psychoanalysis was careful not to become. It is also an excellent
example of a “secondary elaboration” as seen, for example, in the
process which the waking thought produces in dream material.[18] In this
case instead of dream material there is the material newly acquired from
the viewpoint of the ego and brought under the familiar categories of
the same. It is then translated, changed, and as thoroughly
misunderstood as happens in the case of dream-formation. Adler’s theory
is thus characterized less by what it asserts than by what it denies. It
consequently consists of three elements of quite dissimilar value;
first, good contributions to the psychology of the ego, which are
superfluous but admissible; secondly, translations of analytical facts
into the new jargon, and, thirdly, distortions and perversions of these
facts when they do not fit into the ego presuppositions. The elements of
the first kind have never been ignored by psychoanalysis, although it
owed no special attention to them. Psychoanalysis had a greater interest
in showing that all ego strivings are mixed with libidinous components.
Adler’s theory emphasizes the counterpart to it; namely, that all
libidinous feeling contains an admixture of egotism. This would have
been a palpable gain if Adler had not made use of this assertion to
deny, every time, the libidinous feelings in favor of the impelling ego
components. His theory thus does exactly what all patients do, and what
our conscious thinking always does, it rationalizes, as Jones would say,
in order to conceal the unconscious motives. Adler is so consistent in
this, that he considers the object of evincing domination over the
woman, to be on the top, as the mainspring of the sexual act. I do not
know if he has upheld this monstrous idea in his writings.
Psychoanalysis early recognized that every neurotic symptom owes the
possibility of its existence to some compromise. It must, therefore,
also put to some good account the demands of the ego which manages the
repression, it must offer it some advantages by finding for it some
useful employment, otherwise it would suffer the same fate as the
originally defended impulses. The term “morbid gain” expresses this
state of affairs. One might even have been justified in differentiating
the primary gain for the ego which must have been active at the origin,
from a “secondary” gain which appears in connection with other
intentions of the ego, when the symptom is about to assert itself. It
has also long been known to analysis that the withdrawal of this morbid
gain, or the cessation of the same in consequence of some real change,
is one of the mechanisms in the cure of the symptom. On these
relationships which can be verified and understood without difficulty,
Adler’s theory puts the greatest emphasis. It entirely overlooks the
fact that innumerable times the ego makes a virtue out of necessity in
submitting to the most undesired symptom forced upon it, because of the
use it can make of it, _e. g._, when the ego accepts anxiety as a means
of security. Here the ego plays the absurd part of the Pierot in the
circus, who, through his gestures, wishes to convey to the spectators
the impression that all changes in the menage are taking place at his
command. But only the youngest among the spectators believe him.
For the second part of Adler’s theory psychoanalysis must stand security
as for its own possessions. For it is nothing but psychoanalytic
knowledge which the author had from all the sources opened to him during
ten years of our joint work, but which he later marked as his own after
changing the nomenclature. For instance, I myself consider “security” a
better word than “protective measure,” which I used; but cannot find in
it any new meaning. Similarly one will find in Adler’s statements a
great many long-known features if one will replace the expressions
“feigned” (fingiert) fictive and fiction, by the original words “to
fancy” and “phantasy.” This identity would be emphasized by
psychoanalysis, even if the author had not for many years participated
in our common work.
The third part of Adler’s theory, which consists in giving new
interpretations to, and in distorting the disagreeable facts of
psychoanalysis, contains that which definitely severs the actual
“Individual Psychology” from psychoanalysis. As is known the principle
of Adler’s system states that it is the object of the self-assertion of
the individual, his “will to power” in the form of the “masculine
protest,” to manifest itself domineeringly in the conduct of life, in
character formation and in the neurosis. This “masculine protest,” the
Adlerism motor, is nothing else, however, than the repression set free
from its psychological mechanism, and what is more, it is sexualized and
thus hardly in keeping with the vaunted expulsion of sexuality from its
place in the psychic life. The “masculine protest” certainly exists, but
in constituting it as the motor of the psychic life, observation has
only played the part of the springboard which one leaves in order to
uplift one’s self. Let us consider one of the most fundamental
situations of the infantile desire; namely, the observation of the
sexual act between adults by the child. When the life-history of such
persons is later subjected to analysis by a physician, it is found that
at this moment the minor spectator was seized by two feelings; one, in
the case of a boy, to put himself in the place of the active man, and
the other, the opposing feeling, to identify himself with the suffering
woman. Both strivings conjointly exhaust the pleasure that might have
resulted from this situation. Only the first feeling can come under the
head of the “masculine protest” if this idea is to retain any meaning at
all. The second feeling, whose fate Adler either ignores or does not
know, is really the one which assumes greater significance in the later
neurosis. Adler has placed himself so entirely into the jealous
confinement of the ego, that he only accounts for such emotional
feelings as are agreeable to the ego and furthered by it; but the case
of the neurosis, which opposes these strivings, lies beyond his horizon.
