such “trembling joys.” “Neo-Malthusianism” has infected the whole
world. In consequence of the employment of innumerable and more or
less generally employed anti-conceptives the birth rate is steadily
declining. “Two-children families” is the rule, and families with
many children--especially among the well-to-do--the exception. Even
the vaunted fecundity of the Germans which is always being held up
as a model to the French will soon be a thing of the past. In former
decades 1,000 married women in Berlin gave birth to 220 children and
from 1873 to 1877 the number even rose to 231. Since then the birth
rate is declining from year to year, so that in 1907 1,000 women only
had 111 children. In other large cities matters are even worse than
in Berlin in this regard. But it would be decidedly wrong to infer
that there is a diminution in the number of marriages. In Prussia
the number of marriages from 1901 to 1904 was at the rate of 8 per
1,000, whereas in 1850 it was somewhat less, to wit: 7.8 per 1,000.
Sociologists have detected in this state of affairs a great danger for
the mental prospects of the race inasmuch as matters in this regard are
much better in the country and, consequently, they say, the progeny of
the farmer class will in a not remote period tremendously exceed the
intelligent descendants of urban people in number. The country will get
the best of the city and not vice versa. But we must not wander away
from our subject. Let us take this fact for granted: The “two-children
system” is the cause for the excessive parental affection we have
described. But wherein is this dangerous?
I shall not attempt here a detailed statement of the well-known
dangers. We all know that coddled children very often become helpless,
dependent persons, that they cannot find their place in life, and do
not seem to be armed against adversity. It seems superfluous to dwell
at greater length on this. Of greater significance is the phenomenon
that the exaggerated affection lavished on the child creates a
correspondingly large need for affection in it. A need for affection
that is tempestuous in its demand for gratification. As long as
these children are young so long is this demand fully satisfied. The
parents, and especially mothers, are so overjoyed at their children’s
manifestations of love that out of their overflowing hearts they
reward them by overwhelming them with caresses. Thus the measure of
affectionate demonstrations rises instead of gradually sinking. And now
the time comes for the child to go to school. And for the first time
in its life it stands in the presence of the will of a stranger who
demands neither petting nor love, only work done without grumbling. How
easily this situation gives rise to conflict! The child thinks it is
not loved by the teacher, it is terrified by a harsh word and begins to
cry. School becomes odious to it; it learns unwillingly. It asks for
another school and for other teachers. If its wish is gratified the
same thing is soon repeated.
Matters get much worse when these children grow up. They have an
unquenchable craving for caresses. From them are developed the women
who kill their husband’s love by their own immoderate love. Every day
they want to be told that their husbands still love them. Daily--nay,
hourly--they wish to be the recipients of sweets, loving words, private
pet names and kisses without number. The men, on the other hand,
who had been so coddled in their childhood, are only in the rarest
instances satisfied with their wives; sooner or later they seek to
compensate outside of the home for the insufficient affection shown by
the wife; or they transfer this requirement upon the children who thus
become seriously (though not congenitally) burdened. But even this is
not the worst.
The greatest dangers of excessive affection are known to only very
few persons. They consist in a premature excitation of the erotic
emotions. We are so prone to forget unpleasant experiences. Hence comes
it that most adults have no recollection of their own youthful erotic
experiences. Parents especially are very forgetful in this regard--so
much so that their forgetfulness amounts almost to a pathological
condition bordering on hysterical amnesia. Thence comes it that most
mothers will take an oath on their daughters’ innocence and fathers on
their sons’ purity. They talk themselves into the belief that their
children are exceptions, that they are incredibly simple, still believe
in the stork myth and other similar stupidities.
That the sexual enlightenment of the child is an important problem
and of far-reaching significance for its whole life is proved in
numberless books and essays dealing with the subject. We are told that
open scientific instruction should take the place of secret knowledge
obtained from turbid channels. Very fine! But the world must not
believe that the child’s first erotic knowledge is awakened as a result
of such instruction. That is a widespread superstition. The sexual life
of the child does not begin with puberty, the old books to the contrary
notwithstanding, but with the day of its birth.
On the occasion of a sad criminal trial in which children were charged
with being prostitutes, public opinion was horrified at the wickedness
of these poor creatures. And yet most of them were victims of their
environment. Does any one really believe that such occurrences are rare
exceptions? That is a myth. We talk ourselves into the belief that
the little child that is still unable to speak is not receptive to
erotic impressions. How do we know this? The brain of a child is like
a photographic plate that greedily catches impressions, independently
of whether they are intelligible or not, impressions whose influence
may be operative throughout its life. As we know, there is a large
group of investigators which traces all perverse manifestations of the
sexual impulses back to a fixation of the earliest erotic experience.
