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THE DEPTHS
OF THE SOUL
PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES
_Dedicated
to his dear friends
BESS AND OSCAR BLUMENTHAL
in remembrance of
his delightful stay
in Chicago, 1921_
THE AUTHOR
THE DEPTHS
OF THE SOUL
PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES
BY
DR. WILLIAM STEKEL
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
BY
DR. S. A. TANNENBAUM
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD.
BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.
1921
PREFACE
An old proverb says that every parent loves the ugly duckling most. My
book, _The Depths of the Soul_, was, from its beginning, my favourite.
It was written in the beautiful years in which the first rays of
analytic psychognosis penetrated the darkness of the human soul. The
reader may find between the lines the exuberant joy of a discoverer.
First impressions are the strongest. It is an unfortunate fact that
subsequent impressions lack the vividness, the intensity, the warmth,
and the colours of the first emotions.
The great success of this book in many foreign languages has given me
incalculable pleasure, because it has served to confirm my own blind
love. No other book has brought me so many friends from far and near.
I am happy that my friend Dr. Tannenbaum has devoted his knowledge of
the art of translation to my favourite child, and I hope that this
translation will bring me many new English friends.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
PAGE
DEDICATION ii
PREFACE v
CONTENTS vii
THE SECOND WORLD 1
GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 11
UNPACKING ONE’S HEART 20
LAZINESS 29
THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 38
WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 46
INDEPENDENCE 57
JEALOUSY 65
CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP 73
EATING 80
ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS? 91
RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 98
DEAD-HEADS 108
IDENTIFICATION 115
REFUGE IN DISEASE 125
WHY WE TRAVEL 133
MOODY PERSONS 143
OVERVALUED IDEAS 152
AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 161
WHY THEY QUARREL 171
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 180
LOOKING BACKWARD 191
ALL-SOULS 201
MIRROR SLAVES 210
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
THE SECOND WORLD
To poets it is a familiar world. The ordinary mortal wanders about
in its wonderful gardens as if he were blind; he lives in it without
knowing it. He does not know where the real world stops and where
the fantasy world begins. In the treadmill of grey day the invisible
boundaries between these two worlds escape him.
The second world! What would our life be without it? What a vale of
tears would this globe be were it not for this heaven on earth!
The reader probably guesses what I mean. All of us, the poorest and the
richest, the smallest and biggest, rarely or never find contentment in
our daily routine. We need a second sphere, a richer life, in which we
may dream of everything that is denied us in the first sphere. Ibsen
called this “The Great Life-Lie.” But is it always a lie? Did not Ibsen
go too far with this characterization? Who could doubt that the lie is
not one of those eternal truths that is so incorporeal that we cannot
grasp it, so colourless that we cannot see it, so formless that we
cannot describe it.
The child finds its second world in play. The little duties of
everyday life are for it only unnecessary interruptions in its play in
the second world. Here the child’s fantasy has ample room. It is a
soldier, king, and robber, cook, and princess; it rides through a wide
world on steaming express trains, it battles courageously with dragons
and giants, it snatches the treasures of the earth from their guardian
dwarfs, and even the stars in the heavens are not beyond its reach in
its play. Then comes the powerful dictum called education and snatches
the child out of its beloved second world and compels it to give heed
to the first world and to learn things necessary to it in its actual
life. The child learns of obligations and submits unwillingly to the
dictates of its teachers. The first world is made up of duties. The
second world knows no duties; it knows only freedom and unrestrained
freedom of thought. This is the root of the subsequent great conflict
between feelings and duties. In our childhood we find duties a
troublemaker who interferes with our playing; this childish hostility
continues with us all through life. Our vocation, the sphere of our
duties, can never wholly satisfy us. It is our first world; and even
though we seem to accept it wholly, a little remnant of this hostility
remains and this constitutes a part of our second world.
Primitive people find their second world in religion. From their
primitive fears for the preservation of their lives they flee to their
gods, whom they love and fear, punish and reward. The same thing is
true of all those simple souls whom culture has not robbed of their
religious belief. To them religion is the second world which gives
them rich consolation and solace for the pains of the first world. In
his book “Seelenkunde,” Benedict attributes anarchism to an absence of
consolatory life-lies. He says: “Our free-thinking times have stopped
up this source and it is the duty of society to create a consoling
life-truth, otherwise that psychic inner life which hoards up bitter
hatred will not cease.”
The more highly developed a person’s mind is, the more complicated is
his second world. People often express surprise at the fact that so
many physicians devote themselves passionately to music or the other
fine arts. To me it seems very simple. All day long they see life in
its most disagreeable aspects. They see the innocent sufferings, the
frightful tortures which they cannot relieve. They look behind the
curtain of the “happy family”; they wade through all the repellant
and disgusting filthiness of this petty world, and they would have to
become dull and non-partisan animals did they not have their second
world.
