terrible it would be if he were so disabled that he could no longer
provide for his family and if he had to go through life that way,
suffering all the time, and half the time unable to work! How much
better it would be if he were dead or wholly disabled. His attorney
informs him that his annual earnings equal the interest on 80,000
francs, and that he could bring an action for that amount--a sum which
would insure his family against want for the rest of their lives.
Are there not indications enough that he will need this sum? Isn’t
it a fact that he is already suffering from insomnia? Work fatigues
him--his head aches--railway journeys make him apprehensive and even
cause attacks of anxiety; how helpful it would be, nay, how absolutely
necessary it would be, to prove that he is very sick and to get
that 80,000 francs! And now the traumatic neurosis or psychosis is
established, and will in all probability not be curable until the
lawsuit is satisfactorily settled.” Bleuler does not mince matters
but roundly asserts that in this case the wish caused the neurosis.
Would it be proper to call these people malingerers? By no means! For,
naturally, all these wishes are not clearly known to these individuals;
they suffer in good faith. The wish emanates from unconscious levels.
Consciousness vehemently resents any imputation of the thought of
simulation. Such invalids usually protest vehemently their desire to
be well. “How happy would I be if only I had my health! Then I would
gladly dispense with damages!”
Here I should like to report two cases from my own experience which
serve to illustrate the refuge in disease even better than the case
described by the distinguished Swiss psychiatrist. The first was a very
sick woman who had been bed-ridden for six years. No organic malady
could be discovered. The diagnosis was hysteria. The deeper cause of
her malady was as follows: Her husband was a coarse, brutal fellow,
continually upbraiding her for something or other and raising fearful
rows; but when she was sick his whole nature underwent a change. Then
he became amiable, affectionate and attentive. As soon as she was
well he became the old, unendurable, domestic tyrant. Finally, there
was nothing for this delicate, weak woman to do but to take refuge in
disease. Her limbs used to tremble and refuse their function, so that
she had to stay in bed or be rolled about in an invalid chair. All the
skill of her physicians--and she had the best the metropolis had to
offer--proved unavailing. Naturally the cure of such a case is hardly
possible unless one can remove the cause for the refuge in disease. In
this case this solution was out of the question, and so the woman goes
on enjoying the blessed fruits of her invalidism, complainingly but
not unhappily, exulting within, but miserable without.
Our everyday life furnishes numerous petty examples of refuge in
disease: the nervous wife who breaks out in a hysterical crying spell
if her husband reproaches her; the schoolboy who complains of headache
when he cannot get his lessons done; the husband who gets pains in
the stomach every time his wife makes life unbearable;--they all take
refuge in disease as a means of escape from their persecutor. How often
is this phenomenon observed among soldiers, for whom a few days of
illness means the most delightful change! In these cases even the most
experienced military physicians often find it impossible to distinguish
between wish and reality.
A physician who does not know of the phenomenon we have designated as
“refuge in disease” will be helpless in the handling of most cases of
hysteria. A blooming young girl had for two years consulted specialists
of the highest repute about the raging headaches with which she was
afflicted. All the usual remedies, such as antipyrin, phenacetin,
pyramidon, and even morphine, failed to give her even slight temporary
relief. The experts thought of a tumor in the brain and of other
dangerous maladies as the possible cause of these obstinate headaches.
But it turned out that this headache, too, was only a refuge in
disease. A casual remark of the father’s betrayed the true nature of
the trouble: “My daughter is about to be married; she has been engaged
for two years, and the young man is anxiously waiting for the wedding;
but I can’t let her marry while she is suffering from such a severe
disease.”
The headache was obviously the means of getting out of a hateful
marriage. Of course one who would have been content with her first
story would never have discovered the truth. What stories she told
about her wonderful love! How ardently she loved her betrothed! There
was nothing she longed for more than the wedding-day! How unhappy she
would be if she lost him! But a careful psychoanalysis brought forth
ample and convincing confirmation of the above-mentioned suspicion.
The girl had been engaged once before; in fact she had not yet
completely broken off her relations with her former lover. In addition
thereto there were confessions about the death of all erotic feelings
during the second engagement, as to which we cannot go into details.
It was quite clear that her malady was a refuge in invalidism. I
advised breaking the engagement. The advice was not followed. On the
contrary, the family hoped that a speedy marriage might bring about a
cure of the hysterical condition. But the young woman is still going
about, complaining and whimpering, with her malady (from which her
husband, notwithstanding his inexhaustible patience, suffers more than
she). Will she ever be well? If she ever learns to love her husband
she may recover her health. But where such powerful, unconscious
counter-impulses, such powerful instincts, contend against an
inclination, it is scarcely possible that this inclination will develop
into full sovereignty of the soul.