Erotic stimulation can subsequently be brought about only by way of
an association with this early impression. This explanation certainly
does seem to fit the curious phenomenon known as fetichism. In this way
children’s experiences influence their whole life. In sexual matters
human beings behave with incredible naïveté. They close their eyes and
will not see. Frank Wedekind is perfectly right in deriding a world
that has secrets even from itself. So infantile sexuality is a secret
which every intelligent person knows.
If parents only kept this in their mind’s eye! Then it would not happen
that children ten years of age and older would be permitted to sleep in
their parents’ bedrooms that the anxious father and mother might watch
over the gentlest breath of their precious darlings. These parents do
not want to consider the possibility that the children may in this
way receive impressions which may prove very injurious to them. Many
a case of obstinate insomnia in childhood or of nocturnal attacks
of apprehension is explained in this way. I have repeatedly cured
sleepless children by the simple remedy of ordering them to sleep in
separate bedrooms.
Let us assume then that all children are susceptible to erotic stimuli
and that such stimulation may harm them. For the later a person’s
conscious sexual life begins the greater the prospects of his becoming
a healthy, mentally well-balanced individual. Among the factors capable
of permanently arousing erotic emotions we must include excessive
affection. Between the affections of one who loves and of a mother
there are really no differences. Both kiss, caress, fondle, hug,
embrace, pet, etc. That the excitement is transmitted to the same
central organs is obvious.
In this way the child receives its first erotic sensations from its
nurse. Interpret it as we may the nurse, the attendant, the mother,
the father are the child’s first love, the first erotic love, as our
psychoanalysis has convincingly demonstrated. But this must not be
interpreted to mean that I wish to condemn the affectionate management
of children. On the contrary! A certain quantity of affection is,
as a matter of fact, essential to the normal development of the
individual. But the affection lavished on them must not be excessive.
For if it is the child will be prematurely brought into a condition of
erotic overstimulation. It grows older and begins to feel the power
of education. To restrain and curb the force of the natural impulses
powerful inhibitions are erected. As a reaction to the premature sexual
stimulation there begins a remarkable process which may be designated
as “sexual repression.” This repression may succeed so well that even
the child forgets its early experiences or the repression does not
succeed and the individual’s erotic requirements grow from year to
year. In the latter case there develops in the child a serious psychic
conflict between sexual longing and sexual renunciation and thus the
soil in which a neurosis may grow is prepared. Perhaps the conflict is
the neurosis.
We shall mention only in passing that such exaggerated affection begets
in many children the habit of securing for themselves a certain amount
of pleasurable sensations by way of certain auto-erotic actions. It
is not possible, nor necessary, to enter into a detailed discussion
of these matters here. For most people know that our experiences in
childhood influence our whole life. But it is a tragic commentary on
human strivings that excessive parental love may bring sickness upon
the child, that a happy present is replaced by an unhappy future, that
the roses a mother strews in her child’s path only later show their
thorns.
We cannot say it too often: We fuss too much with our children. There
is too much theory in this matter of bringing up children. We pay
too much attention to our children. Let us leave them their peaceful
childhood, their merry games, the wondrous product of their untiring
phantasy. Let us clearly realize that with our excessive affection we
give ourselves a great deal of pleasure but that at the same time we
are doing the children a great injury. Let no one discourage mothers
from being affectionate to their children, from expending loving
attentions on them, from making their youth as pleasant as possible.
But the parents’ affection should not expend itself mechanically. It
should be a uniformly warm fire that only warms, kindles no fire, and
bursts into a bright flame only on life’s great holidays.
WHY THEY QUARREL
When a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven
of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no
thunder-storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as self-evident,
but to myself I think: they are lying. When two friends assure me that
they have never quarrelled I think the same thing. I know that they
have not been telling the truth. That is, they are liars without
the consciousness of lying. They are firmly convinced that they
were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the
unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass
that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them,
and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that
had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the
utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. We do not quaff the
lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. No, we sip it daily, and
it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks
hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses.
There are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy
must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worth while
if it runs along smoothly. These are the everlastingly unsatisfied who
have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their
dreams. They project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon
all their daily experiences. That is why they so often appear to be
overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement
is incomprehensible to us. For it is a fact that they fly into rages
about trivial matters. But it is this very intensity of emotion that
shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will
ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper
source than appears on the surface.
