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But since, according to our hypothesis, the unconscious plays a causal part in the neurosis, and since dreams are the direct expression of unconscious psychic activity, the attempt to analyse and interpret dreams is entirely justified from a scientific standpoint.
Since my judgement is fallible, why should my own conjecture be more dependable than his? At this point the dream comes in as the expression of an involuntary psychic process not controlled by the conscious outlook. It presents the subjective state as it really is. It has no respect for my conjectures or for the patient’s views as to how things should be, but simply tells how the matter stands.
The dreams I have cited unmistakably present the ætiological factors in the neurosis; but it is clear that they also offer a prognosis or anticipation of the future and a suggestion as to the course of treatment as well.
For the purposes of therapy, moreover, it is highly important for the analyst to admit his lack of understanding from time to time, for nothing is more unbearable for the patient than to be always understood.
The analyst who wishes to rule out conscious suggestion must consider any dream interpretation invalid that does not win the assent of the patient, and he must search until he finds a formulation that does.
Are we still unable to see that man’s conscious mind is even more devilish and perverse than the unconscious?
All the more reason, then, for giving heed to that side! It should now be clear why I have made it a practical rule always to ask, before trying to interpret a dream: What conscious attitude does it compensate?
It is of the first importance for the assimilation of dream-contents that no violence be done to the real values of the conscious personality. If the conscious personality is destroyed, or even crippled, there is no one left to do the assimilating.
On the one hand it has been kept alive by the language, and on the other hand it is inherited with the structure of the psyche and is therefore to be found in all times and among all peoples.
venture to arrange the sum-total of findings under the four heads of confession, explanation, education, and transformation.
The first beginnings of all analytical treatment are to be found in its prototype, the confessional.
This is why we find self-discipline to have been one of man’s earliest moral attainments. Among primitive peoples it has its place in the initiation ceremonies, chiefly in the forms of ascetic continence and the stoical endurance of pain and fear. Self-restraint, however, is here practised within the secret society as something undertaken in company with others.
At any rate the hysterical subject, who is very free with his emotions, is most often the possessor of a secret, while the hardened psychasthenic suffers from inability to digest his emotions.
There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human.
The patient goes away apparently cured—but he is now so fascinated by the hinterland of his own mind that he continues to practise catharsis by himself at the expense of his adaptation to life.
Freud gave to this symptom the appropriate name of “transference”. A certain dependence upon the physician who has helped you is of course normal and understandable enough. What is abnormal and unexpected is the unusual obstinacy of the transference and its inaccessibility to conscious correction.
Nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas. But when an idea is the expression of psychic experience which bears fruit in regions as far separated and as free from historical relation as East and West, then we must look into the matter closely. For such ideas represent forces that are beyond logical justification and moral sanction; they are always stronger than man and his brain. Man believes indeed that he moulds these ideas, but in reality they mould him and make him their unwitting mouthpiece.
On the average, those who easily achieve social adaptation and social position are better accounted for by the pleasure principle than are the unadapted whose social shortcomings leave them with a craving for power and importance.
But for people who have far more ability than the average, for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work—for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness.
be the man through whom you wish to influence others.
It seems to me that the findings and experiences of analytical psychology can at least provide a foundation; for as soon as psychotherapy requires the self-perfecting of the doctor, it is freed from its clinical origins and ceases to be a mere method for treating the sick. It is now of service to the healthy as well, or at least to those who have a right to psychic health and whose illness is at most the suffering that tortures us all.
As to this question of psychic constitution, it is well known that I postulate two different basic attitudes in accordance with the typical differences already suspected by many students of human nature—the extraverted and the introverted attitudes.
I may allow myself only one criterion for the validity of my interpretation of the dream—and this is that it works.
I need not try to prove that my dream interpretation is correct, which would be a somewhat hopeless undertaking, but must simply help the patient to find what it is that activates him
However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.
They are non-rational, symbolistic currents in the evolution of man, and are so archaic that it is easy to draw parallels between them and similar manifestations in the fields of archæology and comparative religion. We may therefore readily assume that these pictures originate chiefly in that realm of psychic life which I have called the collective unconscious. By this term I designate an unconscious psychic activity present in all human beings which not only gives rise to symbolical pictures today, but was the source of all similar products of the past.
Complexes obviously represent a kind of inferiority in the broadest sense—a statement I must at once qualify by saying that to have complexes does not necessarily indicate inferiority.
But I very soon discovered that the hesitation of the one was by no means always forethought, and that the quick action of the other was not necessarily want of reflection. The hesitation of the former often arises from habitual timidity, or at least from something like a customary shrinking backward as if faced with too heavy a task; while the immediate activity of the second is frequently made possible by a predominating self-confidence with respect to the object.
Introversion or extraversion, as a typical attitude, means an essential bias which conditions the whole psychic process, establishes the habitual reactions, and thus determines not only the style of behaviour, but also the nature of subjective experience. And not only so, but it also denotes the kind of compensatory activity of the unconscious which we may expect to find.
First of all, then, we must make a careful distinction between the concepts of feeling and sensation, the latter being taken to cover the sensory processes. And in the second place we must recognize that a feeling of regret is something quite different from a “feeling” that the weather will change or that the price of our aluminium shares will go up. I have therefore proposed using the term “feeling” in the first instance, and dropping it—so far as psychological terminology is concerned—in the other two instances. Here we should speak of “sensation” when the sense organs are involved, and of
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We know that a man can never be everything at once, never complete; he always develops certain qualities at the expense of others, and wholeness is never attained.
The total result of my work in this field up to the present is the presentation of two general types covering the attitudes which I call extraversion and introversion. Besides these, I have worked out a fourfold classification corresponding to the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.
The biblical fall of man presents the dawn of consciousness as a curse. And as a matter of fact it is in this light that we first look upon every problem that forces us to greater consciousness and separates us even further from the paradise of unconscious childhood.
We speak of “knowing” something when we succeed in linking a new perception to an already established context in such a way that we hold in consciousness not only the new perception but this context as well. “Knowing” is based, therefore, upon a conscious connection between psychic contents.
There is a marked distinction between the two in that the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems; while the man with a difficult temperament suffers from his conscious problems without being ill.
The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; oftentimes it grows turbid. All the manifestations mentioned above can be most clearly seen in rather one-sided people, turning up sometimes sooner and sometimes later. In my opinion, their appearance is often delayed by the fact that a person’s parents are still alive. It is then as if the period of youth were unduly continued. I have seen this especially in the cases of men whose fathers were long-lived. The death of the father then has the effect of an overhurried—an almost catastrophic—ripening.
I have observed that a directed life is in general better, richer and healthier than an aimless one, and that it is better to go forwards with the stream of time than backwards against it.
From the standpoint of psychotherapy it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition—one part of a life-process whose extent and duration escape our knowledge.
For my part, I prefer to look at man in the light of what in him is healthy and sound, and to free the sick man from that point of view which colours every page Freud has written. Freud’s teaching is definitely one-sided in that it generalizes from facts that are relevant only to neurotic states of mind; its validity is really confined to those states.
Nothing goes to show that primitive man thinks, feels, or perceives in a way that differs fundamentally from ours. His psychic functioning is essentially the same—only his primary assumptions are different.
It is an axiom in the study of the unconscious that every relatively independent, psychic content is personified whenever the opportunity arises.
We may expect psychological research, on the one hand, to explain the formation of a work of art, and on the other to reveal the factors that make a person artistically creative.
We mean by collective unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it consciousness has developed.
It is a fact that in eclipses of consciousness—in dreams, narcotic states and cases of insanity—there come to the surface psychic products or contents that show all the traits of primitive levels of psychic development.
The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.
The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him—on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire.
To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current.
It is well known that Freud has attempted an explanation from this side—an undertaking which could only succeed if the unconscious were actually something which came into being with the existence and consciousness of the individual. But the truth is that the unconscious is always there beforehand as a potential system of psychic functioning handed down by generations of man.
Truth that appeals to the testimony of the senses may satisfy reason, but it offers nothing that stirs our feelings and expresses them by giving a meaning to human life. Yet it is most often feeling that is decisive in matters of good and evil, and if feeling does not come to the aid of reason, the latter is usually powerless.