There is first of all music, which is so dear to all of us because it
is an all-embracing mother which absorbs all the emotions of hatred,
anger, love, envy, fear, and despair, and fuses them all into one
great rhythm, into one great vibrating emotion of pleasure. On its
trembling waves the thoughts of the poor tortured human soul are borne
out into the darkness of uncomprehended eternity and the eternally
incomprehensible.
Then there is literature. We open a book and at once we are transported
into the second world of another ego, a world which in a few minutes
becomes our own. Happy poets, who have been endowed with the gift of
saying what they see, of giving form to what they dream, of freeing
themselves from their energies, of abreacting their secret sufferings
and of making others happy by opening up to them a second world!
Then there are the thousand and one forms of play; sports and in fact
everything that tears us away from our daily grind. What is the lottery
ticket to the poor wage-earner but an instalment on the pleasures of
the second world, or the purchased right of joyous hope?
There is the devotion to clubs and fraternal associations. The
henpecked husband flees wrathfully to his club where he can freely and
fearlessly launch all those fine argumentative speeches which he has to
suppress at home. Here he can rule, here he can play the role of the
independent master. For many thousands the club is nothing more than an
opportunity to work off their energies, to get rid of unused emotions
and to play that role which life in the first sphere has denied them.
And thus everyone has his second world. One who does not have it stands
on the level of animals, or is the happiest of the happy. By happiness
I mean the employment of one’s energies in the first sphere. There is
a wide gulf between happiness and the consciousness of happiness. The
consciousness of happiness is such a fugitive moment that the poorest
wage-slave in his second world can be happier than the truly happy who
does not happen to be thinking of his happiness. Happiness is like
the possession of a beautiful wife. If we are in danger of losing her
we tremble. Before we have obtained her and in moments of jealousy
we guard her possession as fortune’s greatest gift. But in the
consciousness of undisturbed possession can we be saying to ourselves
every second: I possess her, I am happy? No! no! Happiness is the
greatest of all life’s lies and one who has had least of it may be the
happiest in his second world.
Rose-coloured hope! Queen of all pleasurable emotions, our
all-preserving and all-animating goddess! You are the sovereign of the
second world and beckon graciously the unhappy weeping mortal who in
the first world sees the last traces of you disappear.----
Marital happiness depends very largely upon whether the two spheres of
the couple partly overlap or touch each other at a few points. In the
first world they must live together. But woe if the second world keeps
them asunder! If the two spheres touch each other even only in one
point and have only one feeling tangent between them, that will bring
them closer together than all the cares and the iron constraint of
the first world. Women know this instinctively, especially during the
period of courtship. They enthuse about everything over which the lover
enthuses; they love and hate with him and want to share everything with
him. Beware, you married women, of destroying your husband’s second
world! If after the day’s toil he soothes his tired nerves in the
fateful harmonies of Beethoven, do not disturb his pious mood; enthuse
with him, do not carry the petty cares and the vulgar commonplaces of
life into the lofty second world. Do you understand me, or must I speak
more plainly? Do not let him go alone on his excursions into the second
world! A book that he reads alone, understands alone, enjoys alone,
may be more dangerous to you than the most ardent glances of a wanton
rival. Art must never become the man’s second world. No! It must become
the child of both the lovers if the beats of their souls are to be
harmonious.
True friendship is so lofty, so exalting, because it is dependent
upon a congruence of the second spheres. Love is a linking of the
first worlds and if it is to be permanent it must journey forth into
the second world. Genuine friendship is born in the second world and
affects the first world only retroactively.
The second world need not necessarily always be the better world even
though to its possessor it may appear to be the more beautiful and the
more desirable. Rarely enough it is the supplement to the first world
but frequently the contrast and the complement to it. Pious chaste
natures may often give their coarser instincts undisturbed expression
in the second world. Day-dreams are frequently the expression of life
in the second world. But on careful analysis even the dreams of the
night prove to be an unrestricted wallowing in the waters of the second
world. Dreams are usually wish fulfillments, but in their lowest levels
we find the wishes of the second world which are only rarely altered by
unconscious thought processes.
One who dreams during the day flies from the first world into the
second. If he fails to find his way back again into the first world his
dreams become delusions and we say that he is insane. How delicate are
the transitions from sanity to insanity! Inasmuch as all of us live
in a second world, all of us are insane at least a few seconds every
day. What distinguishes us from the insane is the fact that we hold in
our hands the Ariadne thread which leads us out of the labyrinth of
thoughts back into the world of duties.
It is incredible how happy an insane person can be. Proudly the
paranoid hack writer marches up and down in his pitiful cell. Clothed
in rags, he is king and commands empires. His cot is a heavenly couch
of eiderdown; his old dilapidated stool is a jewel-bedecked throne.