What we have just said of the neurosis is also true of the delusions
of insanity. A delusion also is a fleeing from this world into another
one in which some particular overvalued idea represses all other ideas
and dominates the mind. It will not be long ere this conception will
be an accepted doctrine of all psychiatrists. For the time being it is
the common property of creative literary artists, who, because of their
intuitive insight into human nature, have frequently given expression
to this idea. It is perhaps most beautifully expressed by Georges
Rodenbach, the Flemish artist, unfortunately too early deceased, who
says in one of his fine posthumous novels (“Die Erfüllung,” Dresden,
1905):--
“The insane have nothing to complain of. Often they achieve their
purposes only in this way. They become what they have longed for and
what they would otherwise never have become. They obtain the coveted
goal and their plans are fulfilled. They live what once they dreamed.
Their delusion is, to all intents and purposes, their inner fruition,
inasmuch as it corresponds to their most ardent desires and their most
secret yearnings. Thus the ambitious one ascends in his delusions the
heights that have beckoned to him; he possesses endless treasures,
orders the destinies of great nations, and moves only among the great
rulers of the earth. Religious delusion brings its victim to the throne
of God and makes life in Paradise a tangible reality. So that delusion
always realises the goal that each has longed for. It gratifies our
desires to the utmost limit. Sympathetically it takes a hand in our
affairs and completes the altogether too pretentious destiny of those
upon whom fulfillment never smiles.”
What a beautiful idea! Delusion is a wish-fulfilment exactly as the
dream is. The madhouse is the paradise of thoughts, the heaven in which
wishes meet with unlimited fulfilment. And human beings sicken so
often, and madness increases with such uncanny rapidity, because our
most secret wishes are never gratified, because in these dull times the
miraculous has died, and because life demands so much renunciation and
yields so little happiness.
Let us draw these lessons from the foregoing remarks: to keep one’s
desires within bounds means to assure one’s spiritual health.
Inordinate ambition, which foolish parents kindle in their children’s
hearts, is often the cause of an early breakdown. We must school
ourselves and our children to wish only for the attainable and to
attain our desires. Our ideals must live in our breasts, not in the
outer world. Then we may find in ourselves what the world denies us.
They who can find refuge in their health will escape having to take
refuge in disease.
WHY WE TRAVEL
Why do we not know why we travel? Haven’t we the imperative obligation
to recuperate? Does not our malady enforce a trip to a health resort?
Are we not thirsty for new countries, new people, a new environment?
Peace! peace! No, we do not know! Or rather, we do not wish to know.
Naturally, we always have a few superficial motives at our disposal
when it suits us to mask our unconscious secrets from ourselves and
from the world. Why do we travel? Psychologists have given many
reasons, but they do not go beyond such superficial motives as “the
desire for a change,” “a craving for excitement,” “curiosity,”
“fatigue, the need for a rest,” “flight from the home,” etc. Some go
further and attribute the desire to travel to the elementary pleasure
of being in motion. For these psychologists the little child’s first
step is its first journey, the last step of the weary aged their last
journey. Others again veritably classify journeys and distinguish
between trips undertaken for health reasons, business trips, scientific
trips, etc.
Vain beginning! In reality one trip is like another. If we would
understand the elementary feelings associated with a trip we must go
back to our youth. In youth we still have a sense of the wonderful;
in youth the horizon of our fantasies is aglow with wondrous visions.
But of course the world about us is solemn and wearisome, full of
duties and obligations. But ah, the wide world without! There dangerous
adventures smile alluringly; there unrestrained freedom beckons; there
deeds may be achieved that may make kings of us. In our thoughts we
build a small skiff that will take us out of the narrow channel of
our homes into the vast sea; we battle on the prairie with the brave
and crafty Indians; we seek out the sun-burned gold-fields in the new
world; we put a hurried girdle round about the earth, and--when at top
speed--we would even attempt a flight to the moon.
Nothing that makes an impression on the human mind is ever lost. Our
youth with its fantasies and childish desires exerts an important
influence on us all our life. Henceforth all our excursions are
journeys into the realm of youth. All, all are alike. Life hems us
in with innumerable obstacles, bonds, and walls. The older we grow
the greater becomes the weight that loads us down. In the depths of
the soul the tintinnabulation of youth is ringing and speaking to
us of life and freedom, and keeps on ringing alluringly till weary
man surrenders and takes a trip. The tinkling music of the soul works
strongest on the mind of youth. He, fortunate he, knows not the
difference between the music of his heart and the hum of the world
without. He knows not yet that the world is everywhere the same, the
people everywhere the same, and the mountains, the lakes, the seas,
with but slight variations, the same. His longings carry him out, far
out, and he seeks their fulfilment.