Adler’s most serious deviations from the reality of observation and his
deepest confusion of ideas have arisen in his attempt to correlate the
basic principle of his theory with the psychic life of the child, an
attempt which has become inevitable in psychoanalysis. The biological,
social, and physiological meaning of “masculine” and “feminine” have
here become mixed into a hopeless composition. It is quite impossible,
and it can easily be disproved by observation, that the masculine or
feminine child builds its plan of life on any original undervaluation of
the feminine sex; nor is it conceivable that a child can take as the
guiding line the wish: “I will be a real man.” In the beginning no child
has even an inkling of the significance of the difference in sex, more
likely it starts with the assumption that both sexes possess the same
(male) genital. It does not begin its sexual investigation with the
problem of sex differentiation and is far from entertaining the social
undervaluation of the woman. There are women in whose neurosis the wish
to be a man never played any part. So far as the “masculine protest” is
concerned, it can easily be traced back to a disturbance of the original
narcissism caused by the threat of castration; that is, to the first
hindrance of sexual activity. All dispute as to the psychogenesis of the
neuroses must ultimately be decided in the sphere of the childhood
neuroses. The careful analysis of a neurosis of the early years of
childhood puts an end to all mistakes in regard to the etiology of the
neuroses, and all doubts as to the part played by the sexual impulses.
That is why Adler in his criticism of Jung’s “Conflicts of the Child’s
Mind” was obliged to resort to the imputation that the material of the
case surely must have followed a uniform new tendency “from the
father.”[19]
I will not linger any longer over the biological side of Adler’s theory,
and will not examine whether the palpable inferiority of organs or the
subjective feeling of the same (one often cannot tell which) can
possibly be the basis of Adler’s system. Only permit me to remark that
this would make the neurosis a by-product of the general stunting, while
observation teaches that an excessively large number of hideous,
misshapen, crippled, and wretched creatures have failed to react to
their deficiencies by developing a neurosis. Nor will I consider the
interesting information that the sense of inferiority goes back to
infantile feelings. It shows us in what disguise the doctrine of
infantilism, so much emphasized in psychoanalysis, returns in Adler’s
Individual Psychology. On the other hand, I am obliged to emphasize how
all psychological acquisitions of psychoanalysis have been disregarded
by Adler. In his book “The Nervous Character,” the unconscious still
appears as a psychological peculiarity, but without any relation to his
system. Later, he declared, quite logically, that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether any conception be conscious or unconscious.
For the principle of repressions, Adler never evinced any understanding.
While reviewing a lecture before the Vienna Society in 1911, he said:
“On the strength of a case I wish to point out that the patient had
never repressed his libido, against which he continually tried to secure
himself.”[20] Soon thereafter at a discussion in Vienna Adler said: “If
you ask whence comes the repression, you are told: from culture. But if
you ask whence comes culture, the reply is: from the repression. So you
see it is only a question of a play on words.” A small fragment of the
sagacity used by Adler to defend his “nervous character” might have
sufficed to show him the way out of this pettifogging argument. There is
nothing mysterious about it, except that culture depends upon the acts
of repression of former generations, and that each new generation is
required to retain this culture by carrying out the same repressions. I
have heard of a child that considered itself fooled and began to cry,
because to the question: “Where do eggs come from?” it received the
answer, “Eggs come from hens,” and to the further question: “Where do
the hens come from?” the information was “From the eggs,” and yet this
was not a play upon words. The child had been told what was true.
Just as deplorable and devoid of substance is all that Adler has said
about the dream—that shibboleth of psychoanalysis. At first he
considered the dream as a turning from the masculine to the feminine
line, which simply means translating the theory of wish-fulfillment in
dreams into the language of the “masculine protest.” Later he found that
the essence of the dream lies in the fact that it enables man to realize
unconsciously what is denied him consciously. Adler should also be
credited with the priority of confounding the dream with the latent
dream-thoughts, on the cognition of which rests his idea of “prospective
tendency.” Maeder followed him in this, later on. In doing so he readily
overlooks the fact that every interpretation of the dream which really
tells nothing comprehensible in its manifest appearance rests upon the
same dream interpretation, whose assumptions and conclusions he is
disputing. Concerning resistance Adler asserts that it serves to
strengthen the patient against the physician. This is certainly correct.
It means as much as saying that it serves the resistance. But whence
this resistance originates, and how it happens that its phenomena serve
the patient’s interest, these questions, as if of no interest for the
ego, are not further discussed by Adler. The detailed mechanisms of
symptoms and phenomena, the motivation of the variety of diseases and
morbid manifestations, find no consideration at all with Adler, since
everything is equally subservient to the “masculine protest,” to the
self-assertion, and to the exaltation of the personality. The system is
finished, at the expense of an extraordinary labor of new
interpretation, yet it has not contributed a single new observation. I
believe that I have succeeded in showing that his system has nothing
whatever in common with psychoanalysis.
