mood from _dur_ into _moll_. And the truth dawns on me that all our
“incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a
secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things
are not in order. Their consciousness is split up into numerous
emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state
within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too
tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask,
but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons
have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible
puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence
of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and
“sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe;
commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon
“nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook,
their employment, and what not.
In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and
anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in
a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up
courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly
proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!”
But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again
because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics
of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we
must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of
understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of our
excited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey
man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into
grey shadows and disappears for ever.
Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between
unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of
life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain
partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether
this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not
seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it.
Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of
broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until
they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface,
so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise
to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a
floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on
high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the
split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in
motion.
But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life.
A woman is suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible
depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can
desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor
seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance. Now she lives
in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of
servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes
her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest
affection--in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her
associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days
on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her
husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does
love her husband, she is as happy with her finery and wealth as a child
with a toy; she can assign no cause for her melancholy.
Notwithstanding this, her depression was of psychic origin. When we
investigated carefully the experiences and excitements that ushered
in one of these attacks it became clear that subterranean bridges led
to secret (suppressed) desires. Quite often the immediate occasion
was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor woman pass her in the
street. Alone? No--with a young man, very happy, care-free, their arms
affectionately intertwined. On another occasion she had been reading
of a pair of lovers who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a subject,
beyond all others, which she could not bear to hear. At the theatre she
once sat in a box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked down into the
orchestra and was seized with horror. That was a yawning abyss! What if
her opera glass fell down there! Or if she lost her balance and toppled
over! A shudder passed through her. She put the opera glass aside and
became greatly depressed.
The mystery surrounding her melancholy was soon solved. Her husband,
fifteen years her senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally. In
secret she longs for a life rich in emotions, full of sin and perhaps
also of vice. Nature probably intended her for a fast woman, not for
an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies beckon her to the
metropolis. She would rather lose her breath in an endless dance in the
tight embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately down the main
avenue. She loves her husband, but sometimes she hates him. He’s the
obstacle. She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was very sick once;
just then the wicked thought entered her mind: “If he died now I’d be
rich and free!” The reaction was not long in coming. She saw herself as
a dreadful sinner. Life had no more interest for her. Since then she
has been suffering from periodical attacks of depression.
What happened in this case in the wake of powerful repressions happens
a little in all moody persons. An unconscious motive for the depression
can always be demonstrated. In most instances it is secret reproaches
that provoke the change in mood. In young people they are the sequel
of exaggerated warnings about not injuring their health. Sins against
religion and morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding to one’s
impulses. But also the opposite! Many an attack of depression is
nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.
A girl suffers from violent (psychically), apparently wholly unmotived
crying spells. The last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether
she had excited herself in some way. Had she any reason for being
depressed? No! Was she sure? A trifling matter--“of no particular
significance”--occurs to her. On one of the city bridges a very
elegant, young gentleman had addressed her. Would she permit him to
accompany her? Indignantly she repelled him. What did he think she
was! But he persisted in his role; he painted in glowing colours
the delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found the courage to
exclaim: “If you do not leave me at once, I shall call a policeman!”
Then, flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed home, ate her meal
in silence and soon thereafter gave vent to an almost unending crying
spell.
And now I discover that her first attack of crying followed a similar
occurrence. She was coming home from the country and had to travel at
night. She asked the conductor to point out the ladies’ coupé. To her
horror a tall, blonde lieutenant entered her coupé at the next station.
She at once protested vigorously at the intrusion. The officer very
politely offered his apologies, explaining that the train was full and
that he would be quite satisfied with a modest corner. He would be
greatly obliged to her for her kindness. But so anxious was she about
her virtue that she was proof against his entreaties. She appealed to
the conductor and insisted on her rights. The spruce officer had to
leave the coupé and for the rest of the night she was not molested. But
the occurrence had so excited her that she could not fall asleep and
she lay awake till dawn. The following day she had the first attack of
depression and crying. She bewailed her cruel fate that compelled her
to be virtuous while all the hidden voices within clamoured for a gay
life. She did not find herself strong enough to conquer her ethical
inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not strong enough to be really
virtuous.
I could cite many such examples. They all show convincingly that there
are no “inexplicable” psychic depressions, that consciousness does not
embrace all the psychic forces that govern and direct us.
The classification of human beings into those that are free and
those that are not was determined by a social or ethical canon. But
in reality most human beings are the slaves of their unconscious
complexes. Only he can be free who knows himself thoroughly, who has
dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of the unconscious.
Most persons are under the yoke of their “other self” who, with his
biting whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures, compels them to
leave the table of life and goads them into the arms of crime.
The greatest happiness in life is to have achieved one’s inner freedom.
This thought is still expressed in an old aphorism. “Everyone may have
his moods; but his moods must not have him.”
