New-Introductory-Lectures-On-Psycho-Analysis.txt

NEW -
LECTURES ON
"CHO-ANALYSIS

by
JCM MD FREUD, M.D., LL.D.

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New York
©ARLTON HOUSE

CARG EBOOK 0. JAIPUR,

Copyright, 1933s by
SIGMUND FREUD

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS -

PREFACR .o . . ow ow Oke @ Ow oz oa %
CHAPTER
1. REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS,
LECTURE XXIX | . . . o. . .
2. DREAMS AND THE OCCULT, LECTURE XXX
3. THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSON-
ALITY, LECTURE XXXI - . .
4. ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE, LEC-
TURE XXXII . . 0. 0. o. o. _.
5. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN, LECTURE
;- Yp. _s meas y s
6. EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIEN-
TATIONS,-LECTURE- XXXIV . . 0 . .
7. A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE, LECTURE XXXV .

INDEX .

PAGE
ix

15

82

113

153

186
216
251

 

my Introductory Lectures on Paco Aissa so.
livered in the two winter terms of 1915-16 and 1916.
17 in one of the lecture-rooms of the Vienna Psy-
chiatrical Clinic, before an audience composed of
members and students of every Faculty,. The first half
of the lectures were improvised, and written down im-
mediately afterwards; the second half were composed
during an intervening summer vacation in Salzburg, and
were delivered word for word in the following winter.
In those days I still possessed the gift of a phonographic
memory.

In contradistinction to them, these new lectures have
never been delivered. My age has in the meantime
relieved me of the duty of marking my membership
of the University-even though the relation is only a
peripheral one-by giving lectures; and a surgical
operation has rendered me incapable of addressing an
audience. It is therefore only in imagination that I
picture myself once more in the lecture-room as I write
out what follows; it may help me not to forget my duty
to the reader as I delve deeper into my subject.

The new lectures are in no way intended to take the
. place of the earlier ones. They do not compose an
independent whole which could hope to find a circle of
~ readers of its own; but they are continuations and sup-
plements which fall into three groups in their relation

ix

PREFACE

to the earlier lectures. To the first group belong the
new manipulations of themes which have already been
dealt with fifteen years ago, but which demand further
treatment on account of the deepening of our knowledge,
and the alteration of our views; this group consists, that
is to say, of critical revisions. The two other groups
contain actual enlargements of our field, in that they
deal with matters which either did not exist in psycho-
analysis at the time of the first lectures, or about which
too little was known at that time to justify a special
chapter-heading. It cannot be avoided, but it is also
not to be deplored, that some of the new lectures unite
the characteristics of these groups.

I have, moreover, emphasized the dependence of
these new lectures on the Introductory Lectures by num-
bering them in continuation of the old ones. Thus the
first lecture in this book is called the Twenty-ninthb.
Once more, they offer to the analytic specialist little
that is new, and they are addressed to that large group
of educated persons to whom, let us hope, one can as-
cribe a benevolent, if cautious, interest in the special
nature and discoveries of this young science. And this
time again it has been my guiding purpose to make no
sacrifice in favour of apparent simplicity, completeness
and finality; not to hide any problems and not to deny
the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other
field of scientific work would it be necessary to insist
upon the modesty of one's claims. In every other sub-
ject this is taken for granted; the public expect nothing
else. No reader of a work on astronomy would feel
disappointed and contemptuous of that science, if he
were shown the point at which our knowledge of the

x

PREFACE

universe melts into obscurity. Only in psychology is
it otherwise; here the constitutional incapacity of men
for scientific research comes into full view. It looks
as though people did not expect from psychology prog-
ress in knowledge, but some other kind of satisfaction;
every unsolved problem, every acknowledged uncer-
tainty is turned into a ground of complaint against it.

Any one who loves the science of the mind must
accept these hardships as well.

FREUD

VIENNA,
Summer 1932

CHAPTER 1

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS, LECTURE XXIX

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN-After a silence of more than
fifteen years, I have brought you together again in order
to discuss with you the new developments, or it may be
improvements, which have taken place in psycho-analytic
theory during the interval. From more than one point
of view it is right and proper that we should turn our
attention, in the first place, to the theory of dreams.
This theory occupies a peculiar position in the history
of psycho-anslysis; it marks a turning-point. With the
theory of dreams, analysis passed from being a psycho-
therapeutic method to being a psychology of the depths of
human nature. Ever since then the theory of dreams has
remained the most characteristic and the most peculiar
feature of the young science, something which has no
parallel in the rest of scientific knowledge, a new found
land, which has been reclaimed from the regions of
Folklore and Mysticism. The strangeness of the ideas
which are necessarily involved in it has made it into a
shibboleth, the use of which distinguishes those who might
become believers in psycho-analysis from those who are
incapable of comprehending it. Speaking for myself, I
always found it a thing I could hold on to during those
difficult times when the unsolved problems of the neu-
15

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

roses used to confuse my inexperienced judgment.
Whenever I began to have doubts about the correctness
of my tentative conclusions, the moment I managed to
translate a senseless and complicated dream into a clear
and intelligible mental process in the dreamer, I fel,
with renewed confidence, that I was on the right track.

It is therefore of especial interest for us to follow,
in regard to this particular matter of the theory of
dreams, what changes psycho-analysis has undergone
during the interval I have mentioned, and what progress
it has made in gaining appreciation and understanding
from contemporary thought. I may as well tell you
straight away that you will be disappointed in both
directions.

Let us look through the volumes of the Internationale
Zeitschrift filr (G@rztliche) Psychoanalyse, in which the
most important work on our subject has appeared since
1913. In the earlier volumes you will find one recur-
ring heading, 'On the Interpretation of Dreams," under
which will be a quantity of contributions on various
points of dream-theory. But the further you go, the
rarer such contributions become; this standing heading
eventually disappears entirely. The analysts behave as
though they had nothing more to say about the dream,
as though the whole subject of dream-theory were fin-
ished and done with. If, on the other hand, you ask how
much of the theory of dreams is accepted by outsiders,
the numerous psychiatrists and psycho-therapeutists,
who warm their pot of soup at our fire-without indeed
being very grateful for our hospitality-the so-called
educated people who are in the habit of appropriating
the more startling of the conclusions of science, the

16

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

literati and the general public, then the answer is not
very satisfactory. A few formulae are generally
known, and, among them, several which we have never
put forward, such as the statement that all dreams are
of a sexual nature; but even such important things as
the fundamental distinction between the manifest dream-
content and the latent dream-thoughts, the view that.
anxiety dreams do not contradict the wish-fulfilling:
function of the dream, the impossibility of interpreting
a dream unless one knows the relevant associations of
the dreamer, and, above all, the recognition of the fact:
that the most important part of the dream is the dream-|
work, seem, every one of them, to be as far removed
from the consciousness of the generality of mankind as
they were thirty years ago. I myself have every reason
to say this, because during that period I have received
an enormous number of letters, in which the writers in-
scribe their dreams for interpretation, or ask for infor-
mation about the nature of dreams. They declare that
they have read the Interpretation of Dreams, and yet
in every sentence they betray their lack of understanding
of our dream-theory. That will not prevent our once
more giving an account of what we know about dreams.
You will remember that last time we devoted a whole
group of lectures to showing how we have come to under-
stand this hitherto unexplained psychic phenomenon.
Supposing some one, say a patient under analysis,

tells us one of his dreams; then we assume that he has
made one of those communications to us, to which he
committed himself when he entered on his analytical
treatment. - It is, of course, a communication which is
insufficiently communicative, because a dream is, in it

17

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

self, not a social utterance; it is not a means for making
oneself understood. We have not, indeed, the least idea
what the dreamer wishes to say, and he himself knows
no better than ourselves. At the outset we have to make
a quick decision. On the one hand, the dream may be,
as the non-analytical physicians assure us, an indication
that the dreamer has slept badly, that not all the parts
of his brain achieved a uniform state of rest, that cer-
tain regions of it endeavoured to go on working under
the influence of unknown stimuli and could only do so
in a very incomplete way. If that is the case then we
are quite right not to bother ourselves any longer over
this psychologically worthless product of nocturnal dis-
turbance. For how could we expect from the investi-
gation of such things to arrive at anything useful for
our purposes? On the other hand, however-but it is
clear that from the outset we have decided otherwise.
We have-perhaps quite arbitrarily-made the assump-
tion, put forward the postulate, that even this unintelli-
gible dream must be a perfectly valid, sensible and
valuable psychic act, of which we can make use in the
analysis, just like any other communication. Only the
result of our attempt can show us whether we are right.
If we are able to turn the dream into a valuable utter-
ance of this kind, then we obviously have a chance of
learning something new, and of obtaining information
of such a sort as otherwise would remain inaccessible
to us.

Now, however, the difficulties of our task, and the
puzzling nature of our theme become apparent. How
are we going to set about turning a dream into a normal
communication, and how are we going to explain that a

18

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

part of the utterance of our patient has taken on a form
which is as unintelligible for him as for us?

You will observe, ladies and gentlemen, that this time
I am not expounding the subject on genetic lines, but I
am speaking dogmatically. The first thing we have to
do is to lay the foundations of our new attitude towards
the problem of the dream by introducing two new con-
cepts and two new names. We call what one usually
refers to as the dream, the dream-text or the manifest
dream, and what we are looking for, what we, as it
were, suspect to lie behind the dream, the latent dream-
thoughts. Now we can express our two problems in the:
following way: we have got to turn the manifest dream ,
" into the latent dream, and we have to show how the .
latter became the former in the mental life of the'
dreamer. The first bit is a practical problem, it comes
under the heading of dream-interpretation, and requires
a technique; the second is a theoretical problem, its solu-
tion should be the explanation of the hypothetical dream
work, and can only be a theory. Both the technique of '
dream-interpretation and the theory of the dream-work
have to be built up from the beginning.

Which bit shall we begin with? I think we should
start with the technique of dream-interpretation. It
has a clearer outline and will make a more vivid im-
pression on you.

The patient, then, has described a dream which we
have to interpret. We have listened quietly without
making use of our powers of reflection. What do we do
next? We determine to bother our heads as little as
possible over what we have heard-over the manifest
dream, that is to say. Naturally this manifest dream

19

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSI$

displays all sorts of characteristics to which we are not
completely indifferent. It may be coherent, smoothly
composed, like a literary work, or unintelligibly con-
fused, almost like a delirium; it may have absurd ele-
ments, or jokes and apparently brilliant inferences; it
may seem clear and well defined to the dreamer, or it
may be dim and indefinite; the pictures in it may have
the full sensuous force of a perception, or they may be
as shadowy and vague as a mist. The greatest variety
of characteristics can be found distributed in the various
parts of the same dream. Finally the dream may be
attended by an indifferent feeling tone, or by a very
strong pleasurable or painful affect. You must not
think that we regard this endless variety as a matter of
no importance; we shall come back to it later, and shall
find in it much that is useful for our interpretation; but
for the present we must put it aside, and travel along
the main road which leads to the interpretation of the
dream. This means that we ask the dreamer as well to
free himself from the impression of the manifest dream,
to switch his attention from the dream as a whole to
individual parts of its content, and to tell us one after
another the things that occur to him in connection with
these parts, what associations come into his mind when
he turns his mental eye on to each of them separately. _

That is a curious technique, is it not? It is not the
usual way to treat a communication or an utterance.
You guess, of course, that behind this procedure there
lie concealed assumptions which have not yet been men-
tioned. But let us proceed. In what order shall we get
the patient to take the parts of his dream? Here we
have a variety of courses open to us. We can simply

20

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

follow the chronological order in which the dream has
been presented to us in description. That is what one
might call the strictest, the classical method. Or we can
ask the dreamer to look for the residue of the previous
day in his dream, because experience has taught us that
in almost every dream is incorporated a memory trace
of, or an allusion to, an event (or it may be several
events) of the previous day; and if we follow up these
links we often discover all of a sudden the bridge from
the apparently remote dream-world to the real life of
the patient. Or else we tell him to begin with those
elements in the dream-content which have struck him
on account of their clarity and sensuous force. We
happen to know that it is particularly easy for him to
obtain associations to such elements. It makes no dif-
ference by which of these ways we choose to reach the
associations we are looking for.

And now let us consider these associations. They
consist of the most varied material, memories of the
day before, the 'dream day," and memories of times
long since passed, deliberations, arguments for and
against, admissions and questionings. A great many
of them are poured out by the patient with ease, while
he hesitates when he reaches others. Most of them show
a clear connection with one of the elements of the dream,
and no wonder, because they have actually sprung from
these elements; but it may also happen that the patient
introduces them with the words: 'That doesn't seem to
have anything to do with the dream at all; I say it
because it comes into my head."

When one listens to this flood of ideas, one soon no-
tices that they have more in common with the content

21

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

of the dream than the mere fact that it provided them
with their origin. They throw an astonishingly clear
light on all the parts of the dream, they fill in the gaps
between them, and they make their odd juxtaposition
intelligible. Finally, we must get clear the relation be-
tween them and the content of the dream. The dream
seems to be an abridged extract from the associations,
which has been put together in accordance with rules
which we have not yet considered; its elements are like
the representatives of a multitude which have beeen
chosen by vote. There is no doubt that our technique
has enabled us to discover what the dream has replaced,
and wherein lies its psychological value; and what we
have discovered displays no longer the bewildering
peculiarities of the dream, its strangeness and its con-
fused nature.

But let us have no misunderstanding. The associa-
tions to the dream are not the latent dream-thoughts.
These are contained, but not completely contained, in
the associations. On the one hand, the associations
produce a great deal more than we require for the
formulation of the latent dream-thoughts, namely, all
the elaborations, the transitions and the connecting
links, which the intellect of the patient must produce
on the road which leads to the dream-thoughts. On
the other hand, the association has often stopped short
immediately before it has reached the dream-thoughts
themselves; it has only touched them allusively. We
now play a part ourselves: we follow up the indications,
we draw inevitable conclusions and bring out into the
open what the patient in his associations has only
touched upon. That sounds as if we allow our clever-

22

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

ness and our arbitrary imagination to play with the
material which the dreamer has placed at our disposal,
and misuse it to the extent of reading into his utter-
ances what we have no business to find there; and indeed
it is no easy matter to show the propriety of our be-
haviour in an abstract exposition. But if you try a
dream-analysis yourselves, or make yourselves familiar
with a well-described example from our literature, you
will be convinced of the compelling manner in which
such a process of interpretation unfolds itself.
Although in dream-interpretation we are in general
and predominantly dependent on the associations of the
dreamer, nevertheless we treat certain elements of the
content quite independently-mainly because we have
to, because, as a rule, associations refuse to come. We
noticed at an early stage that this happens always in
connection with the same material; these elements are
not very numerous, and long experience has taught us
that they are to be taken as symbols for something else,
and to be interpreted as such. In comparison with the
other elements of the dream one can give them a per-
manent meaning, which need not, however, be am-
biguous, and the limits of which are determined by
special laws, which are of an unusual kind. Since we
understand how to translate these symbols, while the
dreamer does not, although he himself has made use
of them, it may very well be that the sense of the dream
is immediately clear to us, even before we have begun
the work of dream-interpretation, as soon as we have
heard the text of the dream, while the dreamer himself
is still puzzled by it. But in the earlier lectures I have
already said so much about symbolism, about our
23

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

knowledge of it, and about the special problems to which
it gives rise, that I need not go over the same ground
again to-day.

That, then, is our method of dream-interpretation.
The next and very proper question is-can we by these
means interpret every dream? - And the answer is-no,
not every one; but so many that we can afford to be
absolutely certain about the utility and correctness of
our procedure. But why not all? The recent answer to
this question will teach us something important, which
has a bearing on the psychological conditions of dream
formation. It is because the work of interpretation
is carried on in the face of resistance, which may vary
from an imperceptible amount to an amount so great
that we cannot overcome it-at any rate with the means
which are at present at our disposal. One cannot help
observing the manifestation of this resistance during the
interpretation. In many places the associations are
given without hesitation, and the first or second of
them already provides us with the explanation. In
other places the patient pauses and hesitates before he
utters an association, and then one often has to listen
to a long chain of ideas before one gets anything which
is of any use for the understanding of the dream. We
are right in supposing that the longer and the more
circuitous the chain of associations, the stronger is the
resistance. And in the forgetting of dreams, too, we
sense the same influence. Often enough it happens
that, however much he may try, the patient cannot
remember one of his dreams. But when, by a piece of
analytical work, we have removed a difficulty which has
been disturbing the patient in his relation to the analysis,

24

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

the forgotten dream will come into his mind quite sud-
denly. Two more observations may be mentioned
here. It very often happens that a piece of the dream
is missing, which is eventually added as an afterthought.
This is to be regarded as an attempt to forget that par-
ticular piece. Experience shows that it is this very
piece of the dream which is the most valuable; we sup-
pose that a stronger resistance stood in the way of its
communication than was the case with the other parts.
And, furthermore, we often find that a patient may try
to combat the forgetting of his dreams by writing them
down immediately after he wakes up. We may as well
tell him that it is useless to do so, because the resistance
from which he may have preserved the text of the dream
will then transfer itself to the associations and render
the manifest dream inaccessible for interpretation.
This being the case, we need not be surprised if a fur-
ther increase of the resistance suppresses the associa-
tions altogether, and thus frustrates the interpretation of
the dream entirely.

From all this we draw the conclusion that the resist-
ance which we come across during the process of dream-
interpretation must play some part in the formation of
the dream as well. One can actually distinguish be-
tween dreams which have been formed under low
pressure of resistance and those in which the resistance
has been high. But this pressure also changes within
the same dream from one place to another; it is respon-
sible for the gaps, the obscurities and the confusion
which may upset the coherence of the most beautiful
dreams.

But what is the resistance doing here, and what is it

25

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

resisting? - Now for us a resistance is the sure sign of
a conflict. There must be a force present which is try-
ing to express something, and another which is striving
to prevent its expression. What comes into being as
the manifest dream may, therefore, be regarded as com-
prising all the solutions to which the battle between these
two opposing forces can be reduced. At one point one
of the forces may have been able to get through what it
wanted to say, at another the counteracting force may
have succeeded in abolishing the intended communica-
tion entirely, or may have substituted for it something
which betrays no sign of it. The most usual cases, and
those which are the most characteristic of the process of
dream-formation, are those in which the conflict results
in a compromise, so that the communicating force can
indeed say what it wants to say, but not in the way it
wants to say it; it is toned down, distorted and made un-
recognizable. If therefore the dream does not faithfully
represent the dream-thoughts, if a process of interpreta-
tion is necessary to bridge the gulf between the two, this
is the result of the counteracting, inhibiting and restrain-
ing force whose existence we have inferred from per-
ceiving the resistance in dream-interpretation. So long
as we regarded the dream as an isolated phenomenon, -
independent of other psychological formations which
are allied to it, we called this force the dream-censor.

You have long been familiar with the fact that this
censorship is not a mechanism which is peculiar to
dreams. You remember that the conflict of two psychic/
factors, which we-roughly-call the repressed uncon-
scious and the conscious, dominates our lives, and that
the resistance against the interpretation of dreams, the

26

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

hall-mark of the dream-censorship, is none other than
the repression-resistance which keeps these two factors
apart. You also know that under certain conditions
other psychological formations emerge from the con-
flict between these same factors, formations which are
the result of compromises just as dreams are; and you
will not require me to repeat all that is involved in my
introduction to the theory of the neuroses in order to put
before you what we know about the conditions under
which such compromise formations come about. You
will have realized that the dream is a pathological prod-
uct, the first member of the series which includes the
hysterical symptom, the obsession and the delusion
among its members; it is differentiated from the others
by its transitoriness and by the fact that it occurs under
conditions which are part of normal life. For we must
never forget that the dream-life is, as Aristotle has al-
ready told us, the way our mind works during sleep.
The state of sleep represents a turning away from the
real external world, and thus provides a necessary con-
dition for the development of a psychosis. The most
penetrating study of serious cases of psychosis will re-
veal no characteristic which is more typical of these
pathological conditions. (In psychoses, however, the
turning away from reality is brought about in two ways; |
either because the repressed unconscious is too strong, : }
so that it overwhelms the conscious which tries to cling
on to reality, or because reality has become so unbear- |
ably painful that the threatened ego, in a despairing ;
gesture of opposition, throws itself into the arms of |
the unconscious impulses. ) The harmless dream-psy-
chosis is the result of a consciously willed, and only
27

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

temporary, withdrawal from the external world; it
ceases to operate when relations with the external world
are resumed. While the sleeper is isolated, there is an
alteration in the distribution of his psychic energy; part
of the repressive expenditure, which is otherwise used
to keep down the unconscious, can be saved, for if the
unconscious makes use of its relative freedom and enters
on some activity, it finds the avenue to motor expression
stopped up, and only the innocent outlet of hallucinatory
satisfaction open to it. It can now, therefore, form a
dream, but the fact of dream-censorship shows that
enough repressive resistance remains operative even dur-
ing sleep.

Here we have an opportunity of answering the ques-
tion whether the dream has also a function to perform,
whether any useful task is entrusted to it. The condi-
tion of repose without stimuli, which the state of sleep
attempts to bring about, is threatened from three sides:
in a chance fashion by external stimuli during sleep, by
interests of the day before which have not yet abated
and, in an unavoidable manner, by the unsatisfied
repressed impulses, which are ready to seize on any
opportunity for expression. On account of the nightly
reduction of the repressive forces, the risk is run that
the repose of sleep will be broken every time the outer
and inner disturbances manage to link up with one of
the unconscious sources of energy. The dream-process
allows the result of such a combination to discharge
itself through the channel of a harmless hallucinatory
experience, and thus insures the continuity of sleep.
There is no contradiction of this function in the fact
that the dream sometimes wakes the sleeper in a state

28

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

of anxiety; it is rather a sign that the watcher regards
the situation as being too dangerous, and no longer
thinks he can cope with it. Quite often, indeed, while
we are still asleep, we are aware of the comforting
thought, which is there to prevent our waking up: 'after
all, it is only a dream.'

