IV

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.

V

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.