The attendants and the physicians are his servants. And thus in his
delusion he is what he would like to be.
The world is only what we think it; the “thing itself” is only a
convention of the majority. A cured maniac assured me that the period
of his insanity had been the happiest in his life. He saw everything
through rose-coloured glasses and the awful succession of wild thoughts
was only a succession of intensely pleasurable emotions. Obviously
those, on the other hand, who suffer from melancholia and delusions
of inferiority are the unhappiest creatures. The invalid who thinks
himself made of glass trembles apprehensively for his life with every
step. The unhappy experiences of the first world have become so fixed
in his brain that they follow him into the second world and transform
even this into their own image.
Every impression in our life affects our soul as if it were made of
wax and not one such impression can be lost. That we forget so many
impressions is due to the fact that we have repressed them out of our
consciousness. Repression is a protective device but at the same time
a cause for many serious nervous disorders. A painful impression, an
unpleasant experience in the first or the second world, is so altered
as to be unrecognizable in consciousness. As a reaction to this
serious nervous disturbances, especially hysterical alterations of the
psyche, may occur,--conditions which can be cured only by tracing out
the dark pathways of the repressed emotions and reintroducing them
into consciousness. They are conjured out of the dark realm of the
unconscious into the glaring light of day and, lo! the ghosts vanish
for all time and with them all those unpleasant symptoms which have so
exercised the physician’s skill.
If the psychotherapeutist is to fulfill his difficult task he must
acquaint himself with the patient’s second world even more thoroughly
than with the first. And so, too, a judge ought never to pronounce
sentence without first having thoroughly penetrated the second world of
the condemned. In that world are the roots of good and evil in human
life. In his “Crime and Punishment” Dostoyevsky’s genius shows in a
masterly way the relationship between the two worlds of a criminal. And
so, too, Tolstoy, in his “Resurrection,” in an endeavour to enlist our
sympathies in her behalf, describes the second world of a courtesan. It
is her life-lie that she makes all the men in her embrace blessed. And
in sooth, a spark of truth seems to slumber in this life-lie.
Physicians, judges, lawyers, and ministers ought all to have a
thorough training in psychology. Not psychology in the sense of that
school philosophy which flourishes in theoretical phraseology and in
theoretical facts remote from the green tree of life. Life can learn
only from life. One who knows the secrets of the second world will not
be surprised by any happenings that the day may bring forth. He will
understand the weaknesses of the great and the strength of the small.
He will see virtue and vice coalesce in one great stream whose murky
waters will flow on into unknown regions.
GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE
Very few people perceive the ridiculous element in the frequent
complaints about the wickedness of human nature. “Human beings are
ungrateful, false, untrustworthy,” and so forth. Yes, but we are all
human. We ought, therefore, logically speaking, complain: “We human
beings are ungrateful, we are false, we are untrustworthy.” But
naturally this requires a measure of self-knowledge that is seldom
to be found in those bearing the vesture of humanity. Let us make a
modest beginning; let us try to look truth in the face. Let us not put
ourselves on a pinnacle above the others till we know how high or low
we ourselves stand.
We like to deceive ourselves, and, above all, not to see our faults.
That is the most prevalent of all weaknesses. We look upon ourselves
not only as cleverer but also as better than all others. We forget
our faults so easily and divide them by a hundred, whereas our
virtues are ever present to our mind and multiplied by a thousand.
To himself everybody is not only the first but also the wisest and
the best of mortals. That is why we complain about the ingratitude of
our fellow-men, because we have forgotten all the occasions on which
we proved ungrateful,--in exactly the same manner in which we manage
wholly to forget everything calculated to awaken painful emotions in
ourselves.
The complaint about man’s ingratitude is as old as the history of man
himself. The Bible, ancient legends, the folk-songs, and the proverbs
of all nations, ancient and modern, bewail man’s ingratitude. It is
“the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin.” A trait that is
so widely distributed, investing the egoist with the glory of supreme
worldly wisdom and branding the altruist as half a fool, must be
founded deep in the souls of men. It must be an integral part of the
circumstances conditioning the life of the individual. It must send its
roots down into the unconscious where the brutal instincts of primal
man consort with humanity’s ripened instincts.
But if ingratitude is a genuinely (psychologically) established fact
then we must be able to determine the dark forces that have it in them
to suppress the elementary feeling of gratitude. For even to the most
casual observation it is apparent that the first emotion with which
we react to a kindness is a warm feeling of recognition, gratitude.
So thoroughly are we permeated by it that it seems impossible ever to
withhold this gratitude from our benefactor, let alone repay him with
ingratitude. The first reaction with which the human soul requites
a kind deed is a firm purpose “ever” to be grateful therefor. But
purpose, “the slave to memory,” is only the puffed sail that drives
the boat until the force of the storm and the weakness of the rudder
compel a different course. So, too, the intent to prove grateful is
driven about fitfully by the winds of life. Of course, not at once.