The adult lives a life of bitter disappointments. He never seeks the
new. He longs only to get rid of the old. And the aged wanderer, having
reached the end of the vale of life, follows his buried wishes, his
memories of the beautiful days in which there was still something to
hope for, in which he was not beyond self-deception.
It is not to be denied that ours is _the_ travelling age. This is
partly due to the fact that we experience so little, as we have already
said, in our craving for excitement. The many inventions that have
conquered time and space have made it possible for us to fly over the
whole world, and thus the primary purpose of travelling, the hunger for
experience, shrinks into trivial, merry or vexatious hotel adventures.
But in every such trip one may discover a deeply hidden kernel of the
voyages of the old Vikings. Every journey is a tour of conquest. Here
at home we have found our level; our neighbours know us and have passed
their irrevocable judgment on our person. To travel means to conquer
the world anew, to make oneself respected and esteemed. Every new
touring acquaintance must stand for a new conquest. We display all our
talents for which we no longer have any use at home and all our almost
rusty intellectual weapons, our amiability, our courteousness, our
gallantry, are again taken out of the soul’s lumber chamber and put to
use in conquering new persons. This secret foolery compensates us for
all the plans of conquest that we have long ago given up. To conquer
persons without having to depend on one’s social background is one of
the greatest delights of travelling.
How strange! As in ordinary life we seek ourself and are overjoyed to
find ourself in our environment and get most out of the individual
who is most like ourself, so everywhere abroad we seek our own home.
How happy we are on beholding a familiar face even though it be that
of a person who has been ever so unsympathetic or indifferent. We are
delighted with him and greet him like a trusted friend--only because
he represents for us a fragment of our home which we have been seeking
out here and which we have found, to some extent, in him. That is why
such discoveries make us happiest as revealing identities with our
home. Even in this the infantile character of travelling is shown.
Just as in our youth we had to learn many things that we had to forget
subsequently so we act with regard to our journeys; every new city,
every new region is a kind of primer whose fundamentals we have to make
our own no matter how much it goes against our grain to do so. The
faithful visiting of all the objects of interest with our Baedeker in
our hands, the profound sense of an obligation to have seen so-and-so
is clearly such an infantile trait and has about it much of the
youthfulness and school-boyishness of the time in which the teacher’s
authority meant compelling knowledge to follow a set norm.
Much might be said about the technique of travelling. The manner in
which the thought springs from the unconscious, gently and with
tender longing, takes on more definite shape and apparently suddenly
breaks out during the night with the violence of a deed, presents
almost a neurotic picture, and one is justified, from this point of
view, in speaking of a “touring neurosis.” Every repression begets
a compulsive idea. The repression of the emotions of youth begets a
touring neurosis. The compulsion is strongest in the first few days
during which difficult internal conflicts have to be overcome. The
threads that bind us to our home, our vocation, and our beloved, must
first be wholly severed. This happens only after several days, after
the so-called “travel-reaction.” That is the name I would propose for
that unpleasant feeling that overcomes us after a few days. Suddenly
we feel lonesome and alone, curse the desire that prompted us to leave
our home, and play with the idea whether it would not be better to
terminate the trip and go back home. It is only when this reaction
has been overcome, when the conflict between the present and the past
has been decided in favour of the latter, only then has one acquired
the correct attitude to travelling, an attitude which depends upon a
complete forgetting of our social and individual obligations. It is,
for all the world, as if after this reaction we had suppressed all our
relations to our home and freed all our inhibitions. Only then can we
enjoy the pleasure of travelling, but, alas, it lasts only a short
time. For soon there rises before our eyes, like a threatening monster,
the time when we must again resume our obligations. The sense of duty
gets stronger and stronger, the desire for travelling gets weaker
and weaker, and after a short but decisive conflict, the fever for
travelling abates, leaving behind it a little heap of ashes in which
the feeble coals of memory gradually die.
It is a profound feeling of bliss that we feel at home, for down at
the bottom of the heart we have always been faithful to the home. We
see everything in the new colours with which our journey has beautified
the dull gray of daily life; alas! they are only temporary joys,
borrowed harmonies, which lose their intensity in the day’s progress
and are bound to return to their former dulness.
Particular mention must be made of the journeys of married couples.
