Psychology of the Unconscious A Study of the...

13. Compare Liepmann, “Über Ideenflucht,” Halle 1904; also Jung, “Diagnost. Assoc. Stud.,” p. 103: “Denken als Unterordnung unter eine herrschende Vorstellung”; compare Ebbinghaus, “Kultur der Gegenwart,” p. 221. Külpe (“Gr. d. Psychologie,” p. 464) expresses himself in a similar manner: “In thinking it is a question of an anticipatory apperception which sometimes governs a greater, sometimes a smaller circle of individual reproductions, and is differentiated from accidental motives of reproduction only by the consequence with which all things outside this circle are held back or repressed.”

14. In his “Psychologia empirica meth. scientif. pertract.,” etc., 1732, p. 23, Christian Wolff says simply and precisely: “Cogitatio est actus animae quo sibi rerumque aliarum extra se conscia est.”

15. The moment of adaptation is emphasized especially by William James in his definition of reasoning: “Let us make this ability to deal with novel data the technical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains.”

16. “Thoughts are shadows of our experiences, always darker, emptier, simpler than these,” says Nietzsche. Lotze (“Logik,” p. 552) expresses himself in regard to this as follows: “Thought, left to the logical laws of its movement, encounters once more at the end of its regularly traversed course the things suppressed or hidden.”

17. Compare the remarks of Baldwin following in text. The eccentric philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) even places intelligence and speech as identical (see Hamann’s writings, pub. by Roth, Berlin 1821). With Nietzsche intelligence fares even worse as “speech metaphysics” (Sprachmetaphysik). Friedrich Mauthner goes the furthest in this conception (“Sprache und Psychologie,” 1901). For him there exists absolutely no thought without speech, and speaking is thinking. His idea of the “fetish of the word” governing in science is worthy of notice.

18. Compare Kleinpaul: “Das Leben der Sprache,” 3 Bände. Leipzig 1893.

19. “Jardin d’Épicure,” p. 80.

20. Speech is generated by the intellect and in turn generates intellect.

21. It is difficult to calculate how great is the seductive influence of the primitive word-meaning upon a thought. “Anything which has even been in consciousness remains as an affective moment in the unconscious,” says Hermann Paul (“Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte,” 4th ed., 1909, p. 25). The old word-meanings have an after-effect, chiefly imperceptible, “within the dark chamber of the unconscious in the Soul” (Paul). J. G. Hamann, mentioned above, expresses himself unequivocably: “Metaphysics reduces all catchwords and all figures of speech of our empirical knowledge to empty hieroglyphics and types of ideal relations.” It is said that Kant learned some things from Hamann.

22. “Grundriss der Psychologie,” p. 365.

23. “Lehrbuch der Psychologie,” X, 26.

24. James Mark Baldwin: “Thought and Things, or Genetic Logic.”

25. In this connection I must refer to an experiment which Eberschweiler (Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1908) has made at my request, which discloses the remarkable fact that in an association experiment the intra-psychic association is influenced by phonetic considerations (“Untersuchungen über den Einfluss der sprachlichen Komponente auf die Assoziation,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 1908).

26. So at least this form of thought appears to Consciousness. Freud says in this connection (“The Interpretation of Dreams,” tr. by Brill, p. 418): “It is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves to an aimless course of ideas when we relinquish our reflections, and allow the unwilled ideas to emerge. It can be shown that we are able to reject only those end-presentations known to us, and that immediately upon the cessation of these unknown or, as we inaccurately say, unconscious end-presentations come into play which now determine the course of the unwilled ideas—a thought without end-presentation cannot be produced through any influence we can exert on our own psychic life.”

27. “Grundriss der Psychologie,” p. 464.

28. Behind this assertion stand, first of all, experiences taken from the field of the normal. The undirected thinking is very far removed from “meditation,” and especially so as far as readiness of speech is concerned. In psychological experiments I have frequently found that the subjects of the investigation—I speak only of cultivated and intelligent people, whom I have allowed to indulge in reveries, apparently unintentionally and without previous instruction—have exhibited affect-expressions which can be registered experimentally. But the basic thought of these, even with the best of intentions, they could express only incompletely or even not at all. One meets with an abundance of similar experiences in association experiments and psychoanalysis—indeed, there is hardly an unconscious complex which has not at some time existed as a phantasy in consciousness.

However, more instructive are the experiences from the domain of psychopathology. But those arising in the field of the hysterias and neuroses, which are characterized by an overwhelming transference tendency, are rarer than the experiences in the territory of the introversion type of neuroses and psychoses, which constitute by far the greater number of the mental derangements, at least the collected Schizophrenic group of Bleuler. As has already been indicated by the term “introversion,” which I briefly introduced in my study, “Konflikte der kindlichen Seele,” pp. 6 and 10, these neuroses lead to an overpowering autoerotism (Freud). And here we meet with this unutterable purely phantastic thinking, which moves in inexpressible symbols and feelings. One gets a slight impression of this when one seeks to examine the paltry and confused expressions of these people. As I have frequently observed, it costs these patients endless trouble and effort to put their phantasies into common human speech. A highly intelligent patient, who interpreted such a phantasy piece by piece, often said to me, “I know absolutely with what it is concerned, I see and feel everything, but it is quite impossible for me to find the words to express it.” The poetic and religious introversion gives rise to similar experiences; for example, Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans viii:26—“For we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered.”