It requires the lapse of a certain latency period ere gratitude is
converted to ingratitude. In the beginning the feeling of gratitude
reigns supreme. Slowly it grows fainter and fainter, is inaudible for a
time, then on suitable occasions is heard again but ever more faintly.
After a while, quite unawares, ingratitude has taken its place. All
those pleasurable emotions that have accompanied gratitude have
been transformed into their opposites: love into hatred, attraction
into aversion, interest into indifference, praise into censure, and
friendship into hostility.
How does this come about? Where lie the sources of these hidden streams
that drive the wheels of our emotions?
We pointed out at the very beginning that everybody regards himself
as the wisest, the best, and the most capable of men. Our weaknesses
we acknowledge very reluctantly. A losing chess-player is sure to
say in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances: “I did not play this
game well.” The opponent’s superiority is always denied; defeat is
attributed to a momentary relaxation of the psychic tension, to
carelessness, to some accident, etc. And if an individual is compelled
to admit another’s superiority, he will do so only with reference
to some one point. He will always make reservations leaving himself
some sphere of activity in which he is king. That constitutes a man’s
secret pride: the sphere in which he thinks he excels all others.
This self-consciousness, this exaggerated apperception of the ego is
a natural basis of life, a protective device of the soul which makes
life bearable, which makes it easier to bear our fardels and endure
the pricks of destiny, and which compensates us for the world’s
inadequate recognition of us and for the failure of our efforts which
must inevitably come short of our intentions. “The paranoid delusion
of the normal human being,” as Philip Frey aptly named it, is really
the individual’s “fixed idea” which proves him to be in a certain sense
pathologic and justifies the opinion that the whole world is a great
madhouse.
This exaggerated self-consciousness manifests itself with pathological
intensity especially in these times. The smaller the individual’s
share in the real affairs of the world is, the more must his fantasy
achieve so as to magnify this function and have it appear as something
of vital importance. In those cases in which individuality is crushed,
a hypertrophied delusion of greatness is developed. Everyone thinks
himself important, everyone is indispensable, everyone thinks himself
an important power in the play and interplay of forces. Our era has
created the type of the “self-made man.” Everyone is willing to be
indebted only to himself, his qualifications, his power of endurance,
his energy, his individual efforts for his achievements. “By his own
efforts”--so runs the much-abused phrase,--does each one want to get to
the top.
All want it--but how few really make it come true! Who can know to-day
what is his own and what another’s? Who knows how much he had to take
before he was able to give anything? But no one wants to stop for an
accounting. Each one wants to owe everything to himself.
Something of this is in every one of us. And this brings us to the
deepest root of ingratitude. The feeling of being indebted to another
clashes with our self-confidence; the unpleasant truth contrasts
sharply with the normal’s deep-rooted delusions of greatness. In this
conflict of emotions there is only an either ... or. _Either_ once for
all to renounce this exaggerated self-consciousness, _or_ to forget
the occasion for gratitude, to repress this painful memory, to let the
ulcerous wound on the proud body of the “ego” heal to a scar. (The
exceptions that prove the rule in this matter, too, we shall consider
later.)
The first road that assures us eternal gratitude is chosen only by
those who by the “bludgeonings of fate” have been wholly stunned, who
are life-weary,--feel themselves goaded to death,--the wholly crushed.
These unfortunates no longer need the play of their hidden psychic
forces. The need of the body has strangled the cry of the soul. These
are grateful, grateful from conviction, grateful from necessity. Their
dreams are veritable orgies of benefactions. For them the benefactor is
the deliverer from bodily torment. They see “dead souls” whom everyone
who so desires may purchase.
But one who has not for ever renounced the fulfillment of his inmost
longings will rarely be capable of gratitude. His ego resents being
indebted to anyone but himself. But this ego will never permit itself
to face the naked brutal fact of its ingratitude. It seeks for causes
and motives, for justification. In this case the proverb again
proves true: “seek and you shall find,” the kindness is scrutinised
from every side till a little point is found which reveals a bit of
calculating egoism from which the kindness takes on a business aspect.
And what human action does not permit of many interpretations? Our
self-preservation impulse then chooses the interpretation that suits us
best, the interpretation that relieves us of the oppressive feeling of
gratitude. Such is the first step in the transformation of gratitude
into ingratitude. Rarely does the matter rest there. Usually it
requires also a transformation of the emotion into its opposite ere the
galling feeling of gratitude can be eradicated. What execrable wretches
would we not appear even to ourselves if we could not work out reasons
for the changes in our feelings? And so we convert the good deed into a
bad one; if possible, we discover stains and blots in our benefactor’s
present life or pursuits that can blacken the spotlessness of his past.