These, too, are trips into the realm of youth, into the beautiful
country of the betrothal period, and thus every such trip is a new
honeymoon. The energies which had hitherto been devoted to the
discharge of their duties have now been freed and burst powerfully into
the amatory sphere; but they may also intensify components of aversion
and hatred, and are just as likely to emphasize antagonisms as, under
circumstances, they may build bridges over bottomless depths. Inasmuch
as _en tour_ thought and feeling are dominated by infantile traits, and
inasmuch as to a certain extent a new spring of love awakens with the
youthful fire and youthful tenderness, a journey may--just because of
these results--result in disappointments such as cannot otherwise be
brought to light in staid old age.
Let us also make mention of the opportunity a journey gives one of
living a purely physical existence, of enjoying the rare pleasure of
feeling oneself a creature of muscles, a thing all backbone and little
brain. Let us also mention the delight of feeling oneself a stranger,
of shaking off every irritating constraint, of being able to break with
impunity the rules of propriety and good breeding, and we have, in
comparison with all the really important psychological motives, touched
only a small part of the surface psychology of travelling.
And now I come to the really important point of my thesis. What I
have hitherto said is of general validity, applying to the generality
of travelling people. But I believe that every individual has also a
secret, deep-lying motive of which he himself is unaware and which one
rarely is in a position to discover. Now and then one may succeed in
discovering such a motive and one is then astonished at the strange
things that may be hidden behind the passion of travelling.
There are so many things that we seek all our life and that, alas! we
can never find. One is on the hunt for a friend who will “understand”
him; another for a beloved whom he can comprehend; the third for a
place where he may find the people he has dreamed of. Which of us
has not his secret, dark desires and longings which really belong
to “the other one” within us and not to the outer personage on whom
the sun shines? What is denied us by the environment may possibly be
found somewhere beyond. What withers here may bear luxuriant blossoms
somewhere beyond....
The deepest-lying, repressed desires are the driving power in the fever
for travelling. We are infected--infected by the seeds that have been
slumbering within us for years and which have now with mysterious power
engendered the ardour that drives us on to travel. Behind every journey
there lies a hidden motive. It will, of course, be a difficult matter
to discover in every case this deeply hidden motive, this innermost
spring of action. In some cases one succeeds, however, and lights
upon most remarkable things. One may hit upon some exciting touring
experience of earlier days, upon a strange fantasy, upon some sweet
wish that seems to be too grotesque to be spoken of openly. No one has
yet fathomed just what constitutes happiness. It is never the present,
always the future. A trip is a journey into the future, a hunting after
happiness.
The best light on the psychology of the “touring neurosis” is thrown by
a consideration of the opposite phenomenon--the “fear of travelling.”
There are many persons who are afraid of every journey, for whom
a railroad trip is a torture, for whom going away from home is a
punishment. There are persons who have compromised with the present
and have given up all hope of a future; who have no happiness to
lose and therefore have no wish to achieve any; who fear any great
change and who have become wrapped up in themselves. They are the
great panegyrists of home, the enthusiastic patriots, the contemners
of everything foreign. They behave exactly like the fox for whom the
grapes were too sour. Because their fears won’t let them travel they
prove to themselves and to the world at large that travelling is
nonsensical, that the city they live in is the best of all places to
live in. The fear of travelling also has a hidden motive which not
rarely is fortified by justifiable and unjustifiable consciousness of
guilt. Why we do not travel is often a much more interesting problem
than why we do travel.
Fear and desire are brother and sister and emanate from the same primal
depths. The wish often converts to fear and fear to wish. One who is
incapable in his heart to fly from himself and his environment bears
a heavy and unbreakable chain within his soul. So do we all. But we
break it now and then. The future may perhaps create free human beings.
Then there may perhaps be no abysms of the soul. Just at present
darkness surrounds us. The mysteries of the soul are barred to us.
Its depths are unfathomable. Even if we have illumined some hidden
corner and brought something that was long concealed to the light of
consciousness, it is only like a drop snatched from the infinity of the
ocean. The real reason why we travel can be told us only by our “other
self,” that “other one” whom we buried in our remote youth. Whither we
travel is quite clear. Large and small, young and old, fools and wise
men--all journey to the realm of youth. Life takes us into the kingdom
of dreams, and the dream takes us back again into life, into that
life to which we have been assigned and to which our deepmost desires
belong. What desires? Those are the secrets we anxiously conceal from
ourselves.
MOODY PERSONS
A beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry
noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to
imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly
there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly,
rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over
mounds after a gilded butterfly....
Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in
the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own
youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions
break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a
long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a
wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?
How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections
in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now
I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood
has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation
about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying
to catch a butterfly with his green net. Why did this scene excite me
so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which
I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the
emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.
Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of
comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my
distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My
heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain,
unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried
here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these
dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I
catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence
to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders
among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed
with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the
collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”