29. Similarly, James remarks, “The great difference, in fact, between that simple kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reason distinctively so called, is this, that whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive.”

30. Compare the impressive description of Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux, by Jacob Burckhardt (“Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien,” 1869, p. 235):

“One now awaits a description of the view, but in vain, not because the poet is indifferent to it, but, on the contrary, because the impression affects him all too strongly. His entire past life, with all its follies, passes before him; he recalls that it is ten years ago to-day that he, as a young man, left Bologna, and he turns a yearning glance toward Italy. He opens a book—‘Confessions of St. Augustine,’ his companion at that time—and his eye falls upon this passage in the tenth chapter: ‘and the people went there and admired the high mountains, the wide wastes of the sea and the mighty downward rushing streams, and the ocean and the courses of the stars, and forgot themselves.’ His brother, to whom he reads these words, cannot comprehend why, at this point, he closes the book and is silent.”

31. Wundt gives a striking description of the scholastic method in his “Philosophische Studien,” XIII, p. 345. The method consists “first in this, that one realizes the chief aim of scientific investigation is the discovery of a comprehensive scheme, firmly established, and capable of being applied in a uniform manner to the most varied problems; secondly, in that one lays an excessive value upon certain general ideas, and, consequently, upon the word-symbols designating these ideas, wherefore an analysis of word-meanings comes, in extreme cases, to be an empty subtlety and splitting of hairs, instead of an investigation of the real facts from which the ideas are abstracted.”

32. The concluding passage in “Traumdeutung” was of prophetic significance, and has been brilliantly established since then through investigations of the psychoses. “In the psychoses these modes of operation of the psychic mechanism, normally suppressed in the waking state, again become operative, and then disclose their inability to satisfy our needs in the outer world.” The importance of this position is emphasized by the views of Pierre Janet, developed independently of Freud, and which deserve to be mentioned here, because they add confirmation from an entirely different side, namely, the biological. Janet makes the distinction in this function of a firmly organized “inferior” and “superior” part, conceived of as in a state of continuous transformation.

“It is really on this superior part of the functions, on their adaptation to present circumstances, that the neuroses depend. The neuroses are the disturbances or the checks in the evolution of the functions—the illnesses depending upon the morbid functioning of the organism. These are characterized by an alteration in the superior part of the functions, in their evolution and in their adaptation to the present moment—to the present state of the exterior world and of the individual, and also by the absence or deterioration of the old parts of these same functions.

“In the place of these superior operations there are developed physical, mental, and, above all, emotional disturbances. This is only the tendency to replace the superior operations by an exaggeration of certain inferior operations, and especially by gross visceral disturbances” (“Les Névroses,” p. 383).

The old parts are, indeed, the inferior parts of the functions, and these replace, in a purposeless fashion, the abortive attempts at adaptation. Briefly speaking, the archaic replaces the recent function which has failed. Similar views concerning the nature of neurotic symptoms are expressed by Claparède as well (“Quelques mots sur la définition de l’Hystérie,” Arch. de Psychol., I, VII, p. 169).

He understands the hysterogenic mechanism as a “Tendance à la réversion”—as a sort of atavistic manner of reaction.

33. I am indebted to Dr. Abraham for the following interesting communication: “A little girl of three and a half years had been presented with a little brother, who became the object of the well-known childish jealousy. Once she said to her mother, ‘You are two mammas; you are my mamma, and your breast is little brother’s mamma.’ She had just been looking on with great interest at the process of nursing.” It is very characteristic of the archaic thinking of the child for the breast to be designated as “mamma.”

34. Compare especially Freud’s thorough investigation of the child in his “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben,” 1912 Jahrbuch, Pt. I. Also my study, “Konflikte der kindlichen Seele,” 1912 Jahrbuch, Pt. II, p. 33.

35. “Human, All Too Human,” Vol. II, p. 27 and on.

36. “Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre,” Pt. II, p. 205.

37. “Der Künstler, Ansätze zu einer Sexualpsychologie,” 1907, p. 36.

38. Compare also Rank’s later book, “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.”

39. “Wish Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales,” 1908.

40. “Dreams and Myths.”

41. Compare with this “Konflikte der kindlichen Seele,” p. 6, foot.

42. Compare Abraham, “Dreams and Myths.” New York 1913. The wish for the future is represented as already fulfilled in the past. Later, the childish phantasy is again taken up regressively in order to compensate for the disillusionment of actual life.

43. Rank: “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.”

44. Naturally, it could not be said that because this was an institution in antiquity, the same would recur in our phantasy, but rather that in antiquity it was possible for the phantasy so generally present to become an institution. This may be concluded from the peculiar activity of the mind of antiquity.

45. The Dioscuri married the Leucippides by theft, an act which, according to the ideas of higher antiquity, belonged to the necessary customs of marriage (Preller: “Griechische Mythologie,” 1854, Pt. II, p. 68).

46. See S. Creuzer: “Symbolik und Mythologie,” 1811, Pt. III, p. 245.