That is all, ladies and gentlemen, that I wanted to
say about dream-interpretation, the business of which is
to trace the manifest dream back to the latent dream-
thoughts. When this has been done, the interest in the
dream from the point of view of practical analysis
fades. The analyst links up the communication which
he has received in the form of a dream with the patient's
. other communications and proceeds with the analysis.
We, however, wish to linger a little longer over the
dream; we are tempted to study the process by means
of which the latent dream-thoughts are transformed into
the manifest dream. We call this the dream-work. You
will remember that in the previous lectures I described
it in such detail that, for to-day's review of the subject,
1 can confine myself to the briefest summary.

The process of dream-work is something quite new
and strange, the like of which has never before been
known. It has given us our first glimpse into those proc-
esses which go on in our unconscious mental system, and
shows us that they are quite different from what we know
about our conscious thought, and that to this latter they
must necessarily appear faulty and preposterous. The
importance of this discovery is increased when we realise
that the same mechanisms-we hardly dare call them
thought processes'-are at work in the formation of neu-

29

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

rotic symptoms as have turned the latent dream-thoughts
into the manifest dream.

In what follows I cannot avoid making my exposition
a schematic one. Supposing we have before us in a
given instance all the latent thoughts, more or less affec-
tively toned, which have taken the place of the manifest
dream after a complete interpretation. We shall then
notice a distinction among them, and this distinction will
take us a long way. Almost all these dream-thoughts
will be recognised or acknowledged by the dreamer; he
will admit that he thought thus at one time or another,
or that he might very well have done so. But he may
resist the acceptation of one single thought, it is foreign
to him, perhaps even repellent; it may be that he will
passionately repudiate it. Now it becomes clear to us
that the other thoughts are bits of his conscious, or, more -
correctly, of his pre-conscious thought; they might very
well have been thought during waking life, and have
probably formed themselves during the day. This one
rejected thought, or, better, this one impulse, is a child
of the night; it belongs to the unconscious of the dreamer,
and is therefore disowned and repudiated by him. It
had to await the nightly relaxation of repression in order
to achieve any sort of expression. In any case the ex-
pression that it obtains is enfeebled, distorted and dis-
guised; without the work of interpretation we should
never have discovered it. It is thanks to its connection
with the other unobjectionable dream-thoughts that this
unconscious impulse has had the opportunity of slipping
past the barrier of the censorship in an unostentatious
disguise; on the other hand, the pre-conscious dream-
thoughts owe to the same connection their power of oc-

30

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

cupying the mental life, even during sleep. We can,
indeed, have no doubt about this:/the unconscious im-.
pulse is the real creator of the dream, it provides the
psychic energy required for its formation. Just like any
other instinctual impulse it can do no other than seek its
own satisfaction, and our experience in dream-interpre-
tation shows us, moreover, that this is the meaning of all
dreaming. In every dream an instinctual wish is dis-
played as fulfilled. The nightly cutting-off of msntal
life from reality, and the regression to primitive mecha-
nisms which it makes possible, enable this desired in-
stinctual satisfaction to be experienced in a hallucinatory
fashion as actually happening. On account of the same
process of regression ideas are turned into visual pictures
in the dream; the latent dream-thoughts are, that is to
say, dramatized and illustrated.

From this piece of dream-work we obtain information
about some of the most striking and peculiar character-
istics of the dream. Let me repeat the stages of dream-
formation. The introduction: the wish to sleep, the
voluntary withdrawal from the outside world. Two
things follow from this: firstly, the possibility for older
and more primitive modes of activity to manifest them-
selves, i.e. regression; and secondly, the decrease of the
repression-resistance which weighs on the unconscious.
As a result of this latter feature an opportunity for
dream-formation presents itself, which is seized upon by
the factors which are the occasion of the dream; that is
to say, the internal and external stimuli which are in
activity. - The dream which thus eventuates is already a
compromise-formation; it has a double function: it is
on the one hand in conformity with the ego ("'ego-

31

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

syntonic'), since it subserves the wish to sleep by drain-
ing off the stimuli which would otherwise disturb it,
while on the other hand it allows to a repressed impulse
the satisfaction which is possible in these circumstances
in the form of an hallucinatory wish-fulfilment. The
whole process of dream-formation, which is permitted
by the sleeping ego, is, however, under the control of
the censorship, a control which is exercised by what is
left of the forces of repression. I cannot explain the
process more simply; it is not in itself simpler than that.
But now I can proceed with the description of the dream-
work.

Let us go back once more to the latent dream-thoughts.
Their dominating element is the repressed impulse, which
has obtained some kind of expression, toned down and
disguised though it may be, by associating itself with
stimuli which happen to be there and by tacking itself
on the residue of the day before. Just like any other
impulse this one presses forward toward satisfaction in
action, but the path to motor discharge is closed to it on
account of the physiological characteristics of the state
of sleep, and so it is forced to travel in the retrograde
direction to perception, and content itself with an halluci-
natory satisfaction. The latent dream-thoughts are there-
fore turned into a collection of sensory images and visual
scenes. As they are travelling in this direction some-
thing happens to them which seems to us new and be-
wildering. All the verbal apparatus by means of which
the more subtle thought-relations are expressed, the
conjunctions and prepositions, the variations of declen-
sion and conjugation, are lacking, because the means
of portraying them are absent: just as in primitive,

32

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

grammarless speech, only the raw material of thought
can be expressed, and the abstract is merged again in
the concrete from which it sprang. What is left over
may very well seem to lack coherence. It is as much
the result of the archaic regression in the mental ap-
paratus as of the demands of the censorship that so much
use is made of the representation of certain objects and
processes by means of symbols which have become
strange to conscious thought. But of more far-reaching
import are the other alterations to which the elements
comprising the dream-thoughts are subjected. Such of
them as have any point of contact are condensed into
new unities. When the thoughts are translated into pic-
tures those forms are indubitably preferred which allow
of this kind of telescoping, or condensation; it is as
though a force were at work which subjected the mate-
rial to a process of pressure or squeezing together. As
a result of condensation one element in a manifest dream
may correspond to a number of elements of the dream-
thoughts; but conversely one of the elements from among
the dream-thoughts may be represented by a number of
pictures in the dream.

Even more remarkable is the other process of dis-
placement or transference of accent, which in conscious
thinking figures only as an error in thought or as a
method employed in jokes. For the individual ideas
which make up the dream-thoughts are not all of equal
value; they have various degrees of affective-tone at-
tached to them, and corresponding to these, they are
judged as more or less important, and more or less
worthy of attention. In the dream-work these ideas are
separated from their affects; the affects are treated

33

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

separately. They may be transferred to something
else, they may remain where they were, they may under-
go transformation, or they may disappear from the
dream entirely. The importance of the ideas which
have been shorn of their affect, reappears in the dream
in the form of the sensuous vividness of the dream-
pictures; but we notice that this accent, which should lie
on important elements, has been transferred to unimpor-
tant ones, so that what seems to be pushed to the fore-
front in the dream, as the most important element in it,
only plays a subsidiary role in the dream-thoughts, and
conversely, what is important among the dream-thoughts
obtains only incidental and rather indistinct representa-
tion in the dream. No other factor in the dream-work
plays such an important part in rendering the dream
strange and unintelligible to the dreamer. Displace-
ment is the chief method employed in the process of
dream-distortion, which the dream-thoughts have to
undergo under the influence of the censorship.

After these operations on the dream-thoughts the
dream is almost ready. There is still, however, a more
or less non-constant factor, the so-called secondary
elaboration, that makes its appearance after the dream.
has come into consciousness as an object of perception.
When the dream has come into consciousness, we treat
it in exactly the same way that we treat any content of
perception; we try to fill in the gaps, we add connecting
links, and often enough we let ourselves in for serious
misunderstandings. But this, as it were, rationalizing
activity, which at its best provides the dream with a
smooth fagade, such as cannot correspond to its real
content, may be altogether absent in some cases, or only

34

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

operate in a very feeble way, in which case the dream
displays to view all its gaps and inconsistencies. On
the other hand, one must not forget that the dream-work
too does not always function with equal force; quite
often it limits its activity to certain parts of the dream-
thoughts, while others are allowed to come into the
dream unaltered. In this event one has the impression
that one has carried out the most complicated and subtle
intellectual operations during the dream, that one has
made brilliant speculations or jokes, or that one has
come to decisions or solved problems; really, however,
all this is the result of our normal mental activity, and
may just as well have happened during the day before
the dream as during the night. It has nothing to do
with the dream-work, nor does it display any feature
which is characteristic of dreams. It is perhaps not
superfluous once more to emphasise the distinction which
subsists among the dream-thoughts themselves, between
the unconscious impulse and the residues of the pre-
ceding day. While the latter exhibit the whole variety
of our mental activity, the former, which is the real
motive force of the dream, always finds its outlet in a
wish-fulfilment.

I could have told you all that fifteen years ago; in
fact I actually did tell it you at the time. Now let us
bring together such modifications and new discoveries
as have been made during the interval.

I have already told you that I am afraid you will
find that there is very little to say; so you will not under-
stand why I have obliged you to listen to the same thing
twice over, and have obliged myself to say it. But
fifteen years have passed, and I hoped that in this way

35

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I might most easily re-establish contact with you. And
indeed these elementary matters are of such decisive
importance for the understanding of psycho-analysis,
that it is a good thing to hear them for a second time,
and the very fact that they have remained the same after
fifteen years is in itself something worth knowing.

You will naturally find in the literature of these years
a great deal of confirmatory material and exposition of
details, of which I only intend to give you examples. I
can also add to this a certain amount that was already
known before. Most of it has to do with symbolism and
the other methods of representation in dreams. Only
quite recently the physicians at an American university
refused to allow that psycho-analysis was a science, on
the ground that it admits of no experimental proof.
They might have raised the same objection against
astronomy; experimentation with the heavenly bodies is
after all exceedingly difficult. There one has to rely on
observation. - Nevertheless, certain Viennese investi-
gators have made a start on the experimental confirma-
tion of our theory of dream-symbolism. Dr. Schrétter
discovered as long ago as 1912 that when one orders a
deeply hypnotized person to dream of sexual activities,
the sexual material in the dream that is thus provoked
is represented by the symbols which are familiar to us.
For example, a woman is told to dream of sexual inter-
course with a lady friend of hers. In her dream the
friend appears with a travelling-bag, which has a label
pasted on it: 'Ladies only." Even more impressive are
the experiments of Betlheim and Hartmann (1924),
who worked with patients suffering from the so-called
Korsakow's syndrome. They told the patient stories

36

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

with a crude sexual content, and then noted the distor-
tions which appeared when he was asked to reproduce
what he had heard. Here again the symbols with which
we are familiar as standing for the sexual organs and
sexual intercourse cropped up, and among them the
symbol of a staircase, with regard to which the authors
very properly observe that it would be inaccessible to a
conscious intention to distort.

Silberer performed a very interesting series of ex-
periments in which he showed that one can surprise the
dream-work, as it were, in flagranti delicto, and see
how it translates the abstract thoughts into visual pic-
tures. When he tried to force himself, in a very tired
and sleepy condition, to perform an intellectual task,
the thought itself would escape him, and in its place
would come a visual image, which was often a substitute
for it.

Here is a simple example. The thought which Sil-
berer set before himself was that he must smooth out
an uneven passage in an article. His visual image was
that he saw himself planing a piece of wood. It often
happened in these experiments that it was not the idea
which was awaiting elaboration that formed the content
of the visual image, but his own state of mind while he
was trying to make the effort-the subjective condition
rather than the objective content. This Silberer calls a
functional phenomenon.' An example will easily show
you what is meant. The author is trying to make a com-
parison between the views of two philosophers about
some problem, but in his drowsiness one of these views
is always escaping him, and finally he has a vision of
himself asking information of a cross-grained secretary,

37

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

who is leaning over his desk and disregards him at first
and then looks at him with a disagreeable expression, as
if he would like to send him about his business. It is
probably due to the conditions of the experiment itself
that the visual images which are aroused in this way so
often represent introspective material.

Let us consider symbols a little longer. There were
some which we thought we had grasped, but about
which we were nevertheless troubled because we could
give no account of how that particular symbol got its
particular meaning. - In such cases any confirmation we
could get from other sources, from philology, folklore,
mythology or ritual, was particularly welcome. An
example of this kind was the symbol of a cloak. We
held that in a woman's dream a cloak stood for a man.
I hope now you will be impressed when you hear that
Reik (1920) tells us: 'In the ancient marriage cere-
mony of the Bedouins the bridegroom covers the bride
with a special cloak which is called an "aba," and at
the same time utters the ritual words: "Let no man in the
future cover thee but me" ' (from Robert Eisler, Wel-
tenmantel und Himmelszelit). We have also discovered
a great many new symbols, of which I will give you two
examples. According to Abraham (1922) a spider in
a dream is a symbol of the mother; but it means the
phallic mother, whom one fears, so that the fear of the
spider expresses the horror of incest with the mother and
the abhorrence felt towards the female genitals You
know perhaps that the mythological figure of the
Medusa's head is to be traced back to the same motif of
castration-fear. The other symbol of which I should
like to speak is the symbol of the bridge. Ferenczi has

38

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

explained it (1921-1922). It stands originally for the
male genital organ, which connects the parents with
each other during sexual intercourse; but it develops
into a wider set of meanings, which spring out of the
first. Since the male genital organ is responsible for
the fact that one can emerge from the waters of birth
into the world, the bridge depicts the passage from Yon-
der (not-yet-born-ness, the womb) to Here (life), and
since mankind also represents death as the return into
the mother's womb (into the water), the symbol of the
bridge gets the meaning of something that brings about
death; and finally, further removed from its original
meaning, it indicates transition, or any change of con-
dition whatever. That is why a woman who has not yet
overcome her desire to be a man so frequently dreams
of bridges which are too short to reach the other side.

Very often pictures and situations appear in the mani-
fest content of the dream which remind one of well-
known themes from fairy stories, legends and myths.
The interpretation of such dreams throws light on the
original motives which created these themes, though
naturally we must not forget the change of meaning
which this material has undergone during the passage
of time. Our work of interpretation uncovers what one
might call the raw material, which often enough may
be regarded as sexual in the broadest sense of the word,
but which has found the most varied application in later
elaborations. When we trace things back like this we
very often arouse the rage of all investigators who do
not share the analytical point of view, as though we were
seeking to deny or underestimate all the later develop-
ments which the raw material has undergone. None

39

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

the less such ways of looking at things are instructive
and interesting. The same is true of the tracing back
of various motifs of plastic art-as, for example, when
J. Eisler (1919), guided by the dreams of his patients,
interprets analytically the young man playing with a
little boy, portrayed in the Hermes of Praxiteles.
Finally, I cannot help mentioning how often mytho-
logical themes find their explanation through dream-
interpretation. The story of the Labyrinth, for exam-
ple, is found to be a representation of anal birth; the
tortuous paths are the bowels, and the thread of Ariadne
is the umbilical cord.

The method of representation which the dream-work
adopts, a fascinating and almost inexhaustible subject,
is constantly becoming better known to us as we study it
more closely. I will give you a few proofs of this. The
notion of frequency, for instance, is expressed in dreams
by means of the multiplication of similars. Listen to
this remarkable dream of a young girl. She goes into
a hall and finds there a person sitting on a chair; this
figure is repeated six times, eight times, and even more,
but every time the person is her father. This can easily
be understood when one learns from the additional
features which emerged in interpretation that the room
represents the womb. The dream then becomes
equivalent to the familiar fantasy of the young girl
who believes that she met her father during her intra-
uterine life, when he visited the womb during her
mother's pregnancy. The fact that an element in the
dream is turned the wrong way round, that the act of
entry is transferred from the father to the dreamer her-
self, should not lead you astray; it has indeed a special

40

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

meaning of its own. The multiplication of the father
image can only mean that the procedure in question was
frequently repeated. But then the dream always turns
temporal relations into spatial ones whenever it has to
deal with them. Thus, one may see in a dream a scene
between people who look very small and far away, as
if one were looking at them through the wrong end of a
pair of opera glasses. The smallness and the spatial
remoteness here mean the same; it is remoteness in time
that is meant, the interpretation being that it is a scene
from the far distant past. Besides this, you may remem-
ber that in my previous lectures I showed you, with the
help of examples, that we had learnt to make use even
of the purely formal characteristics of the manifest
dream for purposes of interpretation; that is to say, to
turn, them into the content of the latent dream-thoughts.
Now you know, of course, that all the dreams of one
night belong to the same context; but it is by no means
immaterial whether these dreams appear to the dreamer
as a continuum, or whether they are organized in several
pieces, and if so in how many. The number of pieces
often corresponds to the same number of distinct nodal
points in the chain of thoughts, which make up the latent
dream-thoughts; or it may correspond to forces in the
mental life of the dreamer which are struggling with one
another, and each of which finds its main (though not
its exclusive) expression in one particular part of the
dream. A short introductory dream and a long main
dream often stand to each other in the relation of con-
dition and consequent; of this you will find a very clear
example in the old lectures. A dream which the dreamer

describes as "somehow interpolated" really corresponds
41

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

to a dependent clause in the dream-thoughts. Franz
Alexander in his essay on pairs of dreams shows that
not infrequently two dreams which occur on the same
night play separate parts in the fulfilment of the dream-
function, so that taken together they provide a wish-
fulfilment in two steps, a thing which each alone does
not do. If a dream-wish has as its content some piece
of forbidden behaviour towards a certain individual,
then that person may appear in the first dream undis-
guised while the behaviour is only faintly indicated. In
the second dream it will be the other way round. The
behaviour will be openly shown, but the person will be
made unrecognizable, or else some indifferent person
will be substituted for him. It must be admitted that
this gives one an impression of deliberate artfulness. A
second and similar relation between two members of a
pair of dreams is that in which the one represents the
punishment and the other the sinful wish-fulfilment. It
is just as if one said: 'If I take the punishment on my-
self, then I can do the forbidden thing."

I must not detain you longer with such discoveries of
matters of detail, nor with discussions of the uses of
dream-interpretation in analytic work. I am sure you
are impatient to hear what alterations have been made
in our basic attitude towards the nature and meaning of
dreams. You will be prepared to hear that there is
little to tell. The most hotly disputed point of the whole
theory was undoubtedly the assertion that all dreams are
wish-fulfilments. The inevitable and ever-recurrent
objection from the laity that there are so many anxiety-

dreams has already been completely answered, I think,
42

| REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

'in my earlier lectures. We have kept our theory intact
by dividing dreams into wish-dreams, anxiety-dreams,
and punishment-dreams.

Even punishment-dreams are wish-fulfilments, but
they do not fulfil the wishes of the instinctual impulses,
but those of the critical, censuring and punishing func-
tion of the mind. If we are faced with a pure punish-
ment-dream, a simple mental operation will enable
us to reinstate the wish-dream to which the punishment-
dream was the proper rejoinder; on account of this
repudiation, the punishment-dream has appeared in
place of the wish-dream as the manifest one. You
know, ladies and gentlemen, that the study of dreams
was the first thing that helped us to understand the
neuroses. And you will not be surprised to hear that
our subsequent knowledge of the neuroses has influ-
enced our conception of the dream. As you will learn
presently, we have been forced to assume the existence
in the mind of a special criticising and forbidding func-
tion which we call the super-ego. Since we have now
recognised the dream-censorship as an activity of this
function, we have been led to consider the part which
the super-ego plays in dream-formation in greater
detail.

Only two serious difficulties face the wish-fulfilment
theory of dreams, the examination of which leads us far
afield and for which we have found no completely satis-
factory solution. The first difficulty is presented by the
fact that people who have had severe shocks or who
have gone through serious psychic traumas (such as

were frequent during the war, and are also found to lie
43

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
i

at the back of traumatic hysteria) are continually being
put back into the traumatic situation in dreams. Ac-
cording to our acceptation of the function of dreams,
this ought not to be the case. What conative impulse
could possibly be satisfed by this reinstatement of a
most painful traumatic experience? - It is indeed hard
to guess. We meet with the second fact almost daily
in our analytical work; it does not involve such a serious
objection as the other. You know that it is one of the
tasks of psycho-analysis to lift the veil of amnesia which
shrouds the earliest years of childhood and to bring the
expressions of infantile sexual life which are hidden
behind it into conscious memory. Now these first sexual
experiences of the child are bound up with painful
impressions of anxiety, prohibition, disappointment and
punishment. One can understand why they have been
repressed ; but, if so, it is difficult to see why they should
have such easy access to dream-life, why they should .
provide the pattern for so many dream-phantasies, and
why dreams are full of reproductions of these infantile
scenes and allusions to them. The pain that attaches to
them, and the wish-fulfilling tendency of the dream-work
would seem to be incompatible. But perhaps in this
case we exaggerate the difficulty. All the imperishable
and unrealisable desires which provide the energy for
the formation of dreams throughout one's whole life
are bound up with these same childish experiences, and
one can well trust to their ability with their powerful
upward thrust to force even material of a painful nature
to the surface. And, on the other hand, in the manner
in which this material is reproduced the efforts of the
dream-work are unmistakable; it disowns pain by means

44,

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

of distortion and turns disappointment into fulfilment.
In the case of the traumatic neuroses it is quite different;
here the dream habitually ends in anxiety. In my
opinion we ought not to shirk the admission that in such
cases the function of the dream fails. I will not have
recourse to the saying that the exception proves the rule;
the validity of this phrase seems to me very dubious.
But at any rate the exception does not do away with the
rule. If for the purposes of investigation one isolates
from every other mental process a single psychic activity
like the dream, one is enabled to discover the laws which
govern it; if one then puts it back into its place, one must
be prepared to find that one's discoveries are obscured
and interfered with when they come into contact with
other forces. We assert that the dream is a wish-fulfil-
ment; in order to take these last objections into account,
you may say that the dream is an attempted wish-fulfil-
ment. But for those who have an understanding for the
dynamics of the mind you will not be saying anything
different. Under certain conditions the dream can only
achieve its end in a very incomplete way, or has to
abandon it entirely; an unconscious fixation to the
trauma seems to head the list of these obstacles to the
dream-function. The sleeper has to dream, because the
nightly relaxation of repression allows the upward
thrust of the traumatic fixation to become active; but
sometimes his dream-work, which endeavours to change
the memory traces of the traumatic event into a wish-
fulfilment, fails to operate. In these circumstances the
result is that one becomes sleepless; one gives up all

idea of sleep because of one's fear of the failure of the
45

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

dream-function. The traumatic neurosis is an extreme
case, but one must also attribute a traumatic character
to infantile experiences as well; so one need not be sur-
prised if lesser disturbances of the function of the dream
occur in other circumstances.