Not until we have done this are we free from the oppressive feeling of
gratitude. Thus, with no further reason for being grateful left, our
personal pride survives unshaken, the bowed ego again stands proudly
erect.
This explanation of the psychology of ingratitude draws the veil from
a series of remarkable phenomena which we pass by in our daily life
without regard or understanding. We shall cite only a few instances
from the many at our disposal: the ingratitude of servants and all
subordinates,--a species of ingratitude that is so obvious that if
an exception occurs the whole world proclaims it as an exception;
the ingratitude of pupils to the teacher to whom they owe all (this
explains the common phenomenon that pupils belittle the scientific
attainments of the teacher,--a phenomenon that may almost be designated
“the pupil’s neurosis”); the deep hatred with which artists regard
those of their predecessors to whom they are most indebted; the tragedy
of the distinguished sons whose fathers paved the way for them; the
great injustice of invalids towards the physicians to whom they owe
their lives; the historic ingratitude of nations to their great leaders
and benefactors; the stubborn ignoring of the living great ones and
the measureless overvaluation of the dead; the perpetual opposition to
whatever administration may be in power, whence is derived a fragment
of the psychology of discontent; the quite frequent transformation of a
friendship into its opposite.
Verily, one who counts upon gratitude is singularly deficient in
knowledge both of human nature and of his own nature. In this
connection, we must consider also the fact that owing to an excessive
overvaluation of the performance of our most obvious duties, we demand
gratitude even when there is no reason for expecting it. I refer to
only one example: Is there not an obvious obligation on parents to
provide to the best of their ability for the child that they have
brought into the world? Notwithstanding this we daily preach to our
children: “You must be grateful to us for all that we do for you, for
your food, your clothes, your education.” And is it not a fact that
this insistence upon the duty of children to be grateful begets the
opposite: ingratitude? Should we not rather strive to hold our children
with only one bond, _love_?
Let us be just and also admit that really grateful human beings are to
be found; persons whom life has not wearied and who lose none of their
dignity though they are grateful. These are the spiritually pre-eminent
individuals who have forced themselves to the recognition of the fact
that no one is an independent unit, that our valuation of ourselves is
false, individuals who have succeeded, by the aid of psychoanalytic
self-knowledge, to reduce the normal person’s delusional greatness to
the moderation warranted by reality.
Such persons are grateful because their valuation of themselves is fed
by other springs. The knowledge of the frailties of humanity in general
compensates them for the failing of the human in the individual.
The greatest number of grateful persons will be found in the ranks
of the geniuses, whereas talented persons are generally addicted to
ingratitude. Genius can easily be grateful inasmuch as the frank
recognition of one’s weaknesses and the secret knowledge of one’s
achievements do not permit the suppression of the greatness of others.
One who has so much to give need not be ashamed to have accepted
something. And more especially as he knows with certainty that in life
everyone must accept....
Truly great men are notably modest. Modesty is the knowledge of one’s
own shortcomings. Vanity, the overvaluation of one’s endowments.
Gratitude is the modesty of the great; ingratitude the vanity of the
small. Only those are grateful who really have no occasion for being
so. A genuine benefactor finds his thanks in good works. In dealing
with this theme one must think of Vischer’s verses:--
“If poison and gall make the world bitter,
And your heart you would preserve;
Do deeds of kindness! and you will learn
That doing good rejoices.”
UNPACKING ONE’S HEART
The average human being finds it helpful to free himself from his
impressions by “pouring out his heart” to someone. Like a sponge, the
soul saturates itself; like a sponge, it must be squeezed dry before
it can fill itself up again. But now and then it happens that the
soul cannot rid itself of its impressions. Such persons, we say, are
soul-sick and we recognise those who suffer from soul-sickness by the
fact that they sedulously shun new impressions. Every disease of the
soul rests ultimately upon a secret.
Children exhibit in clear and unmistakable ways the reactions of their
elders. In the presence of a secret they behave exactly as the normal
person ought to behave. They cannot keep it to themselves. I recall
very distinctly that as a child I was unable to sit a quarter of an
hour without speaking. Repeatedly my parents promised me large rewards
if I would sit a quarter of an hour without asking them a question or
making some remark. The promised reward was increased from day to day
because I never was quiet for more than half of the allotted period.
But the obligation to keep a “secret” was even more discomforting to
me. On one occasion my brother was to be given a silver watch for
his birthday. For three days I went about oppressed and restive as
if something was seriously amiss. I prowled around him, watching him
intently with suppressed excitement, so that he finally noticed my
strange behaviour and demanded to know what I wanted. On the day before
his birthday I could contain myself no longer and while we were at
dinner I burst out with, “Oh, you don’t know that you are going to get
a silver watch to-morrow!”
