simultaneously.
But the physician shook his head gravely. “Strange! Very strange! Do
you put any stock in this looking into the future?”
The journalist blushed so slightly that it could hardly be noticed,
the way men blush when they fear that they had betrayed a weakness.
Cautiously he replied: “And why not? Can you prove the contrary? Have
we not until only a few years ago pooh-poohed the idea of telepathy
and called it superstition? But nowadays that the X-rays, wireless
telegraphy and other marvels have revolutionised our ideas about
matter and energy and even space, we no longer laugh pityingly at
the poor dreamers who, like Swedenburg, the northern magician, see
things that are beyond the field of vision of their bodily eyes. Why
then should I doubt the possibility of somebody some day finding an
explanation for the ability to ‘look into the future’?”
“Bosh!” exclaimed the lawyer. “That’s all fantastic piffle! I can cite
you an example from my own experience which is as interesting as it is
instructive. I was very sick and confined to bed. Suddenly I awoke,
my heart palpitating, and heard a loud voice screaming these words
right into my ears: ‘You will live fourteen days more! Take advantage
of this period!’ Just fourteen days later I was sailing on the ocean.
A frightful sirocco wind was tossing our little steamer from right
to left and from left to right so violently that we could not retain
our upright positions. And suddenly my prophecy--which I had almost
completely forgotten--came back to me. But I remained very cool, like a
scientist who is on the eve of making a great discovery and risking his
life to do so. As you see I did not die, and the ship came safely into
port. But had I accidentally perished, and if my prophetic dream--the
outward projection of my unconscious fear--my unpleasant hallucination
had been known to the people about me--the matter would have been
construed as a new confirmation of the truth of premonitions. We have
so many premonitions that are never fulfilled that the few that happen
accidentally to come true do not really matter. Lots of things in
life are that way. We speak of our ‘hard luck’ because we forget the
times when we have been lucky. Luck rushes by so swiftly! Bad luck
creeps, oh, so slowly! And, coming down to facts, I do not know of a
single instance of an undoubted fulfillment of a prophecy. For I must
confess that all these American and Berlin prophets who have recently
given such striking proofs of their ‘second sight’ do not impress me.
They have not uttered a single prophecy precisely and accurately, and
oracular speeches delivered in general terms are as elastic as a rubber
band, and can be applied to almost anything. A great conflagration,
a destructive earthquake, or a cruel war will rarely disappoint a
prophet. Somewhere or other in this wide world there is a conflagration
some time during the year, the earth rocks somewhere, and somewhere
machine guns are being fired. I therefore do not believe that our
friend will be trampled to death by frightened horses. At the most what
will happen will be that his pegasus, growing tired of being abused by
him, will suddenly throw him down.”
For a little while there was silence. We had the feeling that the
counsellor’s malicious witticism was out of place at this time. The
doctor broke the silence. “What will you say, my dear friends, if I
tell you that a prominent scientist and psychologist has reported a
case which seems to prove the possibility of looking into the future.
I say ‘seems’ only because there is an explanation which re-transforms
the supernatural into the natural. The physician in question, the
well-known Dr. Flournoy, had frequently been consulted by a young man
who was suffering from peculiar attacks of apprehension. Day and night
he was haunted by the idea that he would fall from a high mountain
into a deep precipice, and so be killed. Logic and persuasion were
of no avail in dealing with this obsession. It was easy enough for
Flournoy to point out that all the young man had to do was to keep
away from mountains, and there would be no possibility of his meeting
such a frightful end. The patient grew very melancholic, and could
not be persuaded to enjoy life as formerly. Imagine this experienced
psychologist’s amazement on reading in his newspaper one day that his
patient had been instantly killed by accidentally falling from a steep
but easily passable ridge while he was taking a walk in a sanitarium in
the Alps.”
The journalist exclaimed triumphantly: “Doctor, you’ve disproved your
own theory. If what you’ve just told us doesn’t prove the power to look
into the future, then nothing does.”
“Pish! Pish!” replied the physician. “Haven’t I said that the
explanation is to follow?”
We were all very curious to hear how such a strange occurrence could
be explained without the aid of the supernatural. The physician
lit another cigar and continued: “What, coming down to facts, is
fear? You all know what it is, for I have told you often enough:
fear--anxiety--apprehension--is a repressed wish. Every time that two
wishes are in conflict as to which one is to have mastery over the
individual the wish that has to yield is perceived in consciousness
as apprehension. A young girl is apprehensive when she finds herself
for the first time alone in a room with her sweetheart. For the time
being she is afraid of what later on she may wish for. Dr. Flournoy’s
melancholic young man was clearly tired of life. The wish may have come
upon him once to make an end of his life by throwing himself from a
great height--from such a height as would make failure of the suicidal
attempt impossible. This wish may have come to him at night in a dream,
or perhaps just before he fell asleep, while he was in a state between
sleep and waking. Who knows? But it must have prevailed before the
will to live had repressed it and converted it into apprehension. And
his prophetic premonitions were nothing but the misunderstood voice
from within. And his mysterious death was nothing but--suicide. I have
forgotten to tell you that, according to the newspaper reporters,
he had sat down on the edge of a precipice and fallen asleep. He had
fallen down while asleep. As if the voices in his dream had whispered
to him: ‘Come! do what you so earnestly yearn to do! Die! Now you have
a fine opportunity!’ The moment had come when the fear had become the
stronger wish.”