46

ate
19s

CHAPTER 2

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT, LECTURE XXX

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN-To-day we are to travel along
a narrow path, but it may lead us to a wide prospect.

When you hear that I am going to talk about the con-
nection between dreams and the occult, you need hardly
feel surprised. Dreams are indeed often regarded as
the portal to the world of mysticism, and even to-day
seem to many to be in themselves an occult phenom-
enon. Even we, who have made them an object of
scientific study, cannot deny that several strands link
them up with those obscure regions. Mysticism-Oc-
cultism-what is meant by these terms? Do not imagine
that I shall attempt to provide you with a clear definition
of such hazy concepts. In a general and vague way we
all know what we mean by the terms,. They refer to a
kind of 'other world' which lies beyc..d the clear world,
with its inexorable laws, which science has built up for
us.

Occultism assumes that there are in fact more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philos-
ophy. Well, we need not be tied down by the narrow-
mindedness of the Schools; we are ready to believe
whatever is made plausible to us.

We intend to treat these things in just the same way

47

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

as we treat any other material for scientific investiga-
tion. First, we have to establish whether these processes
really occur, and then, but only then, when there is no
doubt as to their actuality, we can set about their ex-
planation. - But we cannot hide from ourselves the fact
that even the first step will be made difficult for us by
intellectual, psychological and historical factors. It is
by no means the same as when we start on any other
investigation.

Let us consider the intellectual difficulties first. Allow
me to give you a crude, obvious explanation of what I
mean. Supposing we are dealing with the constitution
of the interior of the earth. Admittedly we know noth-
ing certain about it. We suppose that it consists of
heavy metals in a molten condition. Now let us imagine
that some one asserts that the interior of the earth is
made of water impregnated with carbonic acid; that is
to say, a kind of soda-water. We shall certainly say
that it is very improbable, that it runs counter to all our
expectations, and that it does not take into consideration
the scientific data which have led us to put forward the
mental hypothesis. But for all that it is not unthink-
able. If any one shows us the way to prove the soda-
water hypothesis, we shall follow it without any
resistance. But now another person comes along who
seriously asserts that the centre of the earth is made of
jam. We shall behave quite differently towards his
theory. We shall say to ourselves that jam is not a
product of Nature but of human cookery; moreover, the
existence of that material presupposes the presence of
fruit-trees and their fruit, and we cannot see our way to
placing vegetation and human cookery in the centre of

48

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

the earth. The result of this intellectual objection will
be a diversion of our interests; instead of their being
directed on to the investigation itself, as to whether the
interior of the earth is really made of jam or not, we
shall wonder what kind of man it must be who can get
such an idea into his head, or at the most we shall ask
him where he got the idea from. The unfortunate in-
ventor of the jam hypothesis will be very much offended,
and will complain that we are refusing to consider an
objective evaluation of this theory out of what he calls
scientific prejudice. But his complaints will be in vain.
Prejudices, we feel, are not always to be deplored, but
are sometimes justified; and they are useful in saving us
unnecessary trouble. They are, indeed, nothing more
than conclusions drawn by analogy from other well-
founded judgments.

A whole number of occult theories make the same
impression on us as the jam theory, so that we feel
justified in putting them aside at the outset without test-
ing them. But it is not quite such a simple matter. An
analogy such as I have suggested-like all analogies-
proves nothing. In any case it is doubtful whether it
is a fair analogy, and it is obvious that it was our atti-
tude of scornful rejection which in the first instance
determined our choice of it. Prejudices are very often
useful and justified, but sometimes they are erroneous
and harmful, and one never knows when they will be
the one or the other. The history of Science is full of
examples which should warn us against too hasty a con-
demnation. For a long time it was thought to be an
absurd thesis that the stones which we now call meteor-
ites should have reached the earth from outer space,

49

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

or that mountains, the rocks of which contain remains of
shells, should once have formed the bed of the sea. And,
after all, not so very different a fate befell our psycho.
analysis itself, when it brought forward the discovery
of the uncorscious. We analysts, therefore, have special
reason to be cautious in making use of intellectual argu-
ments in the rejection of new theories, and we must
recognize that such arguments will not put us beyond
the reach of feelings of aversion, doubt and uncertainty.

I called the second factor psychological: By that I
meant the general human inclination towards credulity
and belief in the marvellous. From the very beginning,
when life imposes its stern discipline upon us, there
grows up in us a resistance against the restlessness and
monotony of the laws of thought, and against the need -
for putting things to the test of reality. Reason be-
comes an enemy that keeps us from so many possibilities
of pleasure. One discovers what a joy it is to escape
from it at least for a moment, and give oneself up to
the fascination of irrationality. The schoolboy amuses
himself by making up ridiculous plays on words, the
specialist makes fun of his own work after a scientific
congress, and even the serious-minded man enjoys an
occasional joke, More serious antagonism against
'Wisdom and Science, man's most prized powers," awaits
its opportunity; it is eager to prefer the miracle- man or
the natural healer to the 'trained' doctor, it makes us
warm towards the theories of the Occult, so long as its
reputed facts can be taken as breaches of law and rule.
It puts our critical faculty to sleep, falsifies our percep-
tion, and forces us to confirm and agree without real
justification. Any one who takes these human weak-

50

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

nesses into consideration has every reason to discount the
value of much of the information contained in occult
literature.

In referring to the third obstacle as the historical one
I had in mind the fact that nothing new is to be found in
the world of the occult. On the contrary, we meet again
in it with all the signs, wonders, prophecies and appari-
tions which have been handed down to us from remote
ages and in old books, and which we long ago thought
we had done with as being the offspring of unbridled
imagination or tendentious fraud, the product of a time
when the ignorance of mankind was at its height and
when the scientific spirit was still in its infancy. If we
accept as true what we are told by the occultists of our
own day, then we must be prepared to believe the ac-
counts which have come down to us from the past. And
then we remember that the traditions and sacred books
of all races are packed with such marvels, and that
religions base their claim to credibility precisely on
such extraordinary and wondrous happenings, and find
in them the proof of the operation of superhuman forces.
At this point it is hard for us to avoid the suspicion that
occult interests are really religious ones, and that it is
one of the secret motives of the occultist movements to
come to the aid of religious belief, threatened as it is by
the progress of scientific thought. The discovery of a
motive of this kind cannot fail to increase our mistrust
and our disinclination to embark upon an investigation
of these so-called occult phenomena.

But this disinclination must be overcome. The whole
thing is really a question of fact: is what the occultists
tell us true or not? It must be possible to decide this

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

by observation. Au fond we ought to be grateful to
the occultists. The tales of wonderful happenings which
have come down to us from ancient days are beyond our
powers of testing. If we say that they cannot be proved,
we must at least admit that, strictly speaking, they can-
not be disproved. But about what happens in the pres-
ent, about things which we can actually witness, we
ought to be able to reach a definite conclusion. If we
are convinced that such wonders do not occur nowadays,
we need not fear the objection that they might have
occurred in days gone by. Other explanations will then
be far more plausible. We have, then, put aside our
scruples and are ready to take part in the observation
of occult phenomena.

Unfortunately we come up against considerations
which are highly unfavourable to our laudable inten-
tions. The observations on which our judgments must
depend have to be made under conditions which render
our powers of perception insecure, and which blunt our
faculty of attention; the phenomena take place in the
dark or in the faint glimmer of a red light after long
periods of fruitless waiting. We are told that even
our sceptical-that is to say, our critical-attitude may
very well prevent the hoped for phenomena from mani-
festing themselves. The situation which thus arises is
simply a caricature of the conditions under which we
are used to carrying out scientific investigations. The
observations are made on so-called mediums, persons
to whom are ascribed special 'sensitive' gifts, who, how-
ever, do not display outstanding qualities of intelligence
or character, and who are not moved, as the old wonder-
workers were, by some great idea or by some serious

52

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

_ purpose. On the contrary, they are regarded as par-
ticularly untrustworthy even by the people who believe
in their mysterious powers; most of them have already
been unmasked as frauds, and we are tempted to expect
that the same will happen with the rest as well. Their
performances remind us of the mischievous pranks of a
child or of a conjuror's tricks. Nothing of any value
has so far ever come out of these séances with mediums;
no new source of energy has become accessible to us.
And, to be sure, one does not expect any advances in
our knowledge of pigeon-breeding from the tricks of a
conjuror who produces pigeons out of an empty top-
hat. I can easily put myself into the position of a man
who wishes to fulfil the demands of objectivity and there-
fore takes part in these occult séances, but tires of them
after a while, and, put off by what is required of him,
gives up the whole business and returns to his prejudices
no wiser than before. To such a man one might object
that his behaviour is not right, and that if one is going
to investigate phenomena one cannot decide beforehand
of what nature they shall be and under what conditions
they shall manifest themselves. It is, on the contrary,
his business to persevere and form some estimate of the
precautionary measures of control which are used nowa-
days as a protection against the untrustworthiness of
mediums. Unfortunately the modern control technique
puts an end to the easy accessibility of occult observa-
tions. The study of the occult has become a specialized
and difficult pursuit, a form of activity which one cannot
carry on side by side with one's other interests. And
until the investigators who have given their minds to it
53

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

have come to some conclusion, one is necessarily given
over to doubts and to one's own conjectures.

Among these conjectures the most probable is, I think,
that in occultism there is a core of facts which have
hitherto not been recognized, and round which fraud and
phantasy have woven a veil which it is hard to pene-
trate. - But how can we even approach this core? at what
point can we grasp the problem? - It is here, it seems to
me, that the dream comes to our aid by suggesting to
us that we should pick out the theme of telepathy from
all the confused material that surrounds it.

You know that by telepathy we mean the alleged fact
that an event which occurs at a specific time comes more
or less simultaneously into the consciousness of a person
who is spatially distant, without any of the known
methods of communication coming into play. The tacit
assumption is that this event occurs to a person, in whom
the receiver of the message has some strong emotional
interest. Thus, for example, a person A has an accident,
or dies, and a person B, some one closely connected with
A, his mother or daughter or loved one, learns of it at
about the time of its occurrence through a visual or
auditory perception; in the latter case it is as though they
were in telephonic communication, which, however, they
are not; in fact, it is a kind of psychic parallel to wireless
telegraphy. I need not emphasise to you the improba-
bility of such processes, and anyway there are good
grounds for rejecting the majority of such reports.
Some of them are left over which cannot be rejected so
easily, I must now ask you to allow me to leave out the
precautionary word 'alleged' for the purposes of what I
have to tell you, and to let me continue as though I be-

54

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

lieved in the objective reality of telepathic phenomena.
But you must remember all the time that this is not the
case, that I have not committed myself to any conclusion
on the subject.

As a matter of fact I have but little to tell you-only
one modest fact. And I will further diminish your
expectations by informing you that fundamentally the
dream has but little to do with telepathy. Telepathy
throws no new light on the nature of the dream, nor does
the dream bear witness for the reality of telepathy.
Telepathic phenomena are also by no manner of means
confined to dreams; they can also manifest themselves
during waking life. The only ground for mentioning
the connection between dreams and telepathy is that the
condition of sleep seems to be especially suitable for the
reception of telepathic communications. If then one
comes across a so-called telepathic dream, one can con-
vince oneself by its analysis that the telepathic message
has played the same role as any other residue of waking
life, and as such has been altered by the dream-work
and made to serve its purpose.

Now in the course of the analysis of a telepathic dream
of this kind something occurred which seems to me of
sufficient importance, in spite of its slightness, to serve as
the starting-point of this lecture. When in the year 1922
I brought up this subject for the first time, I had only one
observation at my disposal. Since then I have made
several other observations; but I shall keep to the first
example, because it is the easiest one to describe, and I
shall proceed at once to the heart of the matter.

An obviously intelligent man, and one who, according
to his own estimation, was in no way 'tainted with oc-

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

cultism' wrote to me about a dream which seemed to him
to be remarkable. He prefaced his story with the in-
formation that his married daughter, who lived some
distance from him, was expecting her first confinement
in the middle of December. He was very much devoted
to this daughter, and he knew that she was very much
attached to him. Now he dreamed in the night between
the 16th and 17th of November that his wife had had
twins. There followed several details which L can pass
over here, not all of which have found a satisfactory
explanation. The woman who, in the dream, had become
the mother of the twins, was his second wife, the daugh-
ter's step-mother. He did not wish to have children by
this woman, whom he did not consider fitted for bringing
up children in an understanding way, and at the time of
the dream he had for a long time given up sexual inter-
course with her. What induced him to write to me was
not a doubt about the validity of the theory of dreams,
though the manifest dream would have justified him if
that had been the case; for why does the dream, in flat
contradiction to his wishes, depict this woman as bearing
children? And according to his story he had no grounds
for fearing that this unwished-for occurrence might take
place. What determined him to tell me about his dream
was the fact that early in the morning of November 18th
he received a telegram to say that his daughter had given
birth to twins. The telegram had been handed in the
day before, and the birth had taken place during the
night between the 16th and 17th, at about the same time
that he had dreamt that his wife had had twins. The
dreamer asked me whether I thought that the simulta-
neity of the dream and the event was a mere coincidence.
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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

\He did not go far as to call the dream a telepathic one,
because the difference between the content of the dream
And the event itself concerned precisely what he con-
sidered to be the most important point, the person who
had the children. But from one of his remarks it looked
as though he would not have been surprised if he had
had a real telepathic dream. His daughter, he felt
certain, had 'thought especially about him' during
labour.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sure that you can already
explain the dream, and that you understand why I have
told it to you. Here is a man, dissatisfied with his second
wife, who would prefer to have a wife like his daughter
by his first marriage. In the unconscious this 'like' is
naturally omitted. Now during the night he receives the
telepathic communication that his daughter has had
twins. The dream-work seizes on this information,
allows his unconscious wish that his daughter should
replace his second wife to act upon it, and thus emerges
the singular manifest dream in which the wish itself is
veiled and the message distorted. We must admit that
only dream-interpretation has shown us that this is a
telepathic dream; psycho-analysis has discovered a
telepathic event which we should not otherwise have
recognized as such.

But do not let yourselves be led astray. In spite of
all this, dream-interpretation has said nothing about the
objective truth of telepathic phenomena. It may be only
an appearance which can be explained in some other
way. -It is possible that the man's latent dream-thoughts
ran like this: 'To-day is the day on which the confinement
must take place, if my daughter, as I incidentally believe

57

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

is the case, has been a month out in her calculations.
And her appearance when I saw her last time was such
that it looked as though she was going to have twins.
And my dead wife was so fond of children: how de-
lighted she would have been by twins!" (The last point
is derived from associations of the dreamer which I have
not yet mentioned.) In that case the stimulus for the
dream would have been well-founded suspicions on the
part of the dreamer and not a telepathic message; the
result would have been the same in both cases. You
notice that even this interpretation has told us nothing
about the question of whether one should assign objective
reality to telepathy. One could only come to a conclu-
sion about that after making detailed enquiries into all
the circumstances of the case, which unfortunately was
impossible with this example, as it was with all the others
in my experience. We may grant that the assumption
of telepathy gives us by far the simplest explanation;
but that does not carry us very far. The simplest ex-
planation is not always the right one, truth is very often
not simple, and one must act with the greatest caution
before committing oneself to such a far-reaching assump-
tion.

We can now leave the subject of dreams and telepathy;
1 have nothing more to say about it. But I want you to
notice that it was not dreams that seemed to teach us
something about telepathy, but the interpretation of the
dreams, the psycho-analytic treatment of them. We can
therefore leave dreams on one side in what follows, and
we will examine further our suspicion that the ap-
plication of psycho-analysis may throw a light on
other so-called occult facts. There is, for example, the

58

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

\

Bhenomenon of thought-transference, which is closely
allied to telepathy and, indeed, can be identified with
it \rithout much difficulty. It is held that psychological
processes, ideas, states of excitement, volitions, which
occir in the mind of one person, can be transferred
through space to another, without the usual means of
communication (words or signs) being employed. Inci-
dentally it is remarkable that it is actually these phe-
nomena which find the least mention in the old accounts
of the miraculous.

During the psycho-analytic treatment of patients I
have had the impression that the activities of profes-
sional fortune-tellers provide an admirable opportunity
for making really satisfactory observations of thought-
transference. It is usually mediocre and even inferior
people who carry on practices of this sort, deal out cards,
study writing and the lines upon the hand, or make
astrological reckonings, and foretell the future of their
visitors, after having shown some knowledge of their
past or present history. Their clients usually express
themselves as satisfied by their performances, and bear
them no ill-will if their prophecies do not come true in
the end. I have come across a great many such cases
and have been able to study them analytically. I will
tell you the most remarkable instance of the kind. Un-
fortunately the evidential value of this information is
reduced on account of the numerous omissions which are
necessitated by the rules of professional secrecy. Ihave,
however, carefully avoided any distortions. This is the
story of one of my female patients, who had an experi-
ence of the kind we are discussing with a fortune-teller.

She was the eldest of a family of brothers and sisters,

59

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

grew up with an extraordinarily strong attachment to her
father, had married young, and had found entire satis-
faction in her married life. There was only one thing
wanting to make her happiness complete; she was child-
less, and thus the husband whom she loved could not
wholly fill the place of her father. When after many
years she decided to have a gynaecological operation, her
husband disclosed to her the fact that the fault lay in
him, that through an illness which had occurred before
marriage he had been rendered incapable of procreating
children. She took this disappointment very badly, be-
came neurotic, and suffered unmistakably from dread
of the husband's attempts. In order to cheer her up, her
husband took her with him on a business visit to Paris.
While they were there, they were sitting one day in the
hall of the hotel when she noticed a stir among the
hotel servants. She asked what was happening, and
learnt that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived and was
giving consultations in a certain room. She expressed
her wish to see what the thing was like herself. Her
husband tried to dissuade her, but when he was not
looking she slipped into the room where the fortune-
teller was giving his consultations. She was twenty-
seven years old, but looked much younger, and she had
taken off her wedding-ring. Monsieur le Professeur
told her to rest her hand on a bowl filled with ashes,
carefully studied the imprint, and, after telling her all
sorts of things about severe troubles which lay before
her, concluded with the comforting assurance that she
would get married all the same and have two children
by the time she was thirty-two years of age. When she
told me this story she was forty-three, very ill, and with
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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

no expectation of ever having a child at all. The
prophecy therefore had not come true, and yet she
spoke of it with no bitterness whatever, but with an un-
mistakable expression of satisfaction, as though she
were looking back with pleasure upon a happy experi-
ence. It was easy to assure oneself that she had not the
slightest idea what the two numbers in the prophecy
might mean, or whether they meant anything at all.
You will say that this is a stupid and incomprehen-
sible story, and ask why I have related it to you. Now I
should feel exactly as you do, but for the fact-and this
is the important point-that the analysis enabled us to
obtain an interpretation of the prophecy, which was ac-
tually most significant when it came to the details. For
the two numbers have a place in the life of the mother
of my patient. She had married late, when she was
more than thirty, and her family had often remarked
how successful she had been in making up for lost time.
Her two first children-and our patient was the elder
of these-had been born within a single calendar year
with the smallest possible interval between them; and it
was really true of her that by the time she was thirty-
two she had two children. What Monsieur le Professeur
told my patient meant this: 'Cheer up, for you are still
young! You will have the same experience as your
mother, who also had to wait a long time for children,
and you will have two children by the time you are
thirty-two.' But to have the same experience as her
mother, to be in her position, to take her place with
her father, was the strongest wish of her childhood, the
wish whose non-fulfilment was beginning to make her
ill. The prophecy promised her that it would be ful-
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

filled, how could she feel otherwise than friendly towards
the prophet? But do you think that Monsieur le Pro-
fesseur could really have been familiar with the dates
of the intimate family history of a chance client? It
is impossible; whence, then, came the knowledge that
enabled him to express in his prophecy the strongest
and most secret wish of my patient by bringing in these
two numbers? I can see only two possibilities. Either
the story, as she told it me, was not true and the events
were different, or we must accept thought-transference
as a real phenomena. It could, no doubt, be argued
that my patient, after the lapse of sixteen years, had
carried over the two numbers we are discussing from
her unconscious into her recollection. I have no evi-
dence for this suggestion, but I cannot rule it out, and
I imagine that you would prefer to believe in such an
explanation rather than in the reality of thought-trans-
ference. If, however, you should accept the latter view,
do not forget that it was only analysis that brought to
light the occult element, which had been distorted out
of all recognition.

If we had to deal with only one case like that of
my patient, we should turn away from it with a shrug
of the shoulders. It would not occur to any one to base
a belief which has such far-reaching implications on
an isolated observation. But I can assure you that this
is not the only case in my experience. I have collected
a whole set of such prophecies, and I have the impres-
sion that in every instance the fortune-teller has only
given expression to the thoughts, and particularly to the
secret wishes, of his clients; so that we are justified in
analysing such prophecies as if they were the subjective

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

productions, phantasies or dreams of the people con-
cerned. Naturally not all cases have equal evidential
value, nor in all cases is it equally possible to rule
out more rational explanations; but taking all the evi-
dence together there remains a heavy weight of prob-
ability in favour of the reality of thought-transference.
The importance of the matter would justify my putting
all my cases before you; but I cannot do that because
the material would be of inordinate length and would
inevitably involve a breach of professional secrecy. I
will try to salve my conscience as far as possible by
giving you one or two more examples.