All children are, doubtless, like that. A secret is to them an
unbearable burden. When the time comes that they must keep some matters
secret from their parents because an inexplicable shyness makes them
ashamed to talk everything over with them freely, they change their
attitude towards their parents and seek out a companion of their own
age, some friend with whom they can discuss their secret.
Adults are really as little capable of going about with a secret as
children are. It tortures and oppresses them like a heavy burden; and
they are happy to rid themselves of it one way or another. If they
cannot speak of it openly and frankly then they do so in some hidden,
secret, or symbolic way. I could cite numerous illustrations of this
but shall content myself with only one. A woman who had committed the
unpardonable sin became troubled with a remarkable compulsive action.
She was continually washing her hands. Why? Because she was dominated
by the feeling that she was dirty, that she had become unclean. She
could not tell any one in the world what she had done; she would have
loved to say to her husband and to the whole household: “Do not
touch me! I am impure, unclean, an outcast!” She had found a means
of making this confession, but she did so in a form which only the
expert can understand. At every appropriate and inappropriate occasion
she washed her hands. If she was asked why she washed her hands she
answered, “Because they are not clean.” Such symbolic actions are
extremely common and constitute a kind of “speech without words” (to
use Kleinpaul’s apt words). But a symbolic action is nothing but a
substitution, a compromise between antagonistic psychic currents. It
bears, however, no comparison with the freeing effect of pouring one’s
heart out in words to a person, a confidant one can trust.
We know from the statements of convicts that nothing is so hard to bear
in prison as the impossibility of “getting things off their chest.”
And why is it that when touring foreign countries we so readily make
friends with our townspeople whom we happen to meet, though at home we
are quite indifferent to them? Because they furnish the opportunity for
a good talk, because to a certain extent they become receptacles into
which we may empty our soul’s accumulations. The profound yearning that
we all harbour for friendship, for a sympathetic soul, emanates from
the imperative need for pouring our hearts out. By means of a good
talk of this sort, we “abreact,” or throw off a part of our pent-up
excitement. Children are much more fortunate than we in this regard.
How easily they find a friend! The first-best playfellow becomes a
friend and confidant within half an hour. But for us grown-ups the
matter is much more difficult. Before we can take any one into our
confidence, take him to our bosom, he must satisfy certain social and
ethical requirements. But in reality we disclose only the surface and
retain our most oppressive secrets deep down at the bottom of the soul
unless a sudden storm of passion overcomes us; then the sluice-gates
burst open and the dammed up waters pour out in turgid torrents,
carrying everything before them.
The tremendous power of the Roman Catholic Church is even to-day due
to the fact that it enables its members to confess their most secret
sufferings from time to time and to be absolved. Dr. Muthmann calls
attention to the fact that suicides are most frequent in Protestant
countries, and least frequent among Roman-Catholic peoples, and
he thinks that this is to be attributed to the influence of the
confessional, one of the greatest blessings for numberless people.
The psycho-analytic method of treating nervous diseases has not only
made the incalculable benefit of confession its own but has united
with it the individual’s spiritual education inasmuch as it teaches
him how to know himself and to turn his eyes into the darkest depths
of his soul. But there is also a kind of speaking out that is almost
equivalent to confession--self-communion. That is, one’s communings
with oneself. For, as Grillparzer says, every heart has its secrets
that it anxiously hides even from itself. Not all of us know how to
detect such secrets. The poet has this gift. As Ibsen beautifully says:
“To live is to master the dark forces within us; to write is to sit in
judgment on ourselves.” But only a poet is able to sit in judgment on
his own soul. Not every person has the capacity for self-communion.
Most of the diseases of the soul depend upon the peculiar mechanism
that Freud has called “repression.” This “repression” is a
semi-forgetting of displeasing impressions and ideas. But only a
half-forgetting. For a part of the repressed idea establishes itself in
some disguised form as a symptom or as some form of nervous disease.
In these cases the psychotherapeutist must apply his art and teach the
invalid to know himself.
Goethe knew the value of confession. He reports that he once cured
a Lady Herder by confession. On September 25th, 1811, he wrote to
Mrs. Stein: “Last night I wrought a truly remarkable miracle. Lady
Herder was still in a hypochondriacal mood in consequence of the
unpleasantnesses she had experienced in Carlsbad, especially at the
hands of her family. I had her confess and tell me everything, her
own shortcomings as well as that of the others, in all their minutest
details and consequences, and at last I absolved her and jestingly
made her understand that by this ritual these things had now been
disposed of and cast into the deeps of the sea. Thereupon she became
merry and is really cured.” Here we have the basic principles of modern
psychotherapy. Unconsciously, by virtue of the hidden power of his
genius, the poet accomplished what modern therapeutists also attempt.