It has struck many observers that the external provocation to
quarrelling is often very trivial. Of course we frequently hear a man
or his wife declare that they would gladly avoid a quarrel if it were
possible to do so. Either one says something that seems to be quite
innocent, and yet it will be the occasion for a heated altercation, a
great domestic scene with all its unpleasant consequences.
This is due to the fact that most persons do not distinguish between
cause and provocation. The provocation to a quarrel is easily found if
hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a deeper cause, acting as a
driving power, sets the wheels of passion in motion.
A somewhat careful investigation of every quarrel easily brings the
conviction that it is invariably the secret, unconscious emotions
that bring about the conflict of opinions. Where this deep resonance
of the unconscious is lacking we playfully pass over differences.
Unfortunately there are probably no two human beings whose souls
vibrate so harmoniously that there never occurs a discord. This
phenomenon is altogether too deeply rooted in human nature for an
exception ever to occur. And paradoxical as it may sound, it is lovers
who love each other most who cause each other the greatest pain. The
great intensity which their emotions attain is due only to the fact
they have repressed a series of experiences and feelings. They are
blind to the faults of the beloved because they do not wish to see
these faults. But the suppressed forces have not yet lost their power
over the soul. These bring about the quarrel, and are capable, even if
only for a few seconds, to transform love into hatred.
But a few practical examples will do more to make this subject clear
than all our theoretical explanations. Mr. N. S., a pious, upright man,
asserts that his present ailment dates from a quarrel that had been
frightfully upsetting him for months. He had inherited from his father
a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also succeeded him in
his position. One day his brother came to him and stormily demanded
the return of the books. But inasmuch as he was the older he felt
himself entitled to be the sole heir. A violent quarrel ensued, during
which he exclaimed: “I’ll die before I give up any of these books!”
After the quarrel he became very neurotic. He tortures himself with
self-reproaches; he is convinced that with that exclamation he had been
guilty of an act of impiety; he is very unhappy and finds no rest, no
peace, either at home or in his office.
Many persons may be satisfied with the superficial explanation offered
by the patient himself that he is an ardent bibliophile and collector
of ancient manuscripts. But the physician who treats sick souls must
not be so easily satisfied.
We know that every collector is an unconscious Don Juan who has
transferred his passion from an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. But
we also know that the passion with which the collected objects are
loved emanates from the erotic domain. And what did our psychoanalysis
of the above case bring out? Remarkably enough a rivalry between the
two brothers which went back all the way to their youth. The older
one had the privileges of the first-born and was a good-for-nothing.
The younger one was a pattern of what a child ought to be. From their
childhood they had been rivals for the affection of their parents, and
more especially of the mother. We encounter here the so-called “Oedipus
motive,” a son’s love for his mother--a motive whose instinctive
force and urge are still too imperfectly appreciated. The two had
been rivals, the older one being jealous of the parents’ preference
for the younger one, and the younger jealous of the older one’s
privileges. In this we have the first of the deeper motives for the
quarrel. Further investigation brought a second and a third motive to
light. The older had, very naturally, married first, and repeatedly
boasted in the presence of his younger and unmarried brother of his
wife’s charms and virtues. In fact, he had even led him into his wife’s
bedroom that he might see for himself what a treasure he possessed.
(You see the motives of such stories as “Gyges and his Ring” and “King
Candaules” occurring even nowadays.) At that moment a great passion
for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger brother’s breast. Here
we have then a second cause for dissension. But other factors are also
involved. Our pious young man married a beautiful woman and would
have been happy if he had not been the victim of a jealous passion.
Jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge of one’s inferiority.
He thought he noticed that his older brother was too devoted to his
wife. And during an excursion into the country they had been in the
woods a little too long, as he thought, and it occurred to him--and
here we have the fourth motive--to tempt his sister-in-law. He is a
Don Juan who runs after every petticoat and wants to drain life in
large draughts. N. S. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to turn his
sinful cravings to good account for the success of his business and to
bad account as far as his health was concerned. The brother whom he
despised openly he envied in secret. But we could mention still other
motives for their quarrel if Mrs. Grundy considerations did not bar the
way....
Unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many quarrels, one might almost
say behind most quarrels. We have already hinted that dissensions
between brothers or sisters are due to rivalry. But even in the
quarrels between parents and children we may frequently enough
demonstrate the identical undertone for the disharmony. The infant son
sees in his father a rival for the mother’s favour. The reverse also
occurs, though not so frequently. I was once the witness to a violent
quarrel between a father and his son. The father had, as it seemed to
me, not the slightest cause for grievance against the son, and yet
a little trifle led to a violent altercation that ended in a tragic
scene. At the height of the row the father screamed to his wife: “You
are to blame for it all! You robbed me of my son’s love!”
Naturally one would think that this lava stream belched forth in a
great burst of passion from a volcano would contain the truth in its
torrid current. And so it does, but in a disguised form. The true
reproach should have been directed at the son, and should have been:
“You have robbed me of my wife’s love!”
We see in this a “transference” of a painful emotion from one person
upon another. Such transferences or “displacements” are extremely
common in everyday life, and it is only with their aid that we can
account for the many domestic conflicts. A man will rarely admit that
he erred in the choice of a wife. The feeling of hatred that his wife
engenders in him he transfers upon others. Upon whom? The answer is
obvious. Upon her next of kin. Most frequently upon her mother, the
most immediate cause of her existence. This is the secret meaning of
the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing and inexhaustible and
perpetual theme for wits.
So that, for example, if we hear a young woman complain that she cannot
bear her husband’s family but that she loves him beyond bounds we may
with perfect safety translate this in the language of the unconscious
thus: “I would not care a rap about my husband’s family if I did not
have to love my husband.”
The rows with servants, well-known daily occurrences, become
intelligible only if we know the law of transference. An unfaithful
wife, who had been betrayed and deserted by her lover, suddenly
began to watch her servant girls suspiciously, and to strike them on
the slightest provocations. The woman had for years employed “help”
without having had more than the customary quarrels with them. After
a short sojourn with her husband the rage of the abandoned woman, who
would have loved to give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true
southern fashion, was transferred upon her servants. And exactly like
this the resentment of many a housewife is discharged through these
more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is brought about the
phenomenon so common in modern large cities which may be designated as
“servant-girl neurosis.”
Obviously the deeper motives slumber in the unconscious, and if
they ever become conscious they are looked upon as sinfulness
and bad temper. Freud has become the founder of a wholly new
psychology by virtue of his discovery of the laws of repression and
of transference--a psychology which will be indispensable to the
criminologist of the future. What is nowadays brought to light in our
halls of justice as the psychological bases for conflicts is generally
only superficial psychology.
This is strikingly illustrated by one of the saddest of legal
proceedings of last year. I mean the trial for murder in the
Murri-Boumartini case, in consequence of which an innocent victim--so I
am convinced--the Countess Linda Boumartini is languishing in prison.
Her brother Tullio, who had murdered his brother-in-law, was accused
of an illicit relationship with his sister, for otherwise the murder
would have been inexplicable. One who has carefully read Linda’s
memoirs and her letters, which are now before the public, as well as
the confessions of the imprisoned Tullio, will be sure to laugh at the
accusation, which unquestionably owed its origin to a clerical plot.
What may have really happened is that unconscious brotherly love which
deep down under consciousness in all likelihood takes its origin from
the sexual but whose flowers appear on the surface of consciousness as
the loftiest manifestations of ethical feeling. It was brotherly love,
the primal motive which Wagner immortalised in his “Valkyrie,” that
forced the dagger into Tullio Murri’s hand. He saw his sister suffer
and go to pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his brother-in-law.
What lay hidden behind his pure fraternal love may never have entered
his consciousness.
Oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blindness! What we see of the
motives of great conflicts is usually only the surface. Even in the
case of the little domestic quarrels, the irritating frictions of
everyday life, the vessel of knowledge sails only over the easily
excited ripples. But what gives these waters their black aspect
is the deep bed over which they lie. Down there, at the bottom of
the sea which represents our soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed
monsters--our instincts and desires--emanating from the beginnings
of man’s history. When they bestir their coarse bodies the sea too
trembles and is slightly set in motion. And we stupid human beings
think it is the surface wind that has begot the waves.
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE
It was getting late. The last guests had left the café. The waiters,
tired and sleepy, were prowling around our table with a peculiar
expression in their countenances which clearly challenged us to call
for our checks....
We took no notice of them. Or rather, we refused to take notice. The
sudden death of one of our dearest friends had aroused something
incomprehensible in us which made us very restless. We were speaking
about premonitions, and that peculiar intangible awe which one feels
in the presence of the incomprehensible, the supernatural, which at
certain times overcomes even the most confirmed sceptic, sat at our
table.
The journalist--who could not deny a slight tendency to mysticism--was
of the opinion that he would certainly not die a natural death. That
was all we could get him to say on the subject at this time. Finally
however he confessed, with pretended indifference, that he has the
certain premonition that he will one day be trampled to death by
frightened horses.