The picture which one derives from Adler’s system is founded entirely
upon the impulse of aggression. It has no place at all for love. One
might wonder that such a cheerless aspect of life should have received
any notice whatever; but we must not forget that humanity, oppressed by
its sexual needs, is prepared to accept anything, if only the
“overcoming of sexuality” is held out as bait.
The secession of Adler’s faction was finished before the Congress at
Weimar which took place in 1911, while the one of the Swiss School began
after this date. Strangely enough, the first indications of it were
found in some remarks by Riklin in popular articles printed in Swiss
literature, from which the general public learned, even before Riklin’s
closest colleagues, that psychoanalysis had succeeded in overcoming some
regretable mistakes which discredited it. In 1912 Jung boasted, in a
letter to me from America, that his modifications of psychoanalysis had
overcome the resistances to it in many persons, who hitherto wanted to
know nothing about it. I replied that this was nothing to boast about,
that the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psychoanalysis,
the less resistances he would encounter. This modification for the
introduction of which the Swiss are so proud, again was nothing more or
less than the theoretical suppression of the sexual factor. I admit that
from the very beginning I have regarded this “progress” as a
too-far-reaching adaptation to the demands of actuality.
These two retrogressive movements, tending away from psychoanalysis,
which I will now compare, also resemble each other in the fact that they
are seeking to obtain a favorable opinion by means of certain lofty
points of view, as _sub specie æternitatis_. In the case of Adler, this
rôle is played by the relativity of all knowledge, and by the rights of
the personality to construe artificially any piece of knowledge to suit
the individual; while Jung insists on the cultural historical rights of
youth to throw off any fetters that tyrannical old age with ossified
views would forge for it. These arguments require some repudiation. The
relativity of all our knowledge is a consideration which may be used as
an argument against any other science besides psychoanalysis. This idea
originates from well-known reactionary streams of the present day,
inimical to science, and wishes to give the appearance of a superiority
to which we are not entitled. Not one of us can guess what may be the
ultimate judgment of mankind about our theoretical efforts. There are
examples to show that what was rejected by the next three generations
was corrected by the fourth and its recognition thus brought about.
There is nothing else for the individual to do than to defend, with all
his strength, his conviction based on experience after he has carefully
listened to his own criticisms and has given some attention to the
criticisms of his opponents. Let him be content to conduct his affair
honestly and not assume the office of judge, which is reserved for a
remote future. To accentuate personal arbitrariness in scientific
matters is bad; it evidently wishes to deny to psychoanalysis the value
of a science, which, to be sure, Adler has already depreciated by the
aforementioned remark. Any one who highly regards scientific thinking
will rather seek for means and methods by which to restrict, if
possible, the factor of personal and artificial arbitrariness wherever
it still plays too large a part. Besides one must remember that all
agitation in defending is out of place. Adler does not take these
arguments seriously. They are only for use against his opponents, but
they respect his own theories. They have not prevented Adler’s own
adherents from celebrating him as the Messiah, for whose appearance
waiting humanity had been prepared by so many forerunners. The Messiah
is surely no longer anything relative.
Jung’s argument _ad captandam benevolentiam_ rests on the
all-too-optimistic assumption that the progress of humanity, of
civilization, and of knowledge has always continued in an unbroken line,
as if there had never been any epigones, reactions, and restorations
after every revolution, as if there had never been races who, because of
a retrogression, had to renounce the gain of former generations. The
approach to the standpoint of the masses, the giving up of an innovation
that has proved unpopular, all these make it altogether unlikely that
Jung’s correction of psychoanalysis could lay claim to being a
liberating act of youth. Finally it is not the years of the doer that
decide it, but the character of the deed.
Of the two movements we have here considered, that headed by Adler is
undoubtedly the more important. Though radically false, it is,
nevertheless, characterized by consistency and coherence and it is still
founded on the theory of the impulse. On the other hand, Jung’s
modification has lessened the connection between the phenomena and the
impulses: besides, as its critics (Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones) have
already pointed out, it is so unintelligible, muddled, and confused,
that it is not easy to take any attitude towards it. Wherever one
touches it, one must be prepared to be told that one has misunderstood
it, and it is impossible to know how one can arrive at a correct
understanding of it. It represents itself in a peculiarly vacillating
manner, since at one time it calls itself “a quite tame deviation, not
worthy of the row which has arisen about it” (Jung), yet, at another
time, it calls itself a new salvation with which a new epoch shall begin
for psychoanalysis, in fact, a new aspect of the universe for everything
else.