Nietzsche, too, fully understood the value of confession. We are
accustomed at once to associate with Nietzsche the concept of the
Antichrist. That he has accurately conceived the essence of the true
priest he shows in his description of the priestly temper in his book,
“The Joyful Wisdom.” He says, “the people honour a wholly different
kind of man, ... They are the mild, earnest, simple, and modest
priestly natures ... before whom one may pour out one’s heart with
impunity, upon whom one may unload one’s secrets, one’s worries, and
what’s even worse.” (The man who shares himself with another frees
himself from himself; and one who has acknowledged, forgets.)
It would be impossible to state the value of confession more
beautifully and more clearly. It will not be long ere this view which
knocks commandingly at the door of science and which has already been
productive of good will be generally accepted. It will not be long ere
it will furnish us a deep insight into the genesis of the “endogenetic
mental diseases,” excepting, of course, those “exogenetic” maladies
that follow some of the infectious diseases. We shall look upon the
“endogenetic” diseases, even delusions, as a disturbance of the psychic
circulation, and it will be our task to ascertain the causes that bring
these maladies about.
There are numbers of substitutes which are equivalent to a kind of
confessing to oneself. These are art, reading of newspapers, music,
literature, and, least but not last, the theatre. The ultimate effect
of a dramatic presentation depends, in reality, upon the liberation
in us of affects that have been a long time pent up within us. It is
not without good reason that humanity throngs to witness tragic plays
during the performance of which it can cry to its heart’s content. When
the spectators are apparently shedding tears over the unhappy fate of a
character on the stage they are really crying over their own pain. And
the woman who laughs so heartily at the awkward clumsiness of a clown,
that the tears run down her cheeks, is perhaps laughing at her husband,
who, though she will not acknowledge it, appears to her just as stupid
and clumsy; she is thereby excusing to herself her own sins which she
has possibly committed only in fantasy. The theatre serves as a kind
of confessional; it liberates inhibitions; awakens many memories,
consoles, and perhaps renews in us hopes of secret possibilities as to
whose fulfillment we have long since despaired.
We have become accustomed of late to suspect sex-motives behind
friendship. Even if we accept the theory that these motives are
present, but hidden in the unconscious, it is a far from adequate
explanation for the longing for friendship. The unconscious sex-motive
unquestionably co-operates in a significant measure in the choice of
a friend. It may be the determining factor in what we call sympathy
and antipathy, although it would have to be proved with regard to the
latter, and the theme is deserving of separate consideration, for it is
quite possible that our antipathies are only reactions to an excessive
attraction and therefore are evidence of repression. Looked at from
this point of view, sympathy and antipathy are one feeling, one affect,
having in the former case a positive sign and in the latter a negative
sign. This secret tendency may be the deciding factor in the choice of
a friend. But the need for a friend surely is in direct relation to the
need for confession.
It is customary to ridicule the Germans’ passion for forming clubs, and
societies of all kinds. But do these founders of fraternal associations
seek for anything but an opportunity to fraternise, to have a good
talk, something from which they are barred at home? The innumerable
speeches that are delivered during the course of a year, and which
are being poured out every second in an endless stream in some house
at some meeting are apparently being spoken only for the benefit of
the auditors. But every speech is a kind of relief to the speaker’s
“I,” and people who have the craving to speak before the whole world
are very often the keepers of a great secret which they must conceal
from the world and which they are imparting in this indirect way in
homœopathic doses. Just as a dye that is dissolved in a large quantity
of fluid is so completely lost that the naked eye can detect no trace
of it, so do occasional particles of the great secret which must
forever remain hidden find their way into the elocutionary torrent.
LAZINESS
There are commonplace maxims which people go on repeating
thoughtlessly, and in the light of which they determine their conduct
without once stopping to consider whether the assumed truth, looked
at in the light of reason, may not turn out to be a lie. We know,
of course, that there are many “truths” which may under certain
circumstances prove to be falsehoods. Everything is in a state of flux!
Truth and falsehood are wave crests and wave troughs, an endless stream
driving the mills of humanity.
Such notorious maxims as the following are trumpeted into our ears
from the days of our youth: “Work makes life sweet”; “Satan finds
some mischief still for idle hands to do”; “the life of man is
three-score-and-ten, and if it has been a happy one it is due to work
and striving.” These truisms are beaten into us, drummed into us, and
hammered into us from all sides; we hear them wherever we go, till
finally we accept them, completely convinced.
And it is well that it is so. What would the world look like if
everybody pressed his claim to laziness? Think of the hideous chaos
that would ensue if the wheels of industry came to a stop!
The admonition to work has its origin in humanity’s instinct of
self-preservation. It does not spring from one’s own needs but only
from the needs of others. Apparently we all work for ourselves, but in
reality we are always working for others. How very small is the number
of those who do their work gladly and cheerfully! How very many give
vent to their aversion to work by means of apparent dissatisfaction
with their calling! And where can we find a man nowadays who is
contented with his calling?