The journalist was pale. The doctor’s explanation seemed to have
stirred up something in the deepest layers of his soul. His voice
box was seen to make that automatic movement which we all make when
we are embarrassed, as if we wished to speak but could not find the
right word. Finally, after he had coughed a little several times, as
if to clear his vocal cords, he remarked in a somewhat heavy voice:
“That would throw a peculiar light upon many accidental falls in the
mountains. You recall, no doubt, that a short time ago a well-known
tourist had fallen from a relatively safe cliff. He carried a lot of
insurance, and the insurance companies were very anxious to prove it a
case of suicide. Is it possible that in this case, too, an ‘unconscious
power’ co-operated?”
“Certainly!” exclaimed the physician. “Certainly! At any rate, it is my
conviction that many persons seek nothing but death in the mountains.
I have certainly met many tourists who had nothing more to hope for
from life. One who does not fear death no longer loves life, or, at
any rate, no longer loves it to such an extent as not to be willing to
gamble with it. Have any of you an idea how many of our actions have
their origin in ‘unconscious’ motives? All our life our shadow, our
other self, walks by our side and has its say in everything we do.
As long as it is only a shadow it is not dangerous. But, woe, if the
shadow materialises, as the spiritualists say. The tourist makes a
false step and falls into an abyss. Who or what guided his foot? Was it
chance--or the unacted wish that slumbered so long beyond the threshold
of consciousness? Or shall we say that while one was climbing up a
steep mountain path his strength failed him, and he was precipitated
into the depths below? Who can decide in such a case as to just what
happened? For a little moment the climber must have had the thought ‘if
you are not careful now you will fall and be killed.’ The next moment
there may have issued from the repressed ‘complexes’ the command: ‘Do
it! Then you are free and rid of all your troubles!’ So our young
man could have continued to live on the even ground, as Flournoy had
advised him to do. But he preferred to go to the mountains. Perhaps
it would be better to say that something drew him to the mountains.
It was the same power that precipitated him into the abyss: his
life-weariness. The trip he took to the country for the sake of his
health was from the very beginning a flight into the realm of death. He
pursued his shadow just as----”
He did not finish his sentence. His cigar had gone out. He lit it
again, and with wide open eyes gazed into the distance as if he had
more to say but could not find the right word.
There was silence for a time, and finally the counsellor ventured to
say: “Very interesting case! I wonder if its psychology could not be
generalised? Isn’t it possible that a large number of the other daily
fatal accidents could not be instances of ‘unconscious suicide’? There
is, for example, the case of the man who is run over by a cable-car
because he did not hear the bell, the unlucky swimmer who is overcome
by cramps, the victim of the fellow who did not know the revolver
was loaded. Haven’t all these little and big accidents their shadowy
motivation?”
“Of course they have,” replied the physician. “Of course! We really
know so little of the things we do and even less why we do them. Our
emotions, our feelings, are really only the resultants of numerous
components; they are only tensions giving shadowy testimony of ripening
forces. We think we are directing these forces, but we are being
driven by them; we think we make our decisions, but we only accept the
decisions of ‘the other fellow’ in us. Professor Freud has assured
himself a place amongst the immortals with his psychological theory
concerning so-called ‘symptomatic acts.’ He has substituted a ‘secret
inner will’ for ‘blind chance.’”
“And what about looking into the future?” inquired the journalist.
“Why, that’s only looking backward. We can easily predict for ourselves
anything we long for, and can easily have presentiments about what we
do not wish to avert. The facts which permit us to glimpse the future
are gleaned from our yesterdays. Our childhood wishes determine our
subsequent history. All of us could readily read our future could we
call into new life our childhood emotions. What we dreamed of in
childhood we wish to experience as adults. And if we cannot experience
it we are drawn back into the realm of eternal dreams. This is as true
of humanity as a whole as of man individually. Only when we study our
past can we see the future of our present, then can we predict that
our modern, ultra-modern time with its innumerable stupidities, with
its conflicts and ideals, with its strivings and discoveries, will be
as far outstripped as we imagine ourselves to have outstripped our
ancestors. Science and art, politics and public life--all a perpetual
circle tending towards an unknown future....”
“So then, to return to my glimpse of the future,” the journalist
interrupted, “that I shall be crushed by runaway horses?”