Moody persons are the slaves of their past, masters of renunciation
and assuredly bunglers in the art of life. Their only salvation is in
learning the truth or in the art of transforming their depression into
works of art. Most of the time they glide through life’s turbulence
like dreamers. Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes about
that life’s call is perceived but faintly by them. They are chasing
butterflies in cemeteries....
OVERVALUED IDEAS
Ideas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according
to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and
dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once
sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a
thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin.
One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are
highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they
promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes
a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently
worthless piece of paper....
There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different
ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much
ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with
the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority
and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith
to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns
altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses,
the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto
neglected or even unknown idea and cause it to be generally accepted or
to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation
to topple from their thrones?
Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which
beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas.
Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed
ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius
and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the
“overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy
moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant
brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom
to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form
of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which
the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis.
A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor
logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems
of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously.
Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart.
Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long
after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in
gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very
simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are
indifferent and have no emphasis. Coloured ideas are richly endowed
with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.
As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The
instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from
above, and between them--owing to stimuli from within and without--the
sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to
the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top
and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom.
This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of
modern psychotherapeutists.
This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious
lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our
various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has
repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a
powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.
A very old example--if one may so call it--of physiological insanity
is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has
taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is
a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.”
But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being
in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled
precisely to define the conception of an overvalued idea. Like an
example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally
acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our
friends, etc.
But as regards being in love it is quite a different matter. As to
this the environment does not accept the exaggerated valuation of
the emotions. Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing with one
who is in love about common sense, religion, education, station, or
politics will not affect him in the least. He is dominated solely by
the love-complex. This alone determines the resonance of his thoughts
and feelings. The attraction to the chosen object has attracted all
the other affects to it, has placed all the impulses at the service of
one overvalued idea. He loves life but only if he be together with his
beloved; he is jealous, but only with reference to the love-object;
he is interested only in such matters as are in some way related to
that object. The fool who is being dominated by an overvalued idea
acts exactly in the same way. The lunatic who imagines himself the
king of the world, and in whom a childhood wish had overpoweringly
established itself as a fact in his consciousness, has interest only
for such things as find access to this wish; the victim of ideas
of persecution discovers in the news items of the daily papers the
important communication that his enemies are laying traps for him;
the unfortunate love-sick youth who imagines that Princess X wants to
give him her hand in marriage sees in all sorts of advertisements of
love-hungry ladies secret communications from his princess.
These poor fools bring everything they see and everything they feel
into relationship with the overvalued idea which, projected outward in
the shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears like a spiritual
echo and blinds their eyes like a vision.
A lover acts essentially like this. That is why the world says of a
person in love that he makes himself ridiculous. A handkerchief or a
glove, or anything belonging to the beloved, becomes a fetich which can
evoke the most ecstatic emotions. Anything that can be associated with
love is overvalued.
Another question involuntarily presents itself. Is love, in the form
known as “being in love,” the only overvalued idea with which a normal
person may be afflicted? Are there any other forms of “physiological
insanity”--if we may use the term coined by Lower and subsequently
imitated by Moebius?
The answer to these questions is not difficult. A backward look
teaches us what unspeakable evils overvalued ideas have wrought in
man’s history. For overvalued ideas are sources of great danger. They
are richly endowed with emotions and consequently lend themselves to
suggestion more readily than almost any other idea. Bleuler has proved
that suggestion is nothing but the transference of an emotion. And such
overvalued ideas can be hurled with great suggestive force among the
multitude and change the individual--and even whole communities--into
a fool. That is how the psychoses of whole nations have arisen. The
tremendous power of overvalued ideas can be understood if one thinks of
the crusades, the witchcraft persecutions, hysterical epidemics, the
Dreyfus affair, anarchism, etc.
It is a sad fact that none of us can be free from overvalued ideas.
In this sense there is really no difference between fools and healthy
persons. Everyone of us bears within himself a hidden quantity of
neurosis and psychosis. What saves us from the insane asylum is perhaps
only the circumstance that we hide our overvalued ideas or that so many
persons share our folly and that the multitude accepts it as wisdom.
There are innumerable aphorisms, the crystallised precipitations of
thousands of years, experience, that express this truth. “Every man has
his little crack, his dross and his sliver.” (In the German saying the
overvalued idea is compared to a splinter in the brain. An excellent
metaphor!) “If you see a fool take hold of your own ears.” “You cannot
name a wise man who was not guilty of some folly.” (The reader will
find ample material on this subject in Dr. Moenkenmöller’s book on
‘mental disease and mental weakness in satire, proverb, and humour,’
published in 1907.) In other words: We all suffer from a false and
subjective valuation of our ideas. We all drag overvalued ideas about
with us.
It is the dream of all great minds to revise these overvalued ideas.