Let us begin our study of man with that period of his life in which
he was not ashamed to show his impulses to the light of day, in
which repression and education had not yet exerted their restraining
influences,--in other words, let us begin with the observation of
childhood. With astonishment we note, first, that the child’s impulse
to idleness is stronger than the impulse to work. Play is for a long
time the child’s idleness as well as its work. A gymnast who proudly
swings the heaviest dumb-bells before his colleagues would vent
himself in curses, deep if not loud, if he had to do this as work; the
heavy-laden tourist who pants his way up steep mountain paths would
curse his very existence if he had to travel these difficult trails in
the service of mankind in the capacity of--let us say--letter-carrier;
the card player who works in the sweat of his brow for hours in the
stuffy café to make his thousand or ten thousand points would complain
bitterly at his hard lot and at the cruelty of his employers if he had
to do an equivalent amount of work in the office. Anything that does
not bear the stamp of work becomes in the play-form recreation and a
release from almost unbearable tyranny.
The child’s world is play. Unwillingly and only on compulsion does it
perform imposed tasks. (It would have even its education made a kind of
play.) Many parents worry about this and complain that their children
take no pleasure in work, seem to have no sense of duty, forget to do
their school work, and have to be forced to do their exercises. Stupid
parents! If they only stopped to think they would realise that this
frank display of an impulse to laziness is a sign of their children’s
sanity. For we often enough observe the opposite phenomenon. Children
who take their duties too seriously, who wake too early in the morning
lest they should be late for school, who are always poring over their
books, scorning every opportunity to play, are usually “nervous”
children. Exaggerated diligence is one of the first symptoms of
neurosis.
One who can look back upon his own childhood must admit that the
impulse to indolence is stronger than any other childhood impulse.
I recall how unwillingly I went to high-school. Once I read in a
newspaper that a high-school had burned to the ground and that the
pupils would not be able to go to school for several weeks. For days I
and my friends were disappointed as we looked at our own grey school
building that stood there safe and sound. Had it not burned down yet?!
Were we not to have any luck at all?!
Who is not acquainted with the little sadistic traits that almost all
children openly manifest? Such a sadistic motive was our secret hope
that this or that teacher would get sick and we would be excused from
attendance at school. What a joy once possessed the whole class when
we discovered that the Latin teacher was sick just on the day when we
should have had to recite in his subject! That was a grand prize!
And how the child detests always being driven to work! Always the same
disagreeable questions: “Have you no lessons to do to-day?” “Have you
done all your lessons?” The profoundest wish of all who do not yet have
to provide for themselves is once to get a chance to be as lazy as
their hearts might desire.
But we adults, too, who know the pleasure of work and of fulfilled
obligations, long for idleness. For us, too, the vice of laziness is an
exquisite pleasure. We find it necessary continually to overcome the
tendency to laziness by new little resolutions. In the morning laziness
whispers; stay a little longer in your warm bed; it’s so comfortable.
Another few seconds and the sense of duty prevails over the desire for
idleness. In the afternoon we would love to spend an hour in pleasant
day-dreams. Work conquers this wish too. And with what difficulty
we get out of the performance of some task in the evening! It is an
everlasting conflict even though it is in most cases a subconscious
conflict with the sweet seducer of mankind: laziness.
That is why the lawgivers have ordained days on which the urge for
laziness may be gratified. These are called holidays. Religion has made
of this right to laziness a duty to God. The more holidays a religion
has, the more welcome must it appear to labouring humanity. That is
why the various religious systems so readily take over one another’s
holidays. The Catholic Church appropriated ancient heathenish feasts,
and Jews bow to the Sunday’s authority just as the Christian does.
Persons who suppress the inclination to laziness get sick. Their nerves
fail soon and their capacity for work suffers serious diminution. And
then we say that they had overworked. Not at all infrequently illness
is only a refuge in idleness, a defence against a hypertrophied impulse
to work. This is frequently observable in persons afflicted with
nervousness. They are unfit for work, waste themselves away in endless
gloomy broodings, in bitter self-reproaches, and in hypochondriacal
fears. They do not tire of repeatedly protesting how happy they would
be if they could get back to work again. But if their unconscious
mental life is analyzed one discovers with astonishment that the
greatest resistance to a cure is offered by their laziness, the fear
of work. This is one of the greatest dangers for the nervous patient.
If a neurotic has once tasted of the sweets of laziness it is a very
difficult matter to get him to work again. All the varieties of fatigue
“cramps” known to neurologists, _e.g._, writer’s cramp, pianist’s
cramp, violinist’s cramp, typewriter’s cramp, etc., are rebellions on
the part of the tendency to laziness. A return to work is possible only
if, in the absence of an actual organic malady, the psychic element we
have called “refuge in disease” (q.v.) is taken into consideration and
given due weight.