When one thinks of the disagreements between the individual private and
public expressions of Jung’s utterances one is obliged to ask to what
extent this is due to his own lack of clearness and lack of sincerity.
Yet, it must be admitted that the representatives of the new theory find
themselves in a difficult position. They are now disputing things which
they themselves formerly defended and what is more, this dispute is not
based on new observations which might have taught them something fresh,
but rather on a different interpretation which causes them to see things
in a different light from that in which they saw them before. It is for
this reason that they will not give up their connection with
psychoanalysis as the representatives of which they first became known
in the world. They prefer to proclaim that psychoanalysis has changed.
At the Congress of Münich I was obliged to clear up this confusion and
did so by declaring that I could not recognize the innovation of the
Swiss School as a legitimate continuation and further development of the
psychoanalysis which had originated with me. Outside critics (like
Furtmüller) had already recognized this state of affairs and Abraham
says, quite rightly, that Jung is in full retreat away from
psychoanalysis. I am naturally entirely willing to admit that any one
has the right to think and to write what he wishes, but he has not the
right to make it out to be something different from what it really is.
Just as Adler’s researches brought something new into psychoanalysis, a
piece of the ego-psychology, and paid only too dearly for this gift by
repudiating all the fundamental analytic principles, in the same way
Jung and his adherents have based their fight against psychoanalysis
upon a new contribution to the same. They have traced in detail (what
Pfister did before them) how the material of the sexual ideas
originating in the family complex and in the incestuous object selection
can be used to represent the highest ethical and religious interests of
mankind, that is, they have explained a remarkable case of sublimation
of the erotic impelling forces and the transformation of the same into
strivings that can no longer be called erotic. All this harmonized very
well with the assumptions of psychoanalysis, and would have agreed very
well with the conception that in the dream and in the neurosis one sees
the regressive elucidations of these and all other sublimations. But the
world would have exclaimed that ethics and religion had been sexualized.
I cannot help assuming “finally” that the investigators found themselves
quite unequal to the storm they had to face. Perhaps the storm began to
rage in their own bosoms. The previous theological history of so many of
the Swiss workers is as important in their attitude to psychoanalysis as
is the socialistic record of Adler for the development of his
“psychology.” One is reminded of Mark Twain’s famous story about the
fate of his watch and to the speculative remark with which he closed it:
“And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and
gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell
him.”
I will encroach upon the realm of parables and will assume that in a
certain society there lived a parvenu who boasted of descent from a very
noble family not locally known. But it so happened that it was proved to
him that his parents were living somewhere in the neighborhood and were
very simple people, indeed. Only one way out remained to him and he
seized upon it. He could no longer deny his parents, but he asserted
that they were very aristocratic by origin but much come down in the
world, and secured for them at some obliging office a document showing
their descent. It seems to me that the Swiss workers had been obliged to
act in a similar manner. If ethics and religion could not be sexualized,
but must be regarded as something “higher” from the very beginning, and
as their origin from the family and Œdipus complexes seemed undeniable,
then there was only one way out; namely, that these complexes
themselves, from the beginning, could not have the significance which
they appeared to express, but must have that higher “anagogic” sense (to
use Silberer’s nomenclature) with which they adapt themselves for proper
use in the abstract streams of thought of ethics and religious
mysticism.
I am quite prepared to be told once more that I have misunderstood the
contents and object of the theory of the New Zürich School, but here
wish to protest against being held responsible for those contradictions
to my theories that have arisen as a result of the publications of this
school. The burden of responsibility rests on them, not on me. In no
other way can I make comprehensible to myself the ensemble of Jung’s
innovations or grasp them in their associations. All the changes which
Jung has perpetrated upon psychoanalysis originated in the intention of
setting aside all that is objectionable in the family complexes, in
order that these objectionable features may not be found again in
religion and ethics. The sexual libido was replaced by an abstract idea,
of which it may be said that it remained equally mysterious and
incomprehensible alike to fools and to the wise. The Œdipus complex, we
are told, has only a “symbolical” sense, the mother therein representing
the unattainable which must be renounced in the interests of cultural
development. The father who is killed in the Œdipus myth represents the
“inner” father from whose influence we must free ourselves in order to
become independent. No doubt other portions of the material of sexual
conceptions will, in time, receive similarly new interpretations. In
place of the conflict between erotic strivings adverse to the ego and
the self-assertion, we are given the conflict between the “life-task”
and the “psychic laziness.” The neurotic guilty conscience corresponds
with the reproach of not having put to good account one’s life-task.
Thus a new religio-ethical system was founded which, exactly like
Adler’s, was obliged to give new interpretations, to distort or set
aside the actual results of analysis. As a matter of fact they have
caught a few cultural higher notes from the symphony of the world’s
by-gones, but once again have failed to hear the powerful melody of the
impulses.