One day a very intelligent young man came to see
me. He was a student, preparing for his final medi-
cal examination; but he was not in a condition to take
it, because, as he complained, he had lost all his inter-
ests, all power of concentration, and even the faculty
of a well-ordered memory. The history of this para-
lysing condition was soon unravelled: he had fallen ill
after carrying through a line of conduct which had
necessitated great self-discipline. He had a sister
towards whom he felt, just as she did towards him,
an intense but always restrained affection. They had
often enough said to each other: 'What a shame it is
that we cannot marry!" An unobjectionable man had
fallen in love with the sister, and she had returned his
feeling, but her parents would not give their consent
to the union. The couple had turned to my patient for
help, and he bad not refused it. He had enabled them
to correspond with each other, and it had been due to
his influence that the parents had eventually been per-
suaded to give their consent. While they were en-

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

gaged, a chance occurrence had taken place, whose
significance it is easy to guess. He and his future
brother-in-law undertook a difficult climb without a
guide; they lost their way, and were in danger of never
returning alive. Shortly after the marriage of his sister
he had fallen into his present state of mental exhaustion.

When he had become able to work as a result of
psycho-analysis, he left me to take his examination; but
after he had got through it he came back to me in the
autumn of the same year for a short period. He then
told me of a remarkable experience which he had had
before the summer. In his university town there lived a
fortune-teller, who carried on a very successful practice
there. Even the princes of the reigning house used to
consult her regularly before undertaking any important
step. The way in which she worked was very simple.
She asked for the facts concerning the birth of the per-
son involved, but wanted to know nothing else about him,
not even his name. She then consulted her astrological
books, made long calculations and in the end made a
prophecy about him. My patient decided to make use
of her secret arts in connection with his brother-in-law.
He visited her and gave her the requisite data about him.
After she had made her calculations she pronounced the
following prophecy: 'This person will die in July or
August of this year of poison from eating crabs or
oysters." My patient finished his story by explaining:
"And that really was marvellous!

From the very beginning, I had listened to his story
without enthusiasm; and after this exclamation I per-
mitted myself to ask: 'What is it that makes you find this
prophecy so marvellous? We have already reached the

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

late autumn, and your brother-in-law is not dead yet, or
you would have told me long ago,. The prophecy there-
fore has not come true.' "The prophecy-no,' he said,
'but the remarkable thing is this. My brother-in-law is
passionately fond of crabs and oysters, and last summer,
that is to say before my visit to the fortune-teller, he was
poisoned by eating oysters, and nearly died of it."
What could I say about it? I could only feel distressed
that such an intelligent man, and moreover one who had
a satisfactory analysis behind him, should not have seen
through the whole thing more clearly. For my part,
before I believe that one can calculate the onset of
shellfish-poisoning by consulting astrological tables, I
would rather suppose that my patient had not yet over-
come his hatred towards his rival, the repression of
which had caused his own illness, and that the lady
astrologer simply gave voice to his own hope: 'People
never give up such tastes, and one day they will really
be the end of him.' I admit that I can find no other
explanation for this case, except perhaps that my pa-
tient was making a joke at my expense. But neither
then nor later did he give me any grounds for such a
suspicion, and he seemed to mean quite seriously what
he said.

Here is another case. A young man of good position
had a mistress, and showed a remarkable obsession in
his relations with her. From time to time he was im-
pelled to wound her feelings with insulting remarks till
she was reduced to despair. When he had got her into
this condition he felt relieved, made it up with her and
gave her presents. But now he wanted to free him-
self from her, for the obsession was becoming a worry

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

to him: he noticed that his professional life was suffer-
ing from the relationship, and wanted to have a wife
and family of his own. Since, however, he could not
get away from his mistress by his own efforts, he came
to analysis for help. After one of these scenes, which
occurred during the analysis, he got her to write him
a few words on a piece of paper and showed it to a
graphologist. The information he received from him
was to the effect that this was the handwriting of a
person in the depths of despair, who would certainly
commit suicide in the course of the next few days.
That event did not indeed come about, for the lady
remained alive, but the analytical treatment enabled
him to free himself from his fetters; he left the lady,
and turned his attentions to a young girl who he thought
would make him a good wife. Soon afterwards he had
a dream which could only be explained as due to an
incipient doubt about the young girl's worth. He ob-
tained a specimen of her handwriting as well, which
he placed before the same authority, and received a
judgment on it which confirmed his anxieties. He there-
fore gave up his intention of making her his wife.

To estimate the reports of the handwriting expert,
and particularly the first one, at their proper value,
one must know something of the private history of our
subject. In his early adolescent years he was madly
in love with a young woman, some years older than him-
self, in the passionate way that was characteristic of
him. She rejected him and he thereupon attempted
suicide; nor can we doubt the seriousness of his inten-
tion. It was only by a miracle that he escaped death,
and it was only after careful nursing that he recovered.

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

But this reckless act made a deep impression upon the
woman he was in love with; she responded to his atten-
tions, and became his mistress. From that time onwards
he had a deep attachment to her, and served her in a
truly devoted manner. After more than two decades,
when they had both lost something of their youth, the
woman naturally more than he, he felt the need of de-
taching himself from her; he wanted to be free, to
lead his own life, and to have a house and family of
his own. And at the same time that he felt this dis
satisfaction, there sprang up in him the long-suppressed
need for revenge upon her. Just as at first he had tried
to commit suicide himself, because she rejected him, so
now he wanted to have the satisfaction of seeing her
seek destruction because he was leaving her. But his
love was still too strong for this wish to become con-
scious; nor was he able to behave badly enough to her
to drive her to commit suicide. In this frame of mind
he took on the mistress whom I first mentioned as a kind
of whipping-boy, in order to satisfy his thirst for re-
venge in corpore vili, and inflicted on her all the injuries
calculated to produce in her the effect he desired to
produce in the woman he loved. The fact that the re-
venge was actually directed towards the latter was only
betrayed by the circumstances that he made her a con-
federate and advisor in his love-affair, instead of hiding
his lapse from her. The unfortunate woman, who had
sunk from the position of giving favours to that of
receiving them, probably suffered from his confidences
more than the new mistress did from his brutality. The
obsession of which he complained in reference to the
latter, and which brought him under analytic treatment,
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

had naturally been transferred from his first mistress
to her; it was from his first mistress that he wanted
to free himself and could not. I am no handwriting
expert, and I do not think much of the art of guessing
character from handwriting; still less do I believe in the
possibility of foretelling the future of the writer in that
way. You see, however, that, whatever one may think
of the value of graphology, it is undeniable that the
expert, when he promised that the writer of the speci-
men which had been brought to him would commit sui-
cide during the next few days, had once more only
brought to light a very strong secret wish on the part
of the person who was asking his opinion. Something
similar happened in the case of the second report, only
that here we are not concerned with an unconscious
wish; here it was the incipient doubts and anxieties of
the inquirer that found overt expression through the
mouth of the handwriting specialist. I may add that
my patient was able with the help of analysis to make
a love-choice outside the magic circle within which he
had been spell-bound.

Ladies and Gentlemen-You have now heard what
dream-interpretation and psycho-analysis in general
can do for occultism. You have seen by means of ex-
amples that, through the application of psycho-analytic
theory, occult phenomena have been revealed which
would otherwise have remained unrecognised. The
question which doubtless interests you most, whether
we ought to believe in the objective reality of the phe-
nomena, is one which psycho-analysis cannot answer
directly; but at least the material which it has helped
to bring to light is favourable to an affirmative reply.

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

1

But your interest will not stop there. You will want
to know to what conclusion that far richer vein of ma-
terial, with which psycho-analysis has nothing whatever
to do, leads us. There, however, I cannot follow you;
it is no longer my province. The only thing I can do,
is to tell you of some observations, which at any rate
have something to do with psycho-analysis in the sense
that they were made during analytical treatment, and
were perhaps rendered possible by means of it. I will
give you one example, the one which left the strongest
impression with me; it will be long-winded, and you will
have to keep a number of details in your minds, and
even so a great deal will have to be omitted which in-
creased the evidential value of the observation. It is
an instance in which the phenomena in which we are
interested came to light quite obviously and did not
have to be brought out by analysis. In discussing it,
however, we shall not be able to do without analysis.
But I ought to warn you beforehand that even this ex-
ample of apparent thought-transference in the analytic
situation is not proof against all objections, and does
not warrant unconditional acceptance of the reality of
occult phenomena.

The story is this. One autumn day in the year 1919,
at about 10.45 a.m., Dr. David Forsyth, who had just
arrived from London, sent in his card while I was work-
ing with a patient. (My respected colleague from the
University of London will, I feel sure, not think I am
being indiscreet if I tell you that he came to me for
some months to be initiated into the mysteries of psycho-
analytical technique.) I had only time to say 'How do
you do?', and arrange an appointment for later on.

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Dr. Forsyth had a special claim upon my interest; for
he was the first foreigner who came to me after the iso-
lation of the war years, and seemed to be a harbinger
of better times. Soon after this, at eleven o'clock, my
next patient arrived, a Mr. P., an intelligent and charm-
ing man of between forty and fifty, who had come to me
because he experienced difficulties in sexual intercourse
with women. - In his case there was no prospect of bring-
ing about a cure, and I had long ago suggested that he
should break off the treatment; but he had preferred to
continue it, obviously because he felt comfortable in a
well-tempered father-transference upon myself. Money
played no part at this time, because there was too little
of it about. The hours I spent with him were stimu-
lating for me as well, and a relaxation, and so, setting
aside the strict rules of medical etiquette, we were going
on with the analytic treatment for a specified length
of time.

On this particular day P. reverted to his attempts at
sexual intercourse with women, and mentioned once
more the pretty, piquante girl, in poor circumstances,
with whom he might have been successful if only the
fact of her virginity had not frightened him off from
taking any serious steps. He had often spoken of her,
but that day he told me for the first time that she, though
naturally she had not the slightest idea of the real
grounds of his difficulty, used to call him Mr. Foresight
[Vorsicht]. Iwas much struck by this piece of informa-
tion; Dr. Forsyth's card was beside me, and I showed
it to him.

These are the facts. I dare say they will seem to

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

you to be rather thin; but if you will have patience
you will find that there is more to come.

P. had spent some years of his youth in England,
and had retained a lasting interest in English litera-
ture. He possessed a well-stocked library of English
books, which he used to lend me, and it is to him that
I owe my acquaintance with authors such as Arnold
Bennett and Galsworthy, of whose works I had so far
read but little. One day he lent me a novel by Gals-
worthy called The Man of Property, the subject of
which is an imaginary family named Forsyte. Gals-
worthy's imagination was obviously captured by this
creation of his, because in the later stories he repeatedly
went back to members of this family, and eventually
collected all the stories which had to do with them under
the heading of The Forsyte Saga. Only a few days
before the event I am telling you about, P. had brought
me a new volume out of this series. The name Forsyte
and all that it typified for the author, had played a
part in my conversations with P.; it had become a part
of the private language which so easily grows up be-
tween two people who see each other regularly. Now
the name Forsyte out of the novels is not very different
from that of my visitor Forsyth (as pronounced by a
German, indeed, they are hardly distinguishable), and
the expressive English word "foresight," which means
'Voraussicht or 'Vorsicht/ would be pronounced in the
same way. P. had, therefore, produced from his own
personal experiences a name that was in my mind at
the same time on account of a circumstance quite
unknown to him.

As you see, we are making some progress. But I

T1

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

think we shall be even more strongly impressed by this
remarkable occurrence and get some sort of insight into
the conditions of its origin, if we turn the light of
analysis on to two other associations which P. brought
up during the same hour.

First: One day in the preceding week I was expect-
ing Mr. P. at 11 o'clock, but he had not appeared, and
I went out to pay a call on Dr. Anton v. Freund at
his pension. I was surprised to find that Mr. P. lived
on another floor of the same house in which the pension
was. - Referring to this later, I told P. that I had in a
sense paid him a visit at his house; but I am absolutely
certain that I did not mention the name of the person
whom I had visited in the pension, and now, soon after
the mention of Mr. Foresight, he asked me the following
question: 'Is the lady called Freud-Ottorego who gives
the English course at the Volks-universtit your daughter
by any chance?" And for the first time in our long
acquaintance he let slip the distorted form of my name,
to which officials, clerks, and printers have accustomed
me; instead of Freud, he said Freund.

Secondly: At the end of the hour he told me a dream,
out of which he had woken with a feeling of anxiety,
a regular 'Alptraum' [nightmare] he called it. He
added that he had recently forgotten the English word
for it, and had told some one who had asked him, that
the English for 'Alptraum' was 'a mare's nest! That
is of course, absurd, because 'a mare's nest' means
nothing of the sort, and the correct translation of 'Alp-
traum" is 'nightmare.' This association seemed to have
nothing more in common with the others than the ele-
ment of English'; but he reminded me of a trivial oc-

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

currence which had happened about a month before.
P. was sitting in my room with me, when there appeared
quite unexpectedly another welcome guest from London,
Dr. Ernest Jones, whom I had not seen for a long time.
I nodded to him to go into my other room until I had
finished with P. The latter recognised him at once,
however, from a photograph of him which hung in the
waiting-room, and even asked to be introduced to him.
Now Jones is the author of a monograph on the night-
mare. I did not know whether P. was acquainted with
the book; he avoided reading analytical literature.

At this point I should like to consider what analytical
understanding we can obtain of P.'s associations and
their motivations. P. had the same attitude towards
the name Forsyte as I had; it meant the same to him
as it did to me, and in fact it was to him that I owed
my knowledge of the name. The remarkable thing was
that he brought this name into the analysis immediately
after it had acquired another meaning for me through
a recent experience, namely the arrival of the physi-
cian from London. But perhaps not less interesting is
the way in which the name came up in his analytical
hour. He did not say: 'Now the name Forsyte, out of
the novels you have read, comes into my mind," but,
without any conscious reference to this source, he man-
aged to weave it into his own personal experiences and
brought it to the surface in that way-a thing which
might have happened long before, but which had not
as a matter of fact occurred until now. At this juncture,
however, he said: 'I am a Forsyte, too, for that is what
the girl called me.' One cannot mistake the mixture
of exacting jealousy and plaintive self-depreciation

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

which finds expression in this utterance. We shall not
go far wrong if we complete it thus: 'I am hurt that
your thoughts should be so much wrapped up in this
new-comer. Come back to me; after all, I am a For-
syth too,-or rather only a Mr. Foresight, as the girl
called me.' And now, starting from the idea of 'Eng-
lish," his train of thought worked back to two earlier
situations, which might very well have aroused the same
jealousy in him. 'A few days ago you paid a visit
at my house, but, alas, it was not to me, it was to a
Herr v. Freund. This idea made him distort the name
Freud into Freund. The name Freud-Ottorego from
the lecture list came in, because as the name of a teacher
of English it paved the way for the manifest association.
And now the memory of another visitor of a few weeks
back presented itself, a visitor towards whom he cer-
tainly felt just as jealous, this visitor (Dr. Jones) was
at the same time in a superior position to him, because
he could write a book about nightmares, while the best
he could do was to have nightmares himself. The allu-
sion to his mistake about the meaning of a "mare's nest"
belonged to the same connection; it must mean: 'I am
not a proper Englishman after all, any more than I am
a proper Forsyth."

Now it could not be said that his jealous feelings
were either inappropriate or incomprehensible. He had
already been made aware that his analysis, and with
it our relations, would come to an end as soon as for-
eign pupils and patients began to return to Vienna; and
this is actually what happened shortly afterwards. But
what we have just been doing has been a piece of ana-
lytical work: the explanation of three ideas which were

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

brought up in the same hour and were determined by
the same motivation. This has not much to do with the
question whether these ideas could have been produced
without thought-transference or not. The latter ques-
tion applies to each of the three ideas, and can thus
be divided into three separate questions. Could P. have
known that Dr. Forsyth had just paid his first visit to
me? Could he have known the name of the person
whom I visited in his house? Did he know that Dr.
Jones had written a book about nightmares? Or was
it only my knowledge of these things which was dis-
played in the ideas that came into his head? Whether
this observation of mine leads to a conclusion in favour
of thought-transference depends on the answer which is
given to these separate questions. Let us leave the first
question aside for the moment, as the two others are
easier to deal with. The case of the visit to the pension
strikes one at first sight as being very convincing. I am
quite sure that in my short humorous mention of my
visit to his house I did not mention any name; I think
it is most improbable that P. made inquiries in the
pension to discover the name of the person I had called
on; in fact, I believe that he never knew of his existence.
But the evidential value of this case is undermined by
a chance factor. The man whom I had been to see in
the pension was not only called Freund, but was indeed
a true friend to us all. It was he whose generosity had
made possible the founding of our publishing-house.
His early death, and that of Karl Abraham a few years
later, were the most serious misfortunes which have be-
fallen the development of psycho-analysis. It is pos-
sible, therefore, that I said to Mr. P.: 'I have been
75

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

visiting a friend at your house," and with this possibility
the occult interest of the second association evaporates.

The impression made by the third association, too,
soon fades. Could P. have known that Jones had pub-
lished a monograph on the nightmare, seeing that he
never read analytical literature? Yes, he could. He
possessed books issued by our publishing-house, and he
might certainly have seen the titles of new publications
printed on the covers. It cannot be proved, but it can-
not be disproved. Along this road, then, we can come
to no decision. This example of mine, I regret to say,
is open to the same objections as so many others. It
was written down too late, and came up for discussion
at a time when I was not seeing Mr. P. any more, and
could not ask him any further questions.

Let us return to the first association, which even by
itself would support the alleged occurrence of thought-
transference. Could P. have known that Dr. Forsyth
had been with me a quarter of an hour before him?
Could he even have known of his existence or of his
presence in Vienna? We must not give way to the
temptation to answer both questions straight off in the
negative. I might very well have told Mr. P. I was
expecting a physician from England for training in
analysis, the first dove after the deluge. This might
have happened in the summer of 1919; Dr. Forsyth had
made arrangements with me by letter, months before
his arrival. I may even have mentioned his name,
though that is most improbable. In view of the other
association which the name had for us both, the mention
of it would inevitably have led to a conversation of
which some trace at least would have been preserved

76

DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

in my memory. Nevertheless such a conversation may
have taken place and I may have totally forgotten it, so
that it became possible for the mention of Mr. Fore-
sight in the analytical hour to strike me as miraculous.
If one regards oneself as a sceptic, it is as well from
time to time to be sceptical about one's scepticism. Per-
haps I too have that secret leaning towards the miracu-
lous which meets the production of occult phenomena
half-way.

Even if one part of this miraculous occurrence is
thus explained away, we still have another part on our
hands, and that the most difficult part of all. Granted
that Mr. P. knew that there was such a person as Dr.
Forsyth and that he was expected in Vienna in the
autumn, how was it that my patient became sensitive
to him on the very day of his arrival and immediately
after his first visit? We might say that it was chance,
that is, we might leave it unexplained; but I have men-
tioned the two other ideas which occurred to Mr. P.
precisely in order to exclude chance, in order to show
you that he really was occupied with jealous thoughts
directed against people who visited me, and whom I
visited. Or, if we are anxious not to overlook any-
thing even remotely possible, we might suppose that P.
noticed that I was in a state of unusual excitement, a
state of which I was certainly not aware, and that he
drew his inference from that. Or that Mr. P., who
after all had arrived only a quarter of an hour after
the Englishman, had met him in the immediate neigh-
bourhood of my house, that he had recognised him from
his typically English appearance, and with his jealous
feelings on the alert, had immediately thought: 'Ah,

77

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

there is Dr. Forsyth, whose arrival means the end of
my analysis; and probably he has just left the Pro-
fessor. I cannot go any further into these rationalistic
hypotheses. 'We are left once more with a non liquet,
but I must confess that here too I feel that the balance
is in favour of thought-transference. For the matter of
that, I am certainly not the only person who has met
with 'occult' phenomena in the analytic situation.
Helene Deutsch in 1926 reported some observations of
the same kind, and studied the way in which they were
conditioned by the relation of transference between the
patient and the analyst.

I am sure that you will not be satisfied with my posi-
tion with regard to this problem-not completely con-
vinced and yet ready to be convinced. Perhaps you
will say to yourselves: 'Here is another example of a
person who has all his life been a steady-going man of
science, and is now in his old age becoming weak-
minded, religious and credulous. I know that some
great names belong in that category, but you must not
reckon mine among them. At least I have not grown
religious, and I hope I have not become credulous. If
one has humbled oneself all one's life long in order
to avoid painful conflict with facts, one tends to keep
one's back bowed in one's old age before any new facts
which may appear. No doubt you would far prefer
that I should hold fast to a moderate theism, and turn
relentlessly against anything occult. But I am not con-
cerned to seek any one's favour, and I must suggest to
you that you should think more kindly of the objective
possibility of thought-transference and therefore also of
telepathy.