Nietzsche’s life work was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so
engaged, he himself became the victim of an overvalued idea, and his
superman will forever remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of
Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas then only could we do
full justice to his rhapsodies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” For in no
other sphere is there such luxuriance of overvalued ideas as in the
ethical. All progress has been brought about by the suppression of the
natural impulses. All our education, using the word in its true sense,
consists in investing our instincts and impulses with don’ts. The sum
total of these inhibitions we call morality. Progress consists in
getting pleasure out of the inhibition, in converting the displeasure
of being inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for this goal
results in a kind of ethical burdening. One who has had the opportunity
to study neurotics will be amazed at the many agonizing conscious pangs
they suffer from owing to their ignorance of man’s true nature. These
times pant under the burden of morality as an overvalued idea. They
are in danger of asphyxiating under the ethical burden. A false and
hypocritical morality, by disseminating an unhealthy conception of our
dispositions (instincts), has turned our views on what constitutes sin
topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too evident. On the one hand,
we behold, as evidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities,
pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate jokes, which forcibly
intrude into life and art; on the other hand, as the natural reaction
to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and pseudo-scientific sexual
literature. And all because morality became a ruinously overvalued
idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Morality will always remain
the goal of noble souls, but only that kind of morality which
harmonizes with man’s nature. Where morality does violence to nature
it becomes natural, and brings about not ethical freedom but ethical
burdening.
But morality is not the only overvalued idea that turns the half of
mankind into fools. If we survey the chaos of modern social life we
shall easily find everywhere evidences of the endless disputes and
irritating conflicts caused by overvalued ideas. Scientists may prove
that the theory of races is no longer tenable, that the asserted
purity of races is a fable, etc. Notwithstanding all that, the German
Workurka and the Czech rustic are always at each other’s throats. Why
cite other examples? In racial, religious, national, and other discords
it is always an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious evolution
impossible. Verily, the whole world is an insane asylum because the
essential factor in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air
like infectious psychic germs.
Will the world ever be better? From a survey of the past we are
justified only in being coldly sceptical and discouragingly dubious.
A conflict of ideas will continue as long as there are dissensions
between human beings. Ideas to wage a war for existence. A few survive
longer than others, are highly esteemed till their course is run and
are discovered to have been overvalued. But as long as they have the
mastery they change credulous men into foolish children.
From this endless round there is no escape. And folly and wisdom lead
the never-ending dance until the dark, wide open gates of the future
swallow them.
AFFECTIONATE PARENTS
The last few years the child has become the centre of interest.
Funny as it may sound, it may almost be asserted that we had just
rediscovered the child. Congresses are held, artists devote their
talents to portraying the life of the child, expositions acquaint
us with the many aspects of the advances that have been made in the
new knowledge. Is it any wonder then that we have suddenly been made
acquainted with the abuses of children? That we have shudderingly
learned that there are children who are tortured by their own mothers?
There were loud cries of horror. The fountain of humanity became a
broad stream which must drive the mills of a new social organization in
the interests of the defenceless child. Who would withhold his approval
of this movement? Who would oppose it? For truly there is no sadder
spectacle than a child tortured to death by its own parents. The whole
instinct for race preservation cries out against it....
But this theme may also be regarded from another angle, and I purpose
showing from the point of view of the physician and the pedagog that
the reverse of abuse, viz., excessive affection, has a dark side,
that it, too, is capable of ruining a child’s life and condemning an
innocent being to lifelong suffering.
At a private gathering of physicians not long ago the subject of
the last congress for the protection of children was discussed from
its more serious as well as lighter aspects. A Viennese neurologist
ventured the following remark: “I regard it as a great misfortune
if a woman’s affection for her husband is expended upon her child.
A misfortune for humanity, for, in this way, the number of nervous
persons will be incalculably increased.”
One is strongly inclined at first energetically to attack this opinion.
What! A tender, affectionate bringing up will make a child neurotic?
Who can prove that a happy childhood results in an unhappy life? Shall
parents be afraid to show their children love? To hug them, kiss them,
pet them? Is not nervousness rather the sequel to draconic sternness,
tyrannical compulsion?
Nonsense! Nonsense! I shall attempt to answer these obtrusive
questions seriatim.
But, first, one remarkable fact has to be postulated. Parents are
really becoming more and more affectionate from year to year. Such
fanatically affectionate parents as are quite common now were formerly
the exception. To-day the parents’ thoughts all centre around the
child: How to feed it, bring it up, dress it hygienically, harden it,
how to instruct it in sexual matters.... A flood of books and magazines
scarcely suffices to meet the tremendous concern about these matters.
Can this emanate solely from the fact that the pressing movement for
emancipation of woman has displaced the woman’s interest from the man
to the child? I think that herein the neurologist is in error. That
cannot possibly be the sole cause.
The cause for the hypertrophied love of the child is adduced from
the consideration of those cases which even in former times offered
instances of an exaggerated parental affection amounting to doting
love. The over-indulged child was almost invariably an only child whom
popular speech designates a “trembling joy.”