The physician smiled superiorly. “Just try to think back and see
whether your presentiment has not its roots in the past!”
“Something now occurs to me,” exclaimed the mystic; “my mother used to
prophesy that I would not die a natural death. I was a very wild youth,
and managed to spend a lot of time with the horses in our stable. In
great anger my dear little mother would then launch all sorts of gloomy
predictions concerning my destiny.”
His mysterious look into the future was now explained. The doctor
ventured to remark that this “case” also illustrated how intimately
superstition and a consciousness of guilt are linked together. The
imaginary glimpse into the future was in his friend’s case also only a
glimmer out of the past. He referred to the remarkable fact that our
earliest recollections represent a reflection of our future....
“There are facts”--he said slowly, hesitatingly, as if the words had
to be forced out of his interior--“which one can hardly explain. I once
loved a woman with such an intense love as I have not felt for any
woman since. We spent a wonderful day together. Then we bade each other
good-night. I remained standing, looking after her. She was walking
through the high reeds in a meadow. Her graceful figure was getting
smaller and smaller. With a slight turn in the road she disappeared
from my view but soon reappeared. Then for a while I saw her shadowy
outline until a clump of trees again hid her from my view. Then I saw
her again, but very small. I saw something white--her handkerchief. At
this moment a shiver went through me, and I thought: that’s how you
will lose her; gradually you will cease to see her; twice she will
re-appear, and then she will be gone for ever!--Nonsense, said I to
myself, and spun bold plans for the future.... But the future proved
that my presentiment had been true. Everything happened as I had felt
it that evening. A glimpse into the future! And yet! Sometimes I think
to myself that I had only realised the impossibility of a union between
us. What I felt as a presentiment may have been only clearer inner
comprehension.”
The waiter yawned loud. This time we took the hint and paid. We went
home, and something oppressive, unspoken, weighed us all down. As if we
were not quite satisfied with the solution of the mystery--as if the
shuddering sweetness of a superstitious belief in supernatural powers,
a belief in a something above and beyond us would be more to our
liking. Silently we took our way through the quiet streets. We felt,
for all the world, like children who had been told by their mother that
the beautiful story was only a story--that the prince and the princess
had never really lived.
We had been robbed of one of life’s fairy tales. Fie! Fie on this
naked, sober, empty reality! How much nicer it would be if we could
look into the future!
LOOKING BACKWARD
Around Christmas of every year a pale woman clad in black consults me
and bewails her fate. It is a pitiful tale that she narrates tearfully.
A ruined life, a ruined marriage! One of those fearful disappointments
experienced by women who, utterly unacquainted with the world, and
not brought up to be independent, entrust all their dammed-up longing
for happiness and love to the first man who happens to cross their
path. The first time she came I was touched with pity and could
have wept with her. The best advice I could give her was wholly to
separate from her husband, forget the past, and to build up a new
life. The second time she came I was somewhat unpleasantly surprised,
because the unfortunate woman had not yet screwed her courage to the
sticking-point and was wasting her life in gloomy broodings about the
incomprehensibleness of her destiny. But this time she promised to
employ all the means and resources at her disposal to get out of her
fruitless conflict and useless complainings.... Since her first visit
ten years have passed, but she still stands on the ruins of her hopes
and laments her wasted life. Her figure, which was once slender and
sinewy, looks as if it were broken in many parts; her face shows the
first traces of age. Now she has additional cause for grieving. She
looks into the mirror and is unhappy that she has changed so. “What
has become of me and the beauty that so many admired?” Before her
mind’s eye she sees again the men who once wooed her and whom she had
rejected. Every one of them would probably have made her happier than
the one she had chosen!
She augments her complainings and emphasizes her despair. All her
friends and all her relatives, her physicians and her confidants,
know her sad lot and have no new words of consolation for her,
only conventional phrases and stereotyped gestures. Because of her
complainings she is becoming a nuisance to everybody. Her pain has
reached that dangerous point where the tragic becomes the comic.
In vain she tries to move her hearers by heightening the dramatic
description of the unalterableness of her situation. She becomes aware
that human beings can become partisans only in the presence of fresh
conflicts and very quickly become accustomed to others’ unhappiness.
And this, of course, gives her additional reason for thinking herself
lonesome, misunderstood, and forsaken, and thus a new melody is added
to her stale song. If she had before this compared herself with her
happier sisters, her consciousness of still possessing youth and beauty
afforded her a certain comfort. Hope gently whispered to her: “You can
still change it! you are still young and desirable! you will yet find
a man to appreciate you and to give you the happiness which the other
destroyed!”
Gradually there crept into her embittered soul envy of the youth and
beauty of others and augmented the poison of her depression. There was
no longer any escape from this labyrinth of woes! In whatever direction
she looked, she saw only grey clouds; everywhere she saw dark and
confused roads losing themselves in the darkness of a ruined life. One
would suppose that by this time she would have resolutely determined to
end her sufferings and remove herself from a world which had nothing
more to offer her.
One who supposes any such thing is not acquainted with this type of
person. He has not yet discovered the secret of “sweet sorrow,” the
delights of self-pity. This woman, too, found her pleasure in the
tragic role which life had temporarily assigned her and to which she
was clinging spasmodically with all her power. She virtually drank
herself drunk with the thought that she was the unhappiest woman in
the world. She directed over her own wounds all the streams of love
that flowed from her warm heart. She tore these wounds open again
and again so as to be unhappy and pity herself. If it did not sound
so paradoxical, I would say that this woman would be unhappy if one
deprived her of her unhappiness. I wonder whether an unconscious
religious motive did not play a role in this self-assumed suffering.
Did she hope for compensation in the life to come for all the happiness
that she had missed in this world? Was her everlasting looking
backwards only a voluntarily maintained attitude behind which was
concealed the anticipation of never-ending looking into a radiant
eternity?
All my attempts to restore her to an active life failed. The surest
of all therapeutic remedies, work, failed because she never took the
matter seriously. She stubbornly maintained herself in the position of
looking backward, and from this position no power on earth could move
her....
One who looks upon the Bible as a poetic account of eternal conflicts
and has learned to recognise the symbolic significance of legendary
lore will have no difficulty in recognizing in the story of Sodom
and Gomorrah the significance of looking backwards. The woman who
was converted into a pillar of salt because she looked back into the
burning city--what a wonderful symbolisation of losing oneself in the
past! Everyone has his secret Sodom, his Gomorrah, his disappointments,
his defeats, his fearful judgments! Woe to him who looks back into
the dangerous moments of his life! And does not one of von Schwab’s
legends warn us against the dangers of past terrors? Does it not tell
us that we are flying madly over abysses, that the perils of the road
are concealed and that it is dangerous to retain in the mind’s eye the
perils that are past?
There will be no difficulty now in comprehending my formula that to
be well is to have overcome one’s past. I know of no better means of
distinguishing the neurotic from the healthy. The healthy person also
suffers disappointments--who can escape them?--he too suffers many a
fall when he thinks he is rushing on to victory, but he will raise the
tattered flag of hope and continue on his way to the assured goal.
The neurotic does not get done with his past. All experiences have a
tenfold seriousness for him. Whereas the healthy person throws off
the burden of past disappointments, and occasionally even transforms
the recollection of them to sources of pleasure, and is stimulated to
new efforts by the contrasts between the pleasureable present and the
sad past, the nervous person includes in his burdensome present the
difficulties of the past. His memories become more and more oppressive
from year to year.
It is for all the world as if the neurotic’s soul were covered over
with some dangerous adhesive material. Everything sticks to it and does
not permit itself to be loosed from it, becomes organically united to
it, wraps itself up in it, blinds his clear vision and cripples his
freedom of motion. This not getting done with the past betrays itself
also in his inability to forgive, in his craving for revenge and in his
resentments. A neurotic is capable of reproaching one for some trifling
humiliation or for some unconsidered word many years after the event.
He treasures up these humiliations and defeats and does not lose sight
of them for a single day. It might almost be said that he enacts daily
the whole repertoire of the past.
How often are we amazed to find people who continue to make the
same mistakes over and over again and whom experience seems never
to teach anything. Nietzsche says: “If one has character he has his
experience which keeps on recurring.” In reality all that life is
capable of depends upon this ability to forget the past. Of course
some experiences continue to live as lessons and warnings and go
to make up that uncertain treasure which we call Experience. True
greatness, however, shows itself in being able to act in spite of one’s
experiences, in overcoming latent mistrust.
What would become of us if all of us permitted our unhappy experiences
to operate as inhibitions! We should resemble a person who avoided an
article of diet because it had once disagreed with him. Experience may
be that which no one can learn unless one has been born with it: to
find the appropriate mean from one’s experiences and one’s inclinations.
The nervous individual becomes useless as far as life is concerned
because his experience becomes a source of doubt for him and
intensifies his wanting will-power. In the presence of a new task he
takes his past into consideration and makes his unhappy experiences
serve as warnings, hesitates, vacillates, weighs, and finally does
nothing. How much could any of us do if we lacked the courage to
venture? What could we accomplish if we never thought the game worth
the candle? I have often been enabled to prove that the neurotic’s will
is weak because his will is divided. I must supplement this with the
statement that his will is oppressed by the burden of his past.
Let us after this disgression turn back to the unhappy woman with
whom we began. I intimated that it was within her power to alter her
destiny. Virile and kindly disposed men offered her a helping hand. But
her unhappy experience begot a fear of a second disillusionment. She
preferred to be unhappy rather than to venture a second time and again
be unhappy.