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

You must not forget that I have only dealt with the
problem here in so far as one can approach it from
the direction of psycho-analysis. When I turned my
thoughts towards it more than ten years ago, I too felt
afraid lest our scientific outlook might be endangered
and have to give way to spiritualism or mysticism if
occult phenomena were proved to be true. I think
otherwise now; it seems to me that one is displaying no
great trust in science if one cannot rely on it to accept
and deal with any occult hypothesis that may turn out
to be correct. And as regards thought-transference in
particular, it would seem actually to favour the exten-
sion of the scientific (or, as opponents would say,
mechanistic) way of thinking on to the elusive world
of the mind. For the telepathic process is supposed to
consist in a mental act of one person giving rise to the
same mental act in another. What lies between the two
mental acts may very well be a physical process, into
which the mental process transforms itself at one end
and which is transformed back into the same mental
process at the other. The analogy with other trans-
formations, such as speaking and hearing across the tele-
phone, is an obvious one. And think what it would
mean if one could get hold of this physical equivalent
of the mental act! I should like to point out that by
inserting the unconscious between the physical and what
has hitherto been regarded as the mental, psycho-
analysis has prepared the way for the acceptance of
such processes as telepathy. If one gets used to the
idea of telepathy one can account for a great deal by
means of it, so far, of course, only in imagination. It
is a familiar fact that we have no notion of how the

79

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

communal will of the great insect states comes about.
Possibly it works by means of mental transference of
this direct kind. One is led to conjecture that this may
be the original archaic method by which individuals
understood one another, and which has been pushed into
the background in the course of phylogenetic develop-
ment by the better method of communication by means
of signs apprehended by the sense organs. But such
older methods may have persisted in the background,
and may still manifest themselves under certain condi-
tions: for example, in crowds roused to a state of pas-
sionate excitement. All of this is highly speculative
and full of unsolved problems, but there is no need to
be alarmed by it.

If telepathy is a real process, one may, in spite of
the difficulty of proof, suppose that it is quite a com-
mon phenomenon. It would fit in with our expectations
if we could show that it occurs particularly in the men-
tal life of children. One is reminded of the frequent
fear felt by children that their parents know all their
thoughts without having been told them-a fear which
is a complete parallel to, and perhaps the origin of, the
belief of adults in the omniscience of God. A short time
ago a trustworthy observer, Dorothy Burlingham, pub-
lished some findings in a paper called 'Child Analysis
and the Mother," which, if they are confirmed, must put
an end to any remaining doubts of the reality of thought
transference. She took as her starting-point a number
of those cases (now no longer rare) in which a mother
and child are being analysed at the same time, and re-
ported such remarkable phenomena as the following.
One day in her analytic hour the mother was talking

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DREAMS AND THE OCCULT

about a gold coin which had figured in one of her child-
hood experiences. Immediately afterwards, when she
had returned home, her little ten-year-old boy came into
her room and brought her a gold coin to keep for him.
She was astonished and asked him where he had got
it from. He had been given it on his birthday, but
that was several months ago, and there was no reason _
why the child should have remembered the gold coin
just then. The mother told the analyst about the coin-
cidence, and asked her to try to find out from the child
why he had behaved in this way. But the analysis of
the child elicited nothing; the action had made its way
into the child's life that day like a foreign body. A
few weeks later the mother was sitting at her writing
table, in order to make a note of the occurrence, as
she had been asked to do. At that moment the boy came
in and asked for the gold coin back, saying that he
wanted to take it to show his analyst. Once more the
child's analysis disclosed nothing that led up to the
wish.

And with that we return to our starting-point-the
study of psycho-analysis.

81

CHAPTER 3

THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY,
LECTURE XXXI

LapieEs Anp GENTLEMEN-I am sure you all recognise
in your dealings, whether with persons or things, the
importance of your starting-point. It was the same
with psycho-analysis: the course of development through
which it has passed, and the reception which it has met
with have not been unaffected by the fact that what it
began working upon was the symptom, a thing which
is more foreign to the ego than anything else in the
mind. The symptom has its origin in the repressed, it
is as it were the representative of the repressed in rela-
tion to the ego; the repressed is a foreign territory to
- the ego, an internal foreign territory, just as reality
is-you must excuse the unusual expression-an ex-
ternal foreign territory. From the symptom the path
of psycho-analysis led to the unconscious, to the life of
the instincts, to sexuality, and it was then that psycho-
analysis was met by illuminating criticisms to the effect
that man is not merely a sexual being but has nobler
and higher feelings. It might have been added that,
supported by the consciousness of those higher feelings,
he often allowed himself the right to think nonsense and
to overlook facts.

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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

You know better than that. From the very begin- .
ning our view was that men fall ill owing to the conflict
between the demands of their instincts and the internal
resistance which is set up against them; not for a mo-
ment did we forget this resisting, rejecting and repress-
ing factor, which we believed to be furnished with its
own special forces, the ego-instincts, and which corre-
sponds to the ego of popular psychology. The difficulty
was that, since the progress of all scientific work is
necessarily laborious, psycho-analysis could not study
every part of the field at once or make a pronounce-
ment on every problem in one breath. At last we had
got so far that we could turn our attention from the
repressed to the repressing forces, and we came face
to face with the ego, which seemed to need so little
explanation, with the certain expectation that there, too,
we should find things for which we could not have been
prepared; but it was not easy to find a first method of
approach. That is what I am going to talk to you about
to-day.

Before I start, I may tell you that I have a suspicion
that my account of the psychology of the ego will affect
you differently than the introduction into the psycho-
logical underworld that preceded it. Why that should
be the case, I cannot say for certain. My original ex-
planation was that you would feel that, whereas hitherto
I have been telling you in the main about facts, how-
ever strange and odd they might appear, this time you
would be listening chiefly to theories, that is to say,
speculations. - But that is not quite true; when I weighed
the matter more carefully I was obliged to conclude
that the part played by intellectual manipulation of the

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

facts is not much greater in our ego-psychology than it
was in the psychology of the neuroses. Other explana-
tions turned out to be equally untenable, and I now
think that the character of the material itself is respon-
sible, and the fact that we are not accustomed to dealing
with it. Anyhow I shall not be surprised if you are
more hesitant and careful in your judgment than you
have been hitherto.

The situation in which we find ourselves at the begin-
ning of our investigation will itself suggest the path
we have to follow. We wish to make the ego the object
of our study, our own ego. But how can we do that?
The ego is the subject par excellence, how can it become
the object? There is no doubt, however, that it can.
The ego can take itself as object, it can treat itself like
any other object, observe itself, criticise itself, and do
Heaven knows what besides with itself. In such a case
one part of the ego stands over against the other. The
ego can, then, be split; it splits when it performs many
of its functions, at least for the time being. The parts
can afterwards join up again. After all that is saying
nothing new; perhaps it is only underlining more than
usual something that every one knows already. But on
the other hand we are familiar with the view that
pathology, with its magnification and exaggeration, can
make us aware of normal phenomena which we should
otherwise have missed. Where pathology displays a
breach or a cleft, under normal conditions there may
well be a link. If we throw a crystal to the ground, it
breaks, but it does not break haphazard; in accordance
with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments, whose
limits were already determined by the structure of the

84.

THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

crystal, although they were invisible. Psychotics are
fissured and splintered structures such as these. We
cannot deny them a measure of that awe with which
madmen were regarded by the peoples of ancient times.
They have turned away from external reality, but for

that very reason they know more of internal psychic.

reality and can tell us much that would otherwise be
inaccessible to us. One group of them suffer what we
call delusions of observation. They complain to us
that they -suffer continually, and in their most intimate
actions, from the observation of unknown powers or
persons, and they have hallucinations in which they
hear these persons announcing the results of their ob-
servations: 'now he is going to say this, now he is
dressing himself to go out,' and so on. Such observa-
tion is not the same thing as persecution, but it is not
- far removed from it. It implies that these persons
distrust the patient, and expect to catch him doing some-
thing that is forbidden and for which he will be pun-
ished. How would it be if these mad people were right,
if we all of us had an observing function in our egos
threatening us with punishment, which, in their case,
had merely become sharply separated from the ego and
had been mistakenly projected into external reality?

I do not know whether it will appeal to you in the
same way as it appeals to me. Under the strong im-
pression of this clinical picture, I formed the idea that

the separating off of an observing function from the ,

rest of the ego might be a normal feature of the ego's
structure; this has never left me, and I was driven
to Investigate the further characteristics and relations
of the function which had been separated off in this way.

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The next step is soon taken. The actual content of the
delusion of observation makes it probable that the ob-
servation is only a first step towards conviction and
punishment, so that we may guess that another activity
- of this function must be what we call conscience. There
is hardly anything that we separate off from our ego
so regularly as our conscience and so easily set over
against it. I feel a temptation to do something which
promises to bring me pleasure, but I refrain from doing
it on the ground that 'my conscience will not allow it.'
Or I allow myself to be persuaded by the greatness of
the expectation of pleasure into doing something
against which the voice of my conscience has protested,
and after I have done it my conscience punishes me with
painful reproaches, and makes me feel remorse for it.
I might simply say that the function which I am begin-
ning to distinguish within the ego is the conscience; but
it is more prudent to keep that function as a separate
entity and assume that conscience is one of its activities,
and that the self-observation which is necessary as a pre-
liminary to the judicial aspect of conscience is another.
And since the process of recognizing a thing as a sepa-
rate entity involves giving it a name of its own, I will
henceforward call this function in the ego the "super-
ego."

At this point I am quite prepared for you to ask
scornfully whether our ego-psychology amounts to no -
more than taking everyday abstractions literally, magni-
fying them, and turning them from concepts into things
-which would not be of much assistance. My answer
to that is, that in ego-psychology it will be difficult to
avoid what is already familiar, and that it is more a

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question of arriving at new ways of looking at things
and new groupings of the facts than of making new dis-
coveries. I will not ask you, therefore, to abandon your
critical attitude but merely to await further develop-
ments. The facts of pathology give our efforts a back-
ground for which you will look in vain in popular psy-
chology. I will proceed. No sooner have we got used
to the idea of this super-ego, as something which enjoys
a certain independence, pursues its own ends, and is
independent of the ego as regards the energy at its dis-
posal, than we are faced with a clinical picture which
throws into strong relief the severity, and even cruelty,
of this function, and the vicissitudes through which its
relations with the ego may pass. I refer to the condi-
tion of melancholia, or more accurately the melancholic
attack, of which you must have heard often enough, even
if you are not psychiatrists. In this disease, about whose
causes and mechanism we know far too little, the most
remarkable characteristic is the way in which the super-
ego-you may call it, but in a whisper, the conscience-
treats the ego. The melancholiac during periods of
health can, like any one else, be more or less severe
towards himself; but when he has a melancholic attack,
his super-ego becomes over-severe, abuses, humiliates,
and ill-treats his unfortunate ego, threatens it with the
severest punishments, reproaches it for long forgotten
actions which were at the time regarded quite lightly,
and behaves as though it had spent the whole interval
in amassing complaints and was only waiting for its
present increase in strength to bring them forward, and
to condemn the ego on their account. 'The super-ego
has the ego at its mercy and applies the most severe
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

moral standards to it; indeed it represents the whole
demands of morality, and we see all at once that our
moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension be-
tween the ego and the super-ego. It is a very remark-
able experience to observe morality, which was osten-
sibly conferred on us by God and planted deep in our
hearts, functioning as a periodical phenomenon. For
after a certain number of months the whole moral fuss
is at an end, the critical voice of the super-ego is silent,
the ego is reinstated, and enjoys once more all the rights
of man until the next attack. Indeed in many forms
of the malady something exactly the reverse takes place
during the intervals; the ego finds itself in an ecstatic
state of exaltation, it triumphs, as though the super-ego
had lost all its power or had become merged with the
ego, and this liberated, maniac ego gives itself up in
a really uninhibited fashion, to the satisfaction of all its
desires. Happenings rich in unsolved riddles!

You will expect me to do more than give a mere
example in support of my statement that we have learnt
a great deal about the formation of the super-ego, that
is of the origin of conscience. The philosopher Kant
once declared that nothing proved to him the greatness
of God more convincingly than the starry heavens and
the moral conscience within us. The stars are unques-
tionably superb, but where conscience is concerned God
has been guilty of an uneven and careless piece of work,
for a great many men have only a limited share of it
or scarcely enough to be worth mentioning. This does
not mean, however, that we are overlooking the frag-
ment of psychological truth which is contained in the
assertion that conscience is of divine origin! but the

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assertion needs interpretation. Conscience is no doubt
something within us, but it has not been there from the
beginning. - In this sense it is the opposite of sexuality,
which is certainly present from the very beginning of
life, and is not a thing that only comes in later. But
small children are notoriously a-moral. They have no
internal inhibitions against their pleasure-seeking im-
pulses. The role, which the super-ego undertakes later
in life, is at first played by an external power, by
parental authority. The influence of the parents domi-
nates the child by granting proofs of affection and by
threats of punishment, which, to the child, mean loss
of love, and which must also be feared on their own
account. This objective anxiety is the forerunner of the
later moral anxiety; so long as the former is dominant
one need not speak of super-ego or of conscience. It is
only later that the secondary situation arises, which we
are far too ready to regard as the normal state of
affairs; the external restrictions are introjected, so that
the super-ego takes the place of the parental function,
and thenceforward observes, guides and threatens the
ego in just the same way as the parents acted to the
child before.

The super-ego, which in this way has taken over the
power, the aims and even the methods of the parental
function, is, however, not merely the legatee of parental
authority, it is actually the heir of its body. It pro-
ceeds directly from it, and we shall soon learn in what
way this comes about. First, however, we must pause
to consider a point in which they differ. The super-

ego seems to have made a one-sided selection, and to:

have chosen only the harshness and severity of the par-
89

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ents, their preventive and punitive functions, while their
loving care is not taken up and continued by it. If the
parents have really ruled with a rod of iron, we can
easily understand the child developing a severe super-
ego, but, contrary to our expectations, experience shows
that the super-ego may reflect the same relentless harsh-
ness even when the up-bringing has been gentle and
kind, and avoided threats and punishment as far as pos-
sible. We shall return to this contradiction later, when
the formation of the super-ego.

I cannot tell you as much as I could wish about the
change from the parental function to the super-ego,
partly because that process is so complicated that a
description of it does not fit into the framework of a
set of introductory lectures such as these, and partly
' because we ourselves do not feel that we have fully
understood it. You will have to be satisfied, therefore,
with the following indications. The basis of the process
is what we call an identification, that is to say, that one
ego becomes like another, one which results in the first
ego behaving itself in certain respects in the same way
as the second; it imitates it, and as it were takes it into
itself. This identification has been not inappropriately
compared with the oral cannibalistic incorporation of
another person. Identification is a very important kind
of relationship with another person, probably the most
primitive, and is not to be confused with object-choice.
One can express the difference between them in this way:
when a boy identifies himself with his father, he wants
to be like his father; when he makes him the object of
his choice, he wants to have him, to possess him; in

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the first case his ego is altered on the model of his
father, in the second case that is not necessary. Iden-
tification and object-choice are broadly speaking inde-
pendent of each other; but one can identify oneself
with a person, and alter one's ego accordingly, and take
the same person as one's sexual object. It is said that
this influencing of the ego by the sexual object takes
place very often with women, and is characteristic of
femininity. With regard to what is by far the most
instructive relation between identification and object-
choice, I must have given you some information in my
previous lectures. It can be as easily observed in chil-
dren as in adults, in normal as in sick persons. If one
has lost a love-object or has had to give it up, one often
compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it; one
sets it up again inside one's ego, so that in this case
object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification.

I am myself not at all satisfied with this account of
identification, but it will suffice if you will grant that
the establishment of the super-ego can be described as
a successful instance of identification with the parental
function. The fact which is decisively in favour of this
point of view is that this new creation of a superior
function within the ego is extremely closely bound up
with the fate of the Oedipus complex, so that the super-
ego appears as the heir of that emotional tie, which is
of such importance for childhood. When the Oedipus
complex passes away the child must give up the intense
object-cathexes which it has formed towards its parents,
and to compensate for this loss of object, its identifica-
tions with its parents, which have probably long been
present, become greatly intensified. Identifications of

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS-
)
this kind, which may be looked on as precipitates of

abandoned object-cathexes, will recur often enough' in
the later life of the child; but it is in keeping with the
emotional importance of this first instance of such a
transformation that its product should occupy a special
position in the ego. Further investigation also reveals
that the super-ego does not attain to full strength and
development if the overcoming of the Oedipus complex
has not been completely successful. During the course
of its growth, the super-ego also takes over the influence
of those persons who have taken the place of the parents,
that is to say of persons who have been concerned in the
child's upbringing, and whom it has regarded as ideal
models. Normally the super-ego is constantly becoming
more and more remote from the original parents, be-
coming, as it were, more impersonal. Another thing
that we must not forget is that the child values its par-
ents differently at different periods of its life. At the
time at which the Oedipus complex makes way for the
super-ego, they seem to be splendid figures, but later
on they lose a good deal of their prestige. Identifica-
tions take place with these later editions of the parents
as well, and regularly provide important contributions
to the formation of character; but these only affect the
ego, they have no influence on the super-ego, which has
been determined by the earliest parental imagos.

I hope you will by now feel that in postulating the
existence of a super-ego I have been describing a genu-
ine structural entity, and have not been merely per-
sonifying an abstraction, such as conscience. We have
now to mention another important activity which is to
be ascribed to the super-ego. -It is also the vehicle of

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the ego-ideal, by which the ego measures itself, towards
which it strives, and whose demands for ever-increasing
perfection it is always striving to fulfil. No doubt this
ego-ideal is a precipitation of the old idea of the par-
ents, an expression of the admiration which the child
felt for the perfection which it at that time ascribed to
them. I know you have heard a great deal about the
sense of inferiority which is said to distinguish the
neurotic subject. It crops up especially in the pages
of works that have literary pretensions. A writer who
brings in the expression 'inferiority-complex' thinks he
has satisfied all the demands of psycho-analysis and
raised his work on to a higher psychological plane.
As a matter of fact the phrase 'inferiority-complex' is
hardly ever used in psycho-analysis. It does not refer
to anything which we regard as simple, let alone ele-
mentary. To trace it back to the perception in oneself
of some organic disability or other, as the school of so-
called Individual Psychologists like to do, seems to us

a short-sighted error. The sense of inferiority has a-

strong erotic basis. The child feels itself inferior when
it perceives that it is not loved, and so does the adult
as well. The only organ that is really regarded as in-
ferior is the stunted penis-the girl's clitoris. But the
major part of the sense of inferiority springs from the
relationship of the ego to its super-ego, and, like the

sense of guilt, it is an expression of the tension between ;

them. The sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt:
are exceedingly difficult to distinguish. Perhaps we

should do better if we regarded the former as the erotic
complement to the sense of moral inferiority. We have

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paid but little attention to such questions of conceptual
differentiation in psycho-analysis.

Seeing that the inferiority-complex has become so
popular, I shall venture to treat you to a short digres-
sion. A historical personage of our own time, who is
still living but who for the present has retired into the
background, suffers from the mal-development of a limb
caused by an injury at birth. A very well-known con-
temporary writer who has a predilection for writing the
biographies of famous persons, has dealt with the life
of the man to whom I am referring. Now if one is writ-
ing a biography, it is naturally very difficult to suppress
the urge for psychological understanding. The author
has therefore made an attempt to build up the whole
development of his hero's character on the basis of a
sense of inferiority, which was caused by his physical
defect. While doing this he has overlooked a small but
not unimportant fact. It is usual for mothers to whom
fate has given a sickly or otherwise defective child to try
to compensate for this unfair handicap with an extra
amount of love. In the case we are speaking of, the
proud mother behaved quite differently; she withdrew
her love from the child on account of his disability.
When the child grew up into a man of great power, he
proved beyond all doubt by his behaviour that he had
never forgiven his mother. If you will bear in mind the
importance of mother-love for the mental life of the
child, you will be able to make the necessary corrections
in the inferiority-theory of the biographer.

But let us get back to the super-ego. We have allo-
- cated to it the activities of self-observation, conscience,
; and the holding up of ideals. It follows from our ac-
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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

count of its origin that it is based upon an overwhelm-
ingly important biological fact no less than upon a
momentous psychological fact, namely the lengthy de-
pendence of the human child on its parents and the
Oedipus complex; these two facts, moreover, are closely
bound up with each other. For us the super-ego is the
representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of
the impulse towards perfection, in short it is as much
as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of
what people call the 'higher things in human life. Since
it itself can be traced back to the influence of parents,
teachers, and so on, we shall learn more of its signifi-
cance if we turn our attention to these sources. In gen-
eral, parents and similar authorities follow the dictates
of their own super-egos in the up-bringing of children.
Whatever terms their ego may be on with their super-
ego, in the education of the child they are severe and
exacting. They have forgotten the difficulties of their
own childhood, and are glad to be able to identify them-
selves fully at last with their own parents, who in their
day subjected them to such severe restraints. The result
is that the super-ego of the child is not really built up
on the model of the parents, but on that of the parents'
super-ego; it takes over the same content, it becomes the
vehicle of tradition and of all the age-long values which
have been handed down in this way from generation to
generation. You may easily guess what great help is
afforded by the recognition of the super-ego in under-
standing the social behaviour of man, in grasping the
problem of delinquency, for example, and perhaps, too,
in providing us with some practical hints upon educa-
tion, | It is probable that the so-called materialistic con-
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

ceptions of history err in that they underestimate this
factor. They brush it aside with the remark that the
'ideologies' of mankind are nothing more than resultants
of their economic situation at any given moment or su-
perstructures built upon it. That is the truth, but very
probably it is not the whole truth. Mankind never lives
completely in the present; the ideologies of the super-
ego perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and
the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of
the present and to new developments, and, so long as they
work through the super-ego, play an important part in
man's life, quite independently of economic conditions.

In 1921 I tried to apply the distinction between the
ego and the super-ego to the study of group psychology.

.I reached a formula, which ran like this: A psychologi-

cal group is a collection of individuals, who have intro-

: duced the same person into their super-ego, and on the
: basis of this common factor have identified themselves
: with one another in their ego. This naturally only holds

\ for groups who have a leader." If we could find more

applications of this kind, the hypothesis of the super-ego
would lose all its strangeness for us, and we should be
entirely relieved of the embarrassment which we can-
not help feeling when, used as we are to the atmosphere -
of the underworld, we make excursions into the more
superficial and higher planes of the mental apparatus.
Of course we do not for a moment think that the last
word on ego-psychology has been spoken with the
demarcation of the super-ego. It is rather the beginning
of the subject, but in this case it is not only the first step
that is difficult.

