, they learned to come to an agreement among themselves, they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forego the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem-feast was the commemoration of the fearful deed, from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or “original sin”) and which was the beginning at once of social organization, of religion, and of ethical restrictions.

Now, whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex. After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, honoured and envied, became the prototype of God himself. The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought, on the one hand, to atone for the act of parricide, and, on the other, to consolidate the advantages it had brought. This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, it may be added, the ceremony of the totem-feast still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion. I should like explicitly to mention that this last observation was not made by me, but is to be found in the works of Robertson Smith and Frazer.

Theodor Reik and G. Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought which I developed in Totem and Taboo, and, in a series of important works, have extended it, amplified it or corrected it. I myself have since returned to it more than once in the course of my investigations into the “unconscious sense of guilt” (which also plays such an important part among the motives of neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer connection between social psychology and the psychology of the individual.^[27] I have, moreover, made use of the idea of an archaic inheritance from the “primal horde” epoch of mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to hypnosis.

I have taken but little direct part in certain other applications of psychoanalysis, though they are none the less of general interest. It is only a step from the phantasies of individual neurotics to the imaginative creations of groups and peoples as we find them in myths, legends and fairy tales. Mythology became the special province of Otto Rank; the interpretation of myths, the tracing of them back to the familiar unconscious complexes of infancy, the replacing of astral explanations by a discovery of human motives, all of this is to a large extent due to his analytic efforts. The subject of symbolism has also found many students among my followers. Symbolism has brought psychoanalysis many enemies; many enquirers with unduly prosaic minds have never been able to forgive it the recognition of symbolism, which followed from the interpretation of dreams. But analysis is guiltless of the discovery of symbolism, for it had long been known in other regions of thought (such as folk-lore, legends and myths) and plays even a larger part in them than in the “language of dreams.”

I myself have contributed nothing to the application of analysis to education. It was natural, however, that the analytic discoveries as to the sexual life and mental development of children should attract the attention of educators and make them see their problems in a new light. Dr. Oskar Pfister, a protestant pastor at Zurich, led the way as a tireless pioneer along these lines, nor did he find the practice of analysis incompatible with the retention of his religion, though it is true that this was of a sublimated kind. Among the many others who worked alongside of him, I may mention Frau Dr. Hug-Hellmuth and Dr. S. Bernfeld, both of Vienna. The application of analysis to the prophylactic education of healthy children and to the correcting of those who, though not actually neurotic, have deviated from the normal course of development, has led to one consequence which is of practical importance. It is no longer possible to restrict the practice of psychoanalysis to physicians and to exclude laymen from it. In fact, a physician who has not been through a special training is, in spite of his diploma, a layman in analysis, and a non-physician who has been suitably trained can, with occasional reference to a physician, even carry out the analytic treatment of neuroses.

By a process of development against which it would have been useless to struggle, the word “psychoanalysis” has itself become ambiguous. While it was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method, it has now also become the name of a science—the science of unconscious mental processes. By itself this science is seldom able to deal with a problem completely, but it seems destined to give important contributory help in a large number of regions of knowledge. The sphere of application of psychoanalysis extends as far as that of psychology, to which it forms a complement of the greatest moment.

Looking back, then, over the patch-work of my life’s labours, I can say that I have made many beginnings and thrown out many suggestions. Something will come of them in the future. But I cannot tell myself whether it will be much or little.