But now another task awaits us, as it were at the op-

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posite end of the ego. This question is raised by an
observation which is made during analytic work, an
observation which is, indeed, an old one. As so often
happens, it has taken a long time for its true value to be
appreciated. As you are aware, the whole of psycho-
. analytic theory is in fact built up on the perception of
the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to
make him conscious of his unconscious. The objective
indication of resistance is that his associations stop short
or wander far away from the theme that is being dis-
cussed. He may aiso become subjectively aware of the
resistance by experiencing painful feelings when he ap-
proaches the theme. But this last indication may be
absent. In such a case we say to the patient that we
conclude from his behaviour that he is in a state of
resistance, and he replies that he knows nothing about
it and is only aware of a difficulty in associating. Ex-
perience shows that we were right, but, if so, his re-
sistance too must have been unconscious, just as uncon-
scious as the repressed material which we were trying to
bring to the surface. Long ago we should have asked
from which part of the mind such an unconscious re-
sistance could operate. The beginner in psycho-analysis
will be ready at once with the answer that it must be the
resistance of the unconscious. An ambiguous and use-
less answer! If it means that the resistance operates
from the repressed, then we must say: 'Certainly not!
To the repressed we must rather ascribe a strong upward-
driving force, an impulsion to get through to conscious-
ness. The resistance can only be a manifestation of the
ego, which carried through the repression at one time
or other and is now endeavouring to keep it up. And
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

that too was our earlier view. Now that we have posited
a special function within the ego to represent the demand
for restriction and rejection, .e. the super-ego, we can
say that repression is the work of the super-ego,-either
that it does its work on its own account or else
that the ego does it in obedience to its orders. If now
we are faced with the case where the patient under
analysis is not conscious of his resistance, then it must
be either that the super-ego and the ego can operate
, unconsciously in quite important situations, or, which
: would be far more significant, that parts of both ego and
| super-ego themselves are unconscious. In both cases we
_- should have to take account of the disturbing view that
the ego (including the super-ego) does not by any means
completely coincide with the conscious, nor the repressed
with the unconscious.

Ladies and Gentlemen-I feel I must have a little
breathing space, which I expect you will welcome with
relief, and before I go on I must make an apology. Here
am I giving you a supplement to the introduction to
psycho-analysis which I started fifteen years ago, and I
am behaving as though you yourselves had been doing
nothing but psycho-analysis all that time. I know it is
a monstrous supposition, but I am helpless, I have no
alternative. The reason is that it is exceedingly difficult
to give an insight into psycho-analysis to any one who is
not himself a psycho-analyst. I assure you that we do
not like to give the effect of being members of a secret
society carrying on a secret science. And yet we have
been obliged to recognise and state as our considered
opinion that no one has a right to a say in psycho-
analysis unless he has been through certain experiences

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which he can only have by being analysed himself.
When I delivered my lectures to you fifteen years ago I
tried to let you off certain speculative parts of our
theory, but it is with those very parts that are connected
the new discoveries which I am going.to speak of to-day.

Now let me return to my theme. With regard to the
two alternatives-that the ego and the super-ego may
themselves be unconscious, or that they may merely give
rise to unconscious effects-we have for good reasons
decided in favour of the former. Certainly, large por-
tions of the ego and super-ego can remain unconscious,
are, in fact, normally unconscious. That means to say
that the individual knows nothing of their contents and
that it requires an expenditure of effort to make him
conscious of them. It is true, then, that ego and con-
scious, repressed and unconscious do not coincide. We
are forced fundamentally to revise our attitude towards
the problem of conscious and unconscious. ,. At first we
might be inclined to think very much less of the im-
portance of consciousness as a criterion, since it has
proved so untrustworthy. - But if we did so, we should
be wrong. - It is the same with life: it is not worth much,
but it is all that we have. Without the light shed by
the quality of consciousness we should be lost in the,
darkness of depth-psychology. © Nevertheless we must
try to orientate ourselves anew.

What is meant by 'conscious,' we need not discuss;
it is beyond all doubt.. The oldest and best meaning of
the word 'unconscious' is the descriptive one; we call
'unconscious' any mental process the existence of which
we are obliged to assume-because, for instance, we
infer it in some way from its effects-but of which we

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'are not directly aware. We have the same relation to
that mental process as we have to a mental process in
another person, except that it belongs to ourselves. If
we want to be more accurate, we should modify the
statement by saying that we call a process 'unconscious'
when we have to assume that it was active at a certain
time, although at that time we knew nothing about it.
This restriction reminds us that most conscious processes
are conscious only for a short period; quite soon they
become latent, though they can easily become conscious
again. We could also say that they had become un-
conscious, if we were certain that they were still some-
thing mental when they were in the latent condition.
So far we should have learnt nothing, and not even have
earned the right to introduce the notion of the uncon-
scious into psychology. But now we come across a new
fact which we can already observe in the case of errors.
We find that, in order to explain a slip of the tongue,
for instance, we are obliged to assume that an intention
to say some particular thing had formed itself in the
mind of the person who made the slip. We can infer it
with certainty from the occurrence of the speech-dis-
turbance, but it was not able to obtain expression; it
was, that is to say, unconscious. If we subsequently
bring the intention to the speaker's notice, he may recog-
nise it as a familiar one, in which case it was only
temporarily unconscious, or he may repudiate it as
foreign to him, in which case it was permanently uncon-
scious. Such an observation as this justifies us in also
regarding what we have called 'latent' as something 'un-
conscious.' The consideration of these dynamic rela-
tions puts us in a position to distinguish two kinds of

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unconscious: one which is transformed into conscious
arise, and another in the case of which such a trans-
formation is difficult, can only come about with a con-
siderable expenditure of energy, or may never occur at
all. In order to avoid any ambiguity as to whether we
are referring to the one or the other unconscious, whether
we are using the word in the descriptive or dynamic
sense, we make use of a legitimate and simple expedi-
ent. We call the unconscious which is only latent, and
' so can easily become conscious, the 'preconscious,' and
keep the name 'unconscious' for the other. We have
now three terms, 'conscious,' 'preconscious,' and 'uncon-
scious," to serve our purposes in describing mental phe-
nomena. Once again, from a purely descriptive point
of view, the 'preconscious' is also unconscious, but we
do not give it that name, except when we are speaking
loosely, or when we have to defend in general the ex-
istence of unconscious processes in mental life.

You will, I hope, grant that so far things are not so
bad and that the scheme is a convenient one. That is
all very well; unfortunately our psycho-analytic work
has compelled us to use the word 'unconscious' in yet an-
other, third, sense; and this may very well have given
rise to confusion. Psycho-analysis has impressed us
very strongly with the new idea that large and important
regions of the mind are normally removed from the
knowledge of the ego, so that the processes which eccur
in them must be recognized as unconscious in the true
dynamic sense of the term. We have consequently also
attributed to the word 'unconscious' a topographical or
systematic meaning; we have talked of systems of the

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preconscious and of the unconscious, and of a conflict
between the ego and the Ues. system; so that the word
"rnconscious' has more and more been made to mean
a mental province rather than a quality which mental
things have. At this point, the discovery, inconvenient
at first sight, that parts of the ego and super-ego, too, are
unconscious in the dynamic sense, has a facilitating ef-
fect and enables us to remove a complication. We evi-
denily have no right to call that region of the mind
which is neither ego nor super-ego the Ucs. system, since
the character of unconsciousness is not exclusive to it.
Very well; we will no longer use the word 'unconscious'
in the sense of a system, and to what we have hitherto
called by that name we will give a better one, which
will not give rise to misunderstandings. Borrowing, at
G. Groddeck's suggestion, a term used by Nietzsche, we
will call it henceforward the "id." This impersonal pro-
noun seems particularly suited to express the essential
character of this province of the mind-the character of
being foreign to the ego. Super-ego, ego and id, then,
are the three realms, regions or provinces into which
we divide the mental apparatus of the individual; and
it is their mutual relations with which we shall be con-
cerned in what follows. 6
But before we go on I must make a short digression.
I have no doubt that you are dissatisfied with the fact that
the three qualities of the mind in respect to conscious-
ness and the three regions of the mental apparatus do not
fall together into three harmonious pairs, and that you
feel that the clarity of our conclusions is consequently
impaired. My own view is that we ought not to deplore
this fact but that we should say to ourselves that we had
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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

no right to expect any such neat arrangement. Let me
give you an analogy; analogies prove nothing, that is
quite true, but they can make one feel more at home.
Let us picture a country with a great variety of geo-
graphical configurations, hills, plains and chains of
lakes, and with mixed nationalities living in it, Ger-
mans, Magyars and Slovaks, who, moreover, are en-
gaged upon a number of different occupations. Now the
distribution might be such that the Germans lived in the
hills and kept cattle, the Magyars on the plains and grew
corn and vines, while the Slovaks lived by the lakes and
caught fish and plaited reeds. If this distribution were
neat and exact it would no doubt give great satisfaction
to a President Wilson; it would also be convenient for
giving a geography lesson. It is probable, however, that
you would find a less orderly state of affairs if you
visited the region. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks
would be living everywhere mixed up together, and there
would be cornfields too in the hills, and cattle would be
kept on the plains as well. One or two things would be
as you expected, for one cannot catch fish on the moun-
tains, and wine does not grow in water. The picture of
the region which you had brought with you might on the
whole fit the facts, but in details you would have to put
up with departures from it.

You must not expect me to tell you much that is new
about the id, except its name. It is the obscure inac-
cessible part of our personality; the little we know about
it we have learnt from the study of dream-work and the
formation of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of
a negative character, and can only be described as being
all that the ego is not. We can come nearer to the id

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with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething
excitement. - We suppose that it is somewhere in direct
contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them
instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but
we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made.
These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organisa-
tion and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain
satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with
the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic-above all,
the law of contradiction-do not hold for processes in the
id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side with-
out neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most
they combine in compromise formations under the over-
powering economic pressure towards discharging their
energy. There is nothing in the id which can be com-
pared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an
exception to the philosophers' assertion that space and
time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the id
there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no
recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which
is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in
philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes
by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have
never got beyond the id, and even impressions which
have been pushed down into the id by repression, are
virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades
as though they had only recently occurred. They can
only be recognised as belonging to the past, deprived of
their significance, and robbed of their charge of energy,
after they have been made conscious by the work of
analysis, and no small part of the therapeutic effect of
analytic treatment rests upon this fact.
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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

It is constantly being borne in upon me that we have
made far too little use of our theory of the indubitable
fact that the repressed remains unaltered by the passa~~
of time. This seems to offer us the possibility of ar
approach to some really profound truths. But I myself
have made no further progress here.

Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil,
no morality. The economic, or, if you prefer, the
quantitative factor, which is so closely bound up with
the pleasure-principle, dominates all its processes. In-
stinctual cathexes seeking discharge,-that, in our view,
is all that the id contains. It seems, indeed, as if the
energy of these instinctual impulses is in a different con-
dition from that in which it is found in the other regions
of the mind. It must be far more fluid and more capable
of being discharged, for otherwise we should not have
those displacements and condensations, which are so
characteristic of the id and which are so completely in-
dependent of the qualities of what is cathected. (In the
ego we should call it an idea.) What would one not
give to understand these things better? You observe, in
any case, that we can attribute to the id other character-
istics than that of being unconscious, and you are aware
of the possibility that parts of the ego and super-ego are
unconscious without possessing the same primitive and
irrational quality. As regards a characterisation of the
ego, in so far as it is to be distinguished from the id and
the super-ego, we shall get on better if we turn our at-
tention to the relation between it and the most superficial
portion of the mental apparatus; which we call the
Pept-cs (perceptual-conscious) system. This system is
directed on to the external world, it mediates perceptions

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS -

of it, and in it is generated, while it is functioning, the
phenomenon of consciousness. It is the sense-organ of
the whole apparatus, receptive, moreover, not only of
excitations from without but also of such as proceed
from the interior of the mind. One can hardly go wrong
in regarding the ego as that part of the id which has been
modified by its proximity to the external world and the
influence that the latter has had on it, and which serves
the purpose of receiving stimuli and protecting the
organism from them, like the cortical layer with which
a particle of living substance surrounds itself. This
relation to the external world is decisive for the ego.
The ego has taken over the task of representing the ex-
ternal world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id,
blindly striving to gratify its instincts in complete dis-
regard of the superior strength of outside forces, could
not otherwise escape annihilation. In the fulfilment of
this function, the ego has to observe the external world
and preserve a true picture of it in the memory traces
left by its perceptions, and, by means of the reality-test,
it has to eliminate any element in this picture of the
external world which is a contribution from internal
sources of excitation. On behalf of the id, the ego con-
trols the path of access to motility, but it interpolates
between desire and action the procrastinating factor of
thought, during which it makes use of the residues of
experience stored up in memory. In this way it de-
thrones the pleasure-principle, which exerts undisputed
sway over the processes in the id, and substitutes for it
the reality-principle, which promises greater security and
greater success.

The relation to time, too, which is so hard to describe, .

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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

is communicated to the ego by the perceptual system;
indeed it can hardly be doubted that the mode in which
this system works is the source of the idea of time.
What, however, especially marks the ego out in contra-
distinction to the id, is a tendency to synthesise its con-
tents, to bring together and unify its mental processes
which is entirely absent from the id. When we come
to deal presently with the instincts in mental life, I hope
we shall succeed in tracing this fundamental charac-
teristic of the ego to its source. It is this alone that
produces that high degree of organisation which the ego
needs for its highest achievements. The ego advances
from the function of perceiving instincts to that of con-
trolling them, but the latter is only achieved through
the mental representative of the instinct becoming sub-
ordinated to a larger organisation, and finding its place
in a coherent unity. In popular language, we may say'
that the ego stands for reason and cireumspection, while
the id stands for the untamed passions.

So far we have allowed ourselves to dwell on the
enumeration of the merits and capabilities of the ego;
it is time now to look at the other side of the picture.
The ego is after all only a part of the id, a part pur-
posively modified by its proximity to the dangers of
reality. From a dynamic point of view it is weak; it
borrows its energy from the id, and we are not entirely
ignorant of the methods-one might almost call them
'tricks'-by means of which it draws further amounts
of energy from the id. Such a method, for example,
is the process of identification, whether the object is re-
tained or given up. The object-cathexes proceed from
the instinctual demands of the id. The first business of

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

the ego is to take note of them. But by identifying
itself with the object, it recommends itself to the id in
the place of the object and seeks to attract the libido of
the id on to itself. We have already seen that, in the
course of a person's life, the ego takes into itself a large -
number of such precipitates of former object-cathexes.
On the whole the ego has to carry out the intentions of
the id; it fulfils its duty if it succeeds in creating the
conditions under which these intentions can best be ful-
filled. One might compare the relation of the ego to
the id with that between a rider and his horse. The
horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has
the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding
the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But
all too often in the relations between the ego and the
id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which
- the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction
in which it itself wants to go.

The ego has separated itself off from one part of
the id by means of repression-resistances. But the bar-
rier of repression does not extend into the id; so that
the repressed material merges into the rest of the id.

The proverb tells us that one cannot serve two masters
at once. The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it
has to serve three harsh masters, and has to do its best
to reconcile the claims and demands of all three. These
demands are always divergent and often seem quite in-
compatible; no wonder that the ego so frequently gives
way under its task. The three tyrants are the external
world, the super-ego and the id. When one watches the
efforts of the ego to satisfy them all, or rather, to obey
them all simultaneously, one cannot regret having per-

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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

sonified the ego, and established it as a separate being.
It feels itself hemmed in on three sides and threatened
by three kinds of danger, towards which it reacts by
developing anxiety when it is too hard pressed. Having
originated in the experiences of the perceptual system,
it is designed to represent the demands of the external
world, but it also wishes to be a loyal servant of the id,
to remain upon good terms with the id, to recommend
itself to the id as an object, and to draw the id's libido
on to itself. In its attempt to mediate between the id
and reality, it is often forced to clothe the TUes. com-
mands of the id with its own Pes. rationalisations, to
gloss over the conflicts between the id and reality, and
with diplomatic dishonesty to display a pretended re-
gard for reality, even when the id persists in being
stubborn and uncompromising. - On the other hand, its
every movement is watched by the severe super-ego,
which holds up certain norms of behaviour, without
regard to any difficulties coming from the id and the
external world; and if these norms are not acted up
to, it punishes the ego with the feelings of tension which
manifest themselves as a sense of inferiority and guilt.
In this way, goaded on by the id, in by the
super-ego, and rebuffed by reality, the ego struggles to
cope with its economic task of reducing the forces and
influences which work in it and upon it to some kind
of harmony; and we may weil understand how it is that
we so often cannot repress the ery: 'Life is not easy."
When the ego is forced to acknowledge its weakness, it
breaks out into anxiety: reality anxiety in face of the
external world, normal anxiety in face of the super-
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

ego, and neurotic anxiety in face of the strength of the
passions in the id.

I have represented the structural relations within the
mental personality, as I have explained them to you,
in a simple diagram, which I here reproduce.

You will observe how the super-ego goes down into
the id; as the heir to the Oedipus complex it has, after
all, intimate connections with the id. It lies further
from the perceptual system than the ego. The id only
deals with the external world through the medium of
the ego, at least in this diagram. It is certainly still
too early to say how far the drawing is correct; in one
respect I know it is not. The space taken up by the
unconscious id ought to be incomparably greater than
that given to the ego or to the preconscious. You must,
if you please, correct that in your imagination.

And now, in concluding this certainly rather exhaust-
ing and perhaps not very illuminating account, I must
add a warning. When you think of this dividing up of
the personality into ego, super-ego and id, you must not
imagine sharp dividing lines such as are artificially
drawn in the field of political geography. We can-
not do justice to the characteristics of the mind by means
of linear contours, such as occur in a drawing or in a
primitive painting, but we need rather the areas of
colour shading off into one another that are to be found
in modern pictures. After we have made our separa-
tions, we must allow what we have separated to merge
again. Do not judge too harshly of a first attempt at
picturing a thing so elusive as the human mind. It is
very probable that the extent of these differentiations

varies very greatly from person to person; it is possible
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THE ANATOMY OF THE MENTAL PERSONALITY

that their function itself may vary, and that they may
at times undergo a process of involution. This seems
to be particularly true of the most insecure and, from
the phylogenetic point of view, the most recent of them,
the differentiation between the ego and the super-ego.

pept-Cs

   

It is also incontestable that the same thing can come
about as a result of mental disease. It can easily be
imagined, too, that certain practices of mystics may suc-
ceed in upsetting the normal relations between the dif-
ferent regions of the mind, so that, for example, the
perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the
deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would
otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a pro-
cedure can put one in possession of ultimate truths, from
which all good will flow, may be safely doubted. All
the same, we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of
psycho-analysis have chosen much the same method of
approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego,
to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

its field of vision, and so to extend its organisation that
it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was,
there shall ego be.

It is reclamation work, like the draining of the
Zuyder Zee.

112

9 -
sho
20+
sor

CHAPTER 4

ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE, LECTURE XXXII

LabptEs Anp GENTLEMEN-You will not be surprised to
hear that I have a great deal of new information to
give you about our hypotheses on the subject of anxiety
and the fundamental instincts of the mind, and also
that none of this inforniation claims to provide a final
solution of these doubtful problems. I speak purposely
of 'hypotheses.' This is the most difficult task that has
been. set us, but the difficulty does not lie in the incom-
pleteness of our observations, for it is actually the com-
monest and most familiar phenomena that present us
with such riddles; nor does it lie in the remoteness of
the speculations to which these phenomena give rise, for
speculation hardly comes into the picture in this con-
nection. No, it is genuinely a question of hypotheses;
that is to say, of the introduction of the right abstract
ideas, and of their application to the raw material of
observation so as to bring order and lucidity into it.

I devoted one lecture in my former series-the
twenty-fifth-to the study of anxiety. I must recapitu-
late its contents in brief. We said then that anxiety is
an affective condition-that is to say, a combination of
certain feelings of the pleasure-pain series with their
corresponding efferent innervations, and a perception of

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

them-but we asserted that anxiety is probably also the
trace of a certain important event, taken over by in-
heritance, and therefore comparable to the ontogeneti-
cally acquired hysterical attack. We suggested that the
event which left this affective trace behind it was the
process of birth, in which the modifications of the heart's
action and of respiration, which are characteristic of
anxiety, served a useful purpose. The first anxiety of
all would thus have been a toxic one. We then started
from the distinction between objective anxiety and neu-
rotic anxiety, the former being what seems to us an
intelligible reaction to danger-that is, to anticipated
injury from without-and the latter altogether puzzling
and, as it were, purposeless. In our analysis of ob-
jective anxiety we explained it as a condition of in-
creased sensory attention and motor tension, which we
called 'anxiety-preparedness' Out of this the anxiety-
reaction arises. The anxiety-reaction may run one of
two courses. Either the anxiety-development, the rep-
etition of the old traumatic experience, is restricted to
a signal, in which case the rest of the reaction can adapt
itself to the new situation of danger, whether by flight
or defence; or the old experience gets the upper hand,
and the whole reaction exhausts itself in anxiety-devel-
opment, in which case the affective state is paralysing
and unadapted to the present situation.

We then turned our attention to neurotic anxiety, and
pointed out that it could be observed in three forms.
Firstly, we have free-floating, general apprehensiveness,
ready to attach itself for the time being to any new
possibility that may arise in the form of what we call

expectant dread, as happens, for instance, in the typical
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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

anxiety-neurosis. Secondly, we find it firmly attached
to certain ideas, in what are known as phobias, in which
we can still recognise a connection with external danger,
but cannot help regarding the anxiety felt towards it as
. enormously exaggerated. Thirdly and finally, we have
anxiety as it occurs in hysteria and in other severe
neuroses; this anxiety either accompanies symptoms or
manifests itself independently, whether as an attack or
as a condition which persists for some time, but always
without having any visible justification in an external
danger. We then asked ourselves two questions: 'What
are people afraid of when they have neurotic anxiety?*
and 'How can one bring this kind of anxiety into line
with objective anxiety felt towards an external danger?"

Our investigations were by no means unsuccessful,
and we succeeded in reaching a few important conclu-
sions. With regard to anxious expectation, clinical
experience has taught us that there is a regular rela-
tionship between it and the disposition of the libido in
the sexual life. The most frequent cause of anxiety-
neurosis is undischarged excitation. A libidinal excita-
tion is aroused, but is not satisfied or used; in the place
of this libido which has been diverted from its use,
anxiety makes its appearance. I even thought it was
justifiable to say that this unsatisfied libido is directly
transformed into anxiety. This view found some sup-
port in certain almost universal phobias of small chil-
dren. Many of these phobias are altogether enigmatic,
but others, such as the fear of being left alone and the
fear of unfamiliar people, can be definitely explained.
Being left alone or seeing strange faces stirs up the
'child's longing for the familiar presence of its mother;

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

it cannot control this libidinal excitation; it cannot keep
it in a state of suspension, but turns it into anxiety.
This anxiety in children, therefore, is not objective
anxiety, but must be classed among the neurotic anxi-
eties. Children's phobias, and the anxious expectation
in anxiety-neurosis, serve as two examples of one way
in which neurotic anxiety comes about; i.e. through
direct transformation of libido. In a moment we shall
learn of a second method, and we shall see that it is
not so very different from the first.

For it is to the process of repression that we attribute
the appearance of anxiety in hysteria and other neuroses.
We now believe that it is possible to give a fuller de-
scription of this process than before if we separate the
history of the idea that has to be repressed from that
of the libido which is attached to it. It is the idea that
undergoes repression and may be distorted so as to
become unrecognizable; its associated affect is always
turned into anxiety, regardless of its nature, whether,
that is to say, it is aggression or love. Now it makes
no essential difference on what grounds a given quan-
tity of libido has become unusable, whether on account
of the infantile weakness of the ego, as in the case of
children's phobias, or on account of somatic processes
in sexual life, as in the case of anxiety neuroses, or
on account of repression, as in the case of hysteria.
The two mechanisms which give rise to neurotic anxiety
are therefore essentially the same.

While we were engaged in these investigations, we
noticed a very important connection between anxiety-
development and symptom-formation. It was that the
two are interchangeable. The agoraphobiac, for ex-

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

ample, begins his illness with an attack of anxiety in
the street. This is repeated every time he walks along
the street again. He now develops a symptom-a street
phobia-which can also be described as an inhibition
or a functional restriction of the ego, and thus he pre-
serves himself from anxiety attacks. One can observe
the reverse process if one interferes with the formation
of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, in the case of
obsessive acts. If one prevents a patient from carrying
out his washing ceremonial, he is thrown into an in-
tolerable state of anxiety, against which his symptom
has obviously protected him. And, indeed, it seems as
though anxiety-development is the earlier and symptom-
formation the later of the two, as though the symptom
were created in order to prevent the outbreak of a state
of anxiety. And it is in keeping with this that the
first neuroses of childhood are phobias-conditions,
that is to say, in which one sees quite clearly how what
began as anxiety-development is later replaced by
symptom-formation: one gets an impression that this
circumstance affords the best starting-point from which
to approach an understanding of neurotic anxiety. At
the same time we succeeded in discovering the answer
to the question of what it is that one fears in neurotic
anxiety, and thus restoring the connection between neu-
rotic anxiety and objective anxiety. What one fears is
obviously one's own libido. The difference between this
and objective anxiety lies in two points-that the danger
is an internal instead of an external one, and that it
is not consciously recognised.

In the case of phobias one can see clearly how this

internal danger is transformed into an external one;
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

how, that is to say, neurotic anxiety turns into apparent
objective anxiety. Let us simplify a state of affairs
which is often very complicated, and suppose that the
agoraphobiac is always afraid of his impulses in con-
nection with temptations aroused in him by meeting
people in the street. In his phobia he makes a dis-
placement and is now afraid of an external situation.
What he gains thereby is obvious; it is that he feels he
can protect himself better in that way. One can rescue
oneself from an external danger by flight, whereas to
attempt to fly from an internal danger is a difficult
undertaking. '

At the end of my original lecture on anxiety I ex-
pressed the opinion that, though these various results
of our investigations did not actually contradict one
another, they were nevertheless not entirely consistent.
As an affective condition, anxiety is the reproduction
of an old danger-threatening event; anxiety serves the
purposes of self-preservation as being a signal of the
presence of a new danger; it arises from libido that has
become unusable for some reason or other, including the
process of repression; it is replaced by symptom-forma-
tion, and is thus, as it were, psychically bound ; in all of
this one feels that something is missing which would
combine these fragments into a unity.

Ladies and Gentlemen-The division of the mental
personality into a super-ego, ego and id, which I spoke
about in the last lecture, has forced us to take up a new
position with regard to the problem of anxiety. In
assuming that the ego is the only seat of anxiety, and
that only the ego can produce and feel anxiety, we have

taken up a new and secure position, from which many
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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

facts take on a new aspect. And when you come to
think of it, it is difficult to see what sense there could
be in speaking of an 'anxiety of the id," or how we could
ascribe a capacity for feeling anxiety to the super-ego.
On the contrary, we have found a satisfactory confirma-
tion of our theory in the fact that the three main vari-
eties of anxiety-objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety
and moral anxiety-can so easily be related to the three
directions in which the ego is dependent, on the external
world, on the id and on the super-ego. Our new posi-
tion, too, has brought to the fore the function of anxiety
as a signal indicating the presence of a danger-situation,
a function with which we were already not unfamiliar.
The question of the stuff out of which anxiety is made
loses interest for us, and the relations between objective
anxiety and neurotic anxiety are clarified and simplified
in a surprising way. And, besides this, it is to be no-
ticed that we now understand the apparently complicated
cases of anxiety-formation better than we do those which
seem to be simple.

We have recently investigated the manner in which
anxiety comes about in certain phobias, which we class
with anxiety-hysteria, and we have chosen for investi-
gation cases in which we have to deal with the typical
repression of desires proceeding from the Oedipus
complex. We should have expected to find that it is
the libidinal cathexis of the mother as object which, as
a result of repression, is transformed into anxiety, and
now manifests itself in the form of a symptom as at-
tached to the father-substitute. I cannot tell you all the
individual steps of an investigation of this kind; let it
suffice to say that, to our astonishment, the result was

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

the reverse of what we had expected. It is not the
repression that creates the anxiety, but the anxiety is
there first and creates the repression! But what sort of
anxiety can it be? It can only be fear of a threatening
external danger; that is to say, objective anxiety. It is
true that the boy is afraid of the demands of his libido,
in this case of his love for his mother; so that this is
really an instance of neurotic anxiety. But this being
in love seems to him to be an internal danger, which he
must avoid by renouncing his object, only because it
involves an external danger-situation. And in every case
we have investigated we have obtained the same result.
It must, however, be confessed that we were not pre-
pared to find that the internal instinctual danger was
only a half-way house to an external and real danger-
situation.

We have, however, not yet said what the real danger
is that the child fears as a result of his being in love
with his mother. It is the punishment of castration,
the loss of his penis. Naturally you will object that
after all that is not a real danger. Our boys are not
castrated because they are in love with their mothers
during the phase of the Oedipus-complex. But the
question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is not pri-
marily a matter of whether castration is really per-
formed; what is important is that the danger is one that
threatens from without, and that the boy believes in it.
He has some grounds for doing so, for, not infrequently,
threats of his penis being cut off are made during his
phallic phase, at the time of his early masturbation;
and no doubt allusions to such a punishment will always
find a phylogenetic reinforcement on his side, We have

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

conjectured that, in the early days of the human family,
castration really was performed on the growing boy by
the jealous and cruel father, and that circumcision,
which is so frequently an element in puberty rites, is
an easily recognisable trace of it. We are aware of how
far removed we are from the common point of view in
saying this, but we must maintain our position that fear
of castration is one of the most frequent and one of the
strongest motive forces of repression, and therefore of
the formation of neuroses. The analysis of cases in
which, not, it is true, castration itself, but circumcision,
has been performed on boys as a cure or as a punish-
ment for masturbation (a thing which was by no means
of rare occurrence in English and American society)
has provided us with conclusive proof that we are right.
It is a great temptation at this juncture to go further
into the castration-complex, but we will keep to our
subject. Fear of castration is naturally not the only
motive for repression; to start with, it has no place in
the psychology of women; they have, of course, a cas-
tration-complex, but they cannot have any fear of
castration. - In its place, for the other sex, is found fear
of the loss of love, obviously a continuation of the fear
of the infant at the breast when it misses its mother.
You will understand what objective danger-situation is
indicated by this kind of anxiety. If the mother is
absent or has withdrawn her love from the child, it can
no longer be certain that its needs will be satisfied, and
may be exposed to the most painful feelings of tension.
There is no need to reject the idea that these conditions
for anxiety fundamentally repeat the situation of the
original birth-anxiety, which, to be sure, also implied
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

separation from the mother. Indeed, if you follow a
line of thought suggested by Ferenczi, you may add fear
of castration, too, to this series, for the loss of the male
genital organ results in the impossibility of a reunion
with the mother, or with a substitute for her, in the
sexual act. I might mention, incidentally, that the com-
mon phantasy of returning into the womb is a substitute
for this desire for coitus. There are still a great number
of interesting and surprising facts which I might tell
you about in this connection; but I must not step beyond
the bounds of an introduction to psycho-analysis. 1
will therefore merely draw your attention to the way in
which, at this point, the findings of psychology take us
to the frontiers of biological fact.

Otto Rank, to whom psycho-analysis owes many valu- '
able contributions, has also the merit of having strongly
emphasised the importance of the act of birth and of
separation from the mother. It is true that the rest of
us found it impossible to accept the extreme deductions
that he drew from this factor with regard to the theory
of the neuroses and even to analytical therapy. But be-
fore this he had already discovered the central feature
of his doctrine, namely, that the anxiety-experience of
birth is the prototype of all later danger-situations. If
we pause for a moment at this point we can say that,
as a matter of fact, every stage of development has its
own particular conditions for anxiety; that is to say,
a danger-situation appropriate to it. The danger of
mental helplessness corresponds to the stage of early im-
maturity of the ego; the danger of loss of object or of
love corresponds to the dependence of the early years
of childhood; the danger of castration to the phallic

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

. phase; and finally, fear of the super-ego, which occupies
a special position, to the period of latency. As develop-
ment proceeds, the old conditions for anxiety should
vanish, since the danger-situations, which correspond to
them, have lost their force owing to the strengthening of
the ego. But this only happens to a very incomplete de-
gree. A great many people cannot overcome the fear
of loss of love; they never become independent enough
of the love of other people, and continue their infantile
behaviour in this respect. The fear of the super-ego
should normally never cease, since it is indispensable in
social relations in the form of moral anxiety, and it is
only in the rarest instances that an individual succeeds
in becoming independent of the community. A few of
the old danger-situations also manage to preserve their
force in later life by giving their conditions for anxiety
an up-to-date form. Thus, for instance, the danger of
castration is preserved under the disguise of syphilido-
phobia. Grown-up people are well aware that castration
is no longer practised as a punishment for indulging
sexual desires, but, on the other hand, they have learnt
from experience that instinctual freedom in this direc-
tion involves the risk of severe illnesses. There is no
doubt that persons whom we call neurotic remain in-
fantile in their attitude towards danger, and have not
grown out of antiquated conditions for anxiety. Let us
accept this as a factual contribution to our characteriza-
tion of neurotics; why it should be so is not so easy
to say.

I hopa you have not lost the thread of our discourse,
and that you remember that we are discussing the rela-
tions between anxiety and repression. We have discov-

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ered two new facts in doing so: first, that anxiety causes
repression, and not the other way round as we used to
think, and secondly, that frightening instinctual situa-
tions can in the last resort be traced back to external
situations of danger. Our next question will be: How
can we picture the process of repression carried out
under the influence of anxiety? I think this is what
happens: the ego becomes aware that the satisfaction of
some nascent instinctual demand would evoke one
among the well-remembered danger-situations. This
instinctual cathexis must, therefore, somehow or other
be suppressed, removed, made powerless. We know
that the ego succeeds in this task if it is strong, and if
it has assimilated the impulse in question into its organi-
sation. In the case of repression, however, the impulse
is still a part of the id, and the ego feels weak. In such
a contingency, the ego calls to its aid a technique, which
is, at bottom, identical with that of normal thinking.
Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quan-
tities of energy, just as a general moves miniature
figures about over a map before setting his troops in
motion. In this way, the ego anticipates the satisfaction
of the questionable impulse, and enables it to reproduce
the painful feelings which are attached to the beginning
of the dreaded danger-situation. Thereupon the auto-
matic mechanism of the pleasure-pain principle is
brought into play and carries through the repression of
the dangerous impulse.

'Stop! you will exclaim, "we cannot go so far as that
with you.' You are right; I shall have to add some-
thing to what I have said, to make it seem acceptable
to you. First of all, I must admit that I have tried to

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translate into the language of our normal thought a
process which is in fact certainly neither conscious nor .
preconscious, and which takes place between charges
of energy at some deep level of the mind that it is hard
to picture. But that is not a very serious objection; it
could not be done in any other way. It is more im-
portant that we should clearly distinguish between what
goes on in the ego and what goes on in the id during
the process of repression. We have just explained what
the ego does. It makes use of an experimental cathexis,
and by means of a danger-signal sets in motion the
automatic pleasure-pain mechanism. Several reactions
then become possible, or a combination of them, in
various proportions. Either the anxiety attack develops
completely and the ego withdraws entirely from the
objectionable excitation; or, in place of the experi-
mental cathexis, the ego meets the excitation with an
anti-cathexis (counter-charge) which then combines with
the energy of the repressed impulse to form a symptom,
or is taken up into the ego as a reaction-formation, as
an intensification of certain dispositions, as a permanent
alteration of the ego. The more the development of
anxiety can be restricted to a mere signal, the more the
ego can make use of defensive acts, which amount to a
mental binding of the repressed, and the more the
process approximates to the standard of a normal modi-
fication of the impulse, without of course ever reaching
it. Here I shall digress for a moment or so. You will,
no doubt, yourselves have assumed that the thing which
is so hard to define but which we call 'character' must
be thought of as belonging entirely to the province of
the ego. We have already learnt something of what it
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is that creates this thing called character. The incorpo-
ration of the early parental function in the shape of the
super-ego is no doubt the most important and decisive
element; next come identifications with the parents of a
later date and with other persons in authority, and the
same identifications as precipitates of abandoned object-
relations. We can now add to this list, as contributions
to character-formation which are never absent, the
reaction-formations, which the ego acquires, first in
making its repressions, and later in a more normal way,
in repudiating undesirable impulses.

Now let us go back to a consideration of the id. It
is not so easy to discover what it is that happens during
the process of repression to the impulses that are being
opposed. The main question to which we want to know
the answer is: What happens to the energy, to the libi-
dinal charge of the impulse, and how is it used? You
will remember that my earlier hypothesis was that it
was precisely this energy that was turned into anxiety.
We can, however, no longer venture to say that; we
must content ourselves with a more modest answer. - Jts
fate is probably not always the same. Probably there
is a close correspondence between what happens in the
ego and what happens in the id with respect to the re-
pressed impulse, and it should be possible to learn
something of its nature. For, since we have adopted the
view that the pleasure-pain principle is brought into
action in response to the danger-signal, and plays a part
in repression, we are obliged to modify our anticipa-
tions. This principle has unrestricted sway over the
processes in the id. We can credit it too with the power
of bringing about very profound changes in the impulse

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in question. We are therefore prepared to believe that
the effects of repression will be very varied, and some-
times more and sometimes less extensive. In many
cases the repressed impulse may retain its libidinal
cathexis, and continue to exist unaltered in the id, al-
though under the perpetual pressure of the ego. In
other instances it seems to undergo complete destruc-
tion, in which case its libido is finally diverted into
other channels. I have suggested that this is what hap-
pens where the Oedipus complex is dealt with normally.
In this desirable state of affairs, the Oedipus complex
would thus not merely be repressed, but would be actu-
ally destroyed in the id. Clinical experience has further
taught us that in a great many cases, instead of the
usual result of repression, a degradation of the libido
takes place, a regression of the libidinal organisation to
an earlier stage of development. That can naturally
only happen in the id, and when it does happen, it must
be under the influence of the same conflict that was in-
troduced by the danger-signal. The most remarkable
example of this is to be found in the obsessional neu-
rosis, where regression of libido and repression go hand
in hand.

Ladies and Gentlemen-I am afraid that this account
will seem to you very difficult to follow, and you will
guess that it is by no means a complete one. I am sorry
to have caused you annoyance. My only aim, however,
must be to give you some impression of the nature of
our findings, and of the difficulties we have to face in
dealing with them. The deeper we probe in our study
of mental processes, the more we become aware of the
richness and complexity of their content, Many simple

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formulas which seemed to us at first to meet the case,
turned out later to be inadequate. We are incessantly
altering and improving them. In my lecture on the
theory of dreams, I led you into a field of knowledge in
which hardly a single new discovery has been made in
the last fifteen years; here, where we are dealing with
anxiety, everything is in a state of flux and change.
These new findings have not yet been thoroughly
worked over, and perhaps for that very reason their
exposition is difficult. However, you must have pa-
tience; we shall soon be able to leave the problem of
anxiety, though that does not mean that it will have been
solved to our satisfaction. I hope, however, that we
have advanced a step further. And incidentally we
have acquired much fresh knowledge. Thus we are
now able, through the study of anxiety, to add a fresh
trait to our characterisation of the ego. We have said
that the ego is weak in relation to the id, that it is its
faithful servant, and that it tries to carry out its orders
and fulfil its requirements. We have no intention of
withdrawing this assertion. But on the other hand the
ego is the better organised part of the id, orientated as
it is towards reality. We must not exaggerate too
much the separation between the two, and we must not
be surprised if the ego, too, on its side exerts an influ-
ence on the processes in the id. I think the ego exerts
an influence of this kind when it sets the all-powerful
pleasure-pain principle in motion by means of the dan-
ger-signal. It is true that immediately afterwards it
displays its weakness again, for by the act of repression
it renounces a portion of its organisation, and is obliged

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to allow the repressed impulse to remain permanently
withdrawn from its influence.

And now just one more point in regard to the problem
of anxiety. Neurotic anxiety has, under our hands,
turned into objective anxiety, into anxiety felt towards
certain external danger-situations. But we cannot leave
it at that; we must take a step further, though in a sense
it will be a step backwards. What is it that is actually
dangerous and actually feared in such a danger-situa-
tion? -It is clearly not the objective injury, which need
have absolutely no importance psychologically, but it is
something which is set up in the mind by it. Birth, for
example, our prototype for the state of anxiety, can
hardly in itself be regarded as an injury, although it
may involve a risk of injury,. The fundamental thing
about birth, as about every danger-situation, is that it
evokes in mental experience a condition of tense excita-
tion, which is felt as pain, and which cannot be mastered
by discharge. Let us call such a situation, in which
the efforts of the pleasure-principle come to nothing, a
'traumatic' factor; in that way, by following the series,
neurotic anxiety-objective anxiety-danger-situation,
we can arrive at a simple formula: what is feared, the
object of the anxiety, is always the emergence of a trau-
matic factor, which cannot be dealt with in accordance
with the norms of the pleasure-principle. We can imme-
diately see that the operation of the pleasure-principle
does not guarantee us against objective injury, but only
against a particular injury to our mental economy.
From the pleasure-principle to the instinct of self-
preservation is a long way; and the two tendencies are

far from coinciding from the first. We can observe
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something else, however, and perhaps this is the solu-
tion for which we were looking. I have in mind the
fact that all along we are dealing with questions of
relative quantities. It is only the magnitude of the ex-
citation which turns an impression into a traumatic
factor, which paralyses the operation of the pleasure-
principle and gives significance to the danger-situation.
And if this is really the case, if these problems admit of
such a simple solution, why should it not be possible
that traumatic factors of this kind should occur in the
mental life without relation to the supposed danger-
situations, traumatic factors in regard to which anxiety
is not aroused as a signal, but manifests itself afresh
and for new reasons? Clinical experience definitely
tells us that this actually occurs. Only the later repres-
sions display the mechanism which we have described,
in which anxiety is called forth as a signal of an
earlier danger-situation; the earliest and most funda-
mental repressions arise directly from traumatic factors,
where the ego comes into contact with an excessive libi-
dinal demand; these traumatic factors create their own
anxiety anew, though in accordance with the pattern
of the birth-situation. The same may be true of the
development of anxiety in anxiety-neuroses, caused by
somatic injury of the sexual function. We shall no
longer maintain that it is the libido itself that is turned
into anxiety in such cases. But I can see no objection
to postulating twofold origin of anxiety, first as the
direct effect of a traumatic {actor, and secondly, as a
signal that a traumatic factor of this kind threatens to
recur.

Ladies and Gentlemen-I am sure you are delighted
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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

with the prospect of hearing no more about anxiety.
But your delight will be short-lived, for what is to follow
is no better. I propose to take you straight on to the
subject of the theory of the libido or of the instincts for
there too many new developments have occurred. I can-
not say that we have made any very great progress or
that any trouble you may take in learning about it will
be amply rewarded. No; it is a field in which we are
struggling hard to get some sort of orientation and
understanding; you will only be witnesses of the efforts
we are making. Here too I shall have to repeat much
that I put before you in my earlier lectures.

The theory of the instincts is, as it were, our mythol-
ogy. The instincts are mythical beings, superb in their
indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment
overlook them, and yet we are never certain that we
are seeing them clearly. You know how popular
thought deals with the instincts. It postulates as many
different instincts as may be needed, an instinct of as-
sertiveness, instincts of imitation and play, a social
instinct and a great many more besides. It takes them
up, as it were, lets each do its particular work, and then
drops them again. We have always suspected that
behind this multitude of small occasional instincts there
lies something much more serious and powerful, which
must be approached with cireumspection. Our first
step was tentative enough,. We felt we should probably
not go far wrong if we started by distinguishing two
main instincts, or species or groups of instincts, corre-
sponding to our two great needs-hunger and love.
However jealously we may in other connections have
defended the independence of psychology from all other

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sciences, nevertheless we are here overshadowed by the
immutable biological fact that the living individual
serves two purposes, self-preservation and the preserva-
tion of the species, which seem to be independent of
each other, which we have not been able to trace back
to a common source, and whose interests often conflict
in animal life. Here we are really discussing biological
psychology, we are studying the psychological concomi-
tants of biological processes. In accordance with this
view, we introduced the 'ego-instincts' and the 'sexual
instinets' into psycho-analysis. Under the former head-
ing we placed everything that had to do with the
preservation, maintenance and advancement of the in-
dividual. To the latter we ascribed the rich content
implied in infantile and perverse sexual life. Our
investigation of the neuroses led us to regard the ego
as the restricting and repressing force and the sexual
impulses as the restricted and repressed ones, with the
result that we thought we had firmly grasped not only
the difference between the two groups of instincts, but
the conflict between them. At first the objects of our
studies consisted only of the sexual impulses, whose
energy we called the 'libido.' From the study of them
we tried to make out what an instinct was and what
attributes it possessed. At this point we reach the theory
of the libido.

An instinct differs from a stimulus in that it arises
from sources of stimulation within the body, operates
as a constant force, and is such that the subject cannot
escape from it by flight as he can from an external
stimulus. An instinct may be described as having a
source, an object and an aim. The source is a state of

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excitation within the body, and its aim is to remove that ,
excitation; in the course of its path from its source to:
the attainment of its aim the instinct becomes operative .
mentally. We picture it as a certain sum of energy
forcing its way in a certain direction. We speak of
active and passive instincts, but we ought rather to speak
of active and passive instinctual aims; for an expendi-
ture of activity is required even in order to attain a
passive aim. The aim can be attained in the subject's
own body, but as a rule an external object is introduced,
in which the instinct attains its external aim; its internal
aim is always a somatic modification which is experi-
enced as satisfaction. Whether the relation to a somatic
source gives the instinct any specific characters, and if
so which, is not at all clear. The evidence of analytic
experience proves conclusively that instinctual impulses
from one source can join on to instinctual impulses from
another and share their further vicissitudes, and that in
general the satisfaction of one instinct can be substituted
for the satisfaction of another. It must be freely ad-
mitted, however, that we are not very clear about the
explanation of this. The relations of an instinct to its
aim and to its object are also susceptible to alterations;
both can be exchanged for others, but the relation to the
object is !the more easily loosened of the two. There
is a particular kind of modification of aim and change
of object, with regard to which our social values come
into the picture; to this we give the name of 'sublimeae-
tion. We have also grounds for the differentiation of
what we call 'cim-inhibited instincts; these proceed from
familiar sources and have unambiguous aims, but
come to a stop on their way to satisfaction, with the
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

result that a permanent object-cathexis and an enduring
driving force come into being. Of such a kind, for in-
stance, is the feeling of affection, whose source un-
doubtedly lies in sexual needs but invariably renounces
their gratification. We are, as you see, still in ignorance
about many of the characteristics of the instincts and
their history. We ought here to mention another dis-
tinction between the sexual instincts and the instincts of
self-preservation which would be of the utmost theoret-
ical importance, if it applied to the whole group. The
sexual instincts are remarkable for their plasticity, for
the facility with which they can change their aims, for
their interchangeability-for the ease with which they
can substitute one form of gratification for another, and
for the way in which they can be held in suspense, as
has been so well illustrated by the aim-inhibited instincts.
It would be convenient if we could assert that these
characteristics do not apply to the instincts of self.
preservation, and that the latter are inflexible, do not
allow of delay, are far more imperative and respond
quite differently to repression and anxiety. On re-
flexion, however, we see that this peculiarity does not
apply to all the ego-instincts but only to those of hunger
and thirst, and is clearly due to the special nature of
their instinctual sources. A great deal of our perplexity
also arises from the fact that we have not devoted any
attention to the alterations which the instinctual im-
pulses originally belonging to the id undergo under the
influence of the organised ego.

We find ourselves on firmer ground when we turn
to the question of how the instinctual life serves the
sexual function. Here we have obtained decisive infor-

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

mation; but you are already familiar with it. We do
not, that is to say, believe that there is a single sexual
instinct, which is from the first the vehicle of the impulse
towards the aim of the sexual function, that is, the union
of the two sex cells. On the contrary, we see a large
number of component instincts, arising from various
regions of the body, which strive for satisfaction more
or less independently of one another, and find this sat-
isfaction in something that may be called 'organ-pleas-
ure. The genitals are the latest of these erofogenic
zones; and their organ-pleasure must certainly be called
'sexual." Not all of these pleasure-seeking impulses are
incorporated in the final organisation of the sexual func-
tion. Many of them are put aside as useless, by means
of repression or in some other way; some of them are
deflected from their aims in the remarkable manner
which we have already mentioned and used for the
strengthening of other impulses; while others persist,
but play minor parts, and serve the purpose of bringing
about preliminary actions and of arousing fore-pleasure.
You have heard that in this long-drawn-out course of
development several phases of provisional organisation
are to be recognised, and that aberrations and mal-
developments of the sexual function are to be explained
by reference to its history. The first of these pregenital
phases is called the oral phase, because, in accordance
with the fact that the infant is nourished through the
mouth, the erotogenic zone of the mouth dominates what
we may call the sexual activity of this period of life.
At a second stage the sadistic and anal impulses come
to the fore, obviously in connection with the cutting of
the teeth, the strengthening of the musculature, and the
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES on PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

control of the sphincters. We have learnt a great many
interesting details about this remarkable stage of devel-
opment in particular. Third comes the phallic phase,
in which for both sexes the penis (and what corresponds
to it in the girl) achieves an importance which can no
longer be overlooked. We have reserved the name of
genital phase for the final sexual organisation, estab-
lished after puberty, in which the female genitals
receive for the first time the recognition which the male
genitals have long since obtained.

So far all this has been mere recapitulation. And
you must not suppose that the things which I have
omitted to mention this time no longer hold true. This
recapitulation was necessary so that we could have a
starting-point for our account of the further advance in
our knowledge. We can flatter ourselves that we have
obtained a great deal of new information precisely
about this matter of the early organisations of the libido
and that we have a better understanding of what we
already knew-in proof of which I will give you a few
instances. In 1924 Abraham showed that we can dif-
ferentiate two stages in the sadistic-anal phase. In the
former of these the destructive tendencies to annihilate
and to get rid of things have the upper hand, while in
the latter those tendencies predominate which are
friendly to the object, and seek to possess things and
hold them fast. In the middle of this phase, then, there
appears for the first time a consideration for the object,
which is a forerunner of a later relation of love to-
wards the object. We are equally justified in assuming
a similar subdivision in the first or oral phase. In the
earlier stage of it we only have oral incorporation, and

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

there is no ambivalence in the relation to the object, .e.
the mother's breast, The second stage, which is distin-
guished by the onset of biting activities, may be called
the 'oral-sadistic' stage. It is here that we get the first
manifestations of ambivalence, which become so much
more obvious in the next, or sadistic-anal phase, The
value of these new differentiations becomes especially
clear when we want to discover the predispositional
points of the libidinal development in the case of certain
neuroses-such as obsessional neurosis and melancholia.
I need only recall to you here what we have learnt on
the subject of fixation of libido, predisposition and

'regression.

Our attitude to the phases of libidinal organisation
has in general altered somewhat. We used formerly to
emphasise the way in which one phase gives place to the
next; nowadays, we direct our attention more to the
facts which indicate how much of each earlier phase
persists side by side with, and behind, later organisa-
tions, and obtains permanent representation in the
economy of the libido and in the character of the indi-
vidual. Even more important are those investigations
which have shown us how frequently under pathological
conditions regression to earlier phases takes place, and
that certain regressions are characteristic of certain
forms of illness. I cannot, however, go into that ques-
tion here; it is a matter for a specialised treatise on the
psychology of the neuroses.

We have been able to study the transformation of in-
stincts and similar processes, especially with reference
to anal-erotism, in which the impulses have their source
in the erotogenic anal zone, and we are surprised to find

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the multiplicity of the channels along which these in-
stinctual impulses can be directed. It is perhaps not
easy to free oneself from the contemptuous attitude.
which we have come to adopt towards this particular
zone during the course of our development. It is as
well, therefore, to bear in mind Abraham's reminder
that embryologically the anus corresponds to the primi-
tive mouth, which has moved down to the end of the
bowel. It appears, then, that when, in the course of
development, the individual comes to feel disfavour for
his own faeces or excrement, his instinctual interest
arising from anal sources passes over to objects which
can be given away as gifts. And rightly so, for faeces
were the first gift that the infant could make, and he
parted with them out of love for the person who looked
after him. Subsequently the old interest in faeces turns
into an appreciation of gold and money, and also makes
a contribution to the affective cathexis attaching to the
ideas of child and penis. It is the view of all children,
who, as we know, cling to the cloaca-theory for a long
time, that babies are born out of the bowel, like a piece
of faeces; defaecation is the prototype of the act of
birth. But the penis, too, has its forerunner in the
column of faeces, which fills the mucous membrane
tube of the bowel and stimulates it. When the child
has unwillingly imbibed the knowledge that there are
human beings who do not possess a penis, that organ
seems to him something which can be detached from the
body, and an unmistakable analogy is drawn between
it and the excrement which was the first piece of bodily
substance that had to be given up. A large quantity of
anal-erotism is thus transferred to the cathexis of the
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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

penis. But the interest in that part of the body has, be-
sides an anal-erotic basis, a perhaps even more powerful
root in oral erotism ; for in accordance with the situation
of sucking, the penis derives a great deal from the
nipple of the mother's breast.

It is impossible to have any understanding of peo-
ple's phantasies, or of associations which occur under
the influence of the unconscious, or of the language of
symptoms, if one does not know about these deep-lying
connections. On this level, faeces-money-gift-child-
penis are taken as having the same meaning, and can be
represented by the same symbols. You must not for-
get that I can only give you very incomplete information
on the subject. I will, however, add in passing that the
late awakening interest in the vagina is mainly of anal-
erotic derivation. This is not to be wondered at, since
the vagina is, in the admirable phrase of Lou Andreas-
Salomé, 'hired out' from the rectum; and in the lives
of homosexuals, who have not got beyond a certain stage
in their sexual development, the vagina is once more
represented by the anus. In dreams we often meet
with a place which was formerly a single room, but is
now divided into two by a partition wall, or vice versa.
This always refers to the relation of the vagina to the
rectum. We can also follow very clearly the way in
which in a girl, the entirely unfeminine desire for the
possession of a penis normally turns into the desire for
a child, and then for a man as the bearer of the penis
and the giver of the child, so that in this case too we
can see how an element of what was originally an anal-
erotic interest is taken up into the later genital organisa-
tion.

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

In the course of these studies of the pregenital phases
of the libido, we have gleaned some new pieces of in-
formation about the formation of character. We have
been made aware of a triad of characteristics which are
almost always to be found together: orderliness, parsi-
moniousness and obstinacy, and we have concluded from
the analysis of persons possessing them that these char-
acteristics proceed from the dissipation of their anal-
erotism and its employment in other ways. Where this
remarkable combination is to be found, therefore, we
speak of an 'anal character," and in a sense contrast it
with unmodified anal-erotism. A similar and perhaps
even firmer connection is to be found between ambition
and urethral erotism. We have found a remarkable
reference to this correlation in the legend that Alexander
the Great was born on the same night that a certain
Herostratus, from a craving for notoriety, set fire to the
famous temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It seems that
the ancients were well aware of the connection involved.
You already know how close a connection there is be-
tween urination and fire and the putting out of fire.
Naturally we expect to find that other traits of character
will also turn out to be derived from pregenital libidinal
formations, either as precipitates or as reaction-forma-
tions; but we cannot as yet demonstrate this.

It is now time for me to turn back to an earlier stage
of our problem, and again take up the question of in-
stinctual life in its most general aspect. The contrast
between ego-instincts and sexual instincts lay to begin
with at the bottom of our theory of the libido. When,
later on, we began to study the ego in greater detail, and
came to understand the idea of narcissism, this distinc-

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tion itself lost its validity. In certain rare cases one
observes that the ego takes itself as object, and behaves
as if it were in love with itself. For this reason we
have borrowed the name of 'raercissism' from the Greek
legend. But that is only an extreme exaggeration of the
normal course of events. We must understand that the
ego is always the main reservoir of libido, from which
libidinal cathexes of objects proceed, and into which
they return again, while the greater part of this libido
remains perpetually in the ego. There is therefore a
constant transformation of ego-libido into object-libido,
and of object-libido into ego-libido. But if this is so
the two cannot differ from each other in their nature,
and there is no point in distinguishing the energy of the
one from that of the other; one can either drop the term
'libido' altogether, or use it as meaning the same as
psychic energy in general.

We did not keep to this point of view for long. The
idea of contrasting forces within the instinctual life was
soon given another and more precise meaning. I shall
not go through the processes by which I arrived at this
new point of view; it, too, rests essentially on biological
considerations; I will put it before you as a finished
article. We suppose that there are two fundamentally
different kinds of instincts, the sexual instincts in the
widest sense of the word (Eros, if you prefer that name)
and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction.
When it is put like that, you will hardly think of it as
anything new; it looks as though it were a theoretical
glorification of the commonplace opposition between
love and hate, which may perhaps coincide with the
polarity of attraction and repulsion which physics postu-

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lates for the inorganic world. But it is remarkable that
this hypothesis was nevertheless felt by many to be an
innovation, and indeed a most undesirable one which
ought to be got rid of as soon as possible. I think a
strong emotional factor was responsible for this rejec-
tion. Why have we ourselves taken so long to bring
ourselves to recognise the existence of an aggressive in-
stinct? -Why was there so much hesitation in using for
our theory facts which lay ready to hand and were
familiar to every one? One would probably meet with
but little opposition if one were to ascribe to animals
an instinct with such an aim as this. But to introduce
it into the human constitution seems impious; it con-
tradicts too many religious prejudices and social con-
ventions. No, man must be by nature good, or at least
good-natured. If he occasionally shows himself to be
brutal, violent and cruel, these are only passing disturb-
ances of his emotional life, mostly provoked, and
perhaps only the consequence of the ill-adapted social
system which he has so far made for himself.
Unfortunately the testimony of history and our own
experience do not bear this out, but rather confirm the
judgment that the belief in the 'goodness' of man's
nature is one of those unfortunate illusions from which
mankind expects some kind of beautifying or ameliora-
tion of their lot, but which in reality bring only disaster.
We need not proceed with this polemic; for it is not on
account of the teaching of history and of our own ex-
perience of life that we maintain the hypothesis of a
special instinct of aggression and destructiveness in
man, but on account of general considerations, to which
we were led in trying to estimate the importance of the
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phenomena of sadism and masochism. You know that
we use the word 'sadism' when sexual satisfaction de-
pends upon the sexual object suffering pain, ill-treatment
and humiliation, and the word 'masochism,' when the
subject himself has to suffer such treatment. You know,
too, that there is a certain admixture of these two tend-
encies in normal sexual relations, and that we call them
'perversions' when they thrust the other sexual aims into
the background, and substitute their own aims for them.
It can hardly have escaped you that sadism has a close
connection with masculinity, and masochism with
femininity, as if there were some secret relationship
between them. I must tell you at once that we have
made no further progress along this path. Both of them,
sadism and masochism, are very hard to account for
by the theory of the libido, and especially masochism;
and it is only right and proper that the stone which was
an obstacle to the one theory should become the corner-
stone of the other.

For we believe that in sadism and masochism we have
two admirable examples of the fusion of the two kinds
of instincts, Eros and aggressiveness, and we now put
forward the hypothesis that this relationship is typical
and that all the instinctual impulses that we can study
are made up of such fusions or alloys of the two kinds
of instincts. Naturally they are to be found mixed in
the greatest variety of proportions. To this mixture the
erotic instincts will contribute the whole multiplicity of
their sexual aims, while the others will admit only of
mitigation and graduation of their uniform tendency.
This hypothesis opens up a line of investigation which
may some day be of great importance for the under-

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standing of pathological processes. For fusions may
be undone, and such defusions of instincts may be ex-
pected to bring about the most serious consequences to
adequate functioning. But this point of view is still
too new; no one has so far attempted to make practical
use of it.

Let us return to the specific problem which is pre-
sented by masochism. If we put its erotic components
on one side for a moment, it proves the existence of a
tendency which has self-destruction as its aim. We
have already stated that the ego (or rather, as we should
here say, the id, the whole personality) originally in-
cludes all the instinctual impulses; if this applies
equally to the destructive instinct, it will follow that
masochism is older than sadism; and that sadism is
the destructive instinct directed outwards, thereby
acquiring the character of aggressiveness. Varying
quantities of the original destructive instinct may still
remain inside the organism ; it seems as though we could
only perceive it under two conditions, either when it is
bound up with the erotic instincts so as to form maso-
chism, or when it is turned on to the external world
(with a greater or lesser erotic addition) in the shape
of aggressiveness. We are now led to consider the im-
portant possibility of the aggression being unable to find
satisfaction in the external world, because it comes up
against objective hindrances. It may then perhaps turn
back, and increase the amount of self-destructiveness
within. We shall see that this actually occurs, and that
it is an event of great importance. It would seem that
aggression when it is impeded entails serious injury,
and that we have to destroy other things and other peo-

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ple, in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to protect
ourselves from the tendency to self-destruction. A sad
disclosure, it will be agreed, for the Moralist.

But the Moralist will, for a long time to come, console
himself with the improbability of our speculations. It
is indeed a strange instinct that is occupied with the
destruction of its own organic home! It is true that the
poets speak of things of this sort; but poets are irrespon-
sible beings, they enjoy the privilege of poetic licence.
But, after all, such ideas are not foreign to physiology,
where we find, for instance, the mucous membrane of
the stomach digesting itself. But it must be admitted
that our instinct of self-destruction requires more con-
firmation. One cannot put forward a hypothesis that
is so far-reaching, simply on the ground that a few
poor fools have attached a curious condition to their
sexual satisfaction. 1 think that a deeper study of the
instincts will give us what we want. The instincts do
not only dominate mental life, but vegetative life as
well, and these organic instincts display a characteristic
which merits our most serious attention. - Whether it is
a general characteristic of all instincts we shall only be
able to decide later. They turn out to be directed to-
wards the reinstatement of an earlier state of things.
We may assume that as soon as a given state of things
is upset there arises an instinct to recreate it, and
phenomena appear which we may call 'repetition-com-
pulsion.' Embryology, for instance, is nothing but a
repetition-compulsion; stretching far back in the animal
series we find a capacity to form afresh organs which
have been lost, and the instinct of recovery, to which,

alongside of our therapeutic activities, we owe our
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power to get well, may be the remains of this capacity
which is so wonderfully developed in the lower animals.
The spawning migrations of fish and perhaps the migra-
tions of birds, possibly all that we describe as a mani-
festation of instinct in animals, takes place under the
domination of repetition-compulsion, which expresses
the conservative nature of instincts. And in the realm
of the mind, too, we shall not have far to seek for evi-
dence of the presence of that compulsion. It has always
surprised us that the forgotten and repressed experi-
ences of early childhood should reproduce themselves
in dreams and reactions during analytic treatment, espe-
cially in the reactions involved in the transference,
although their reawakening runs counter to the interests
of the pleasure-principle; and we have explained this
by saying that in such cases repetition-compulsion has
overcome even the pleasure-principle. Outside analysis,
too, one can observe the same thing. There are people
who, all their lives, repeat, to their own detriment, the
same reactions, without any correction, or who seem to
be dogged by a relentless ill-fortune, though a closer
investigation shows that they are unwittingly bringing
this ill-fortune upon themselves. Thus we explain what
is called a 'daemonic character as being due to the
repetition-compulsion.

But how can this conservative quality of instincts help
us to understand the self-destructive tendency? What
is the earlier state of things that such an instinct is try-
ing to reinstate? Now the answer to this question lies
near at hand, and opens up a wide vista of possibilities.
If it is true that once in an inconceivably remote past,
and in an unimaginable way, life arose out of inani-

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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

mate matter, then, in accordance with our hypothesis,
an instinct must at that time have come into being, whose
aim it was to abolish life once more and to re-establish
the inorganic state of things. If in this instinct we recog-
nise the impulse to self-destruction of our hypothesis,
then we can regard that impulse as the manifestation of
a death instinct, which can never be absent in any vital
process. And now the instincts in which we believe
separate themselves into two groups; the erotic instincts,
which are always trying to collect living substance to-
gether into ever larger unities, and the death instincts
which act against that tendency, and try to bring living
matter back into an inorganic condition. The co-opera-
tion and opposition of these two forces produce the
phenomena of life to which death puts an end.

You will perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: That
is not natural science, that is the philosophy of Scho-
penhauer. But, Ladies and Gentlemen, why should not
a bold thinker have divined something that a sober and
painstaking investigation of details subsequently con-
firms? And after all, everything has been said already,
and many people said the same thing before Schopen-
hauer. And besides, what we have said is not even true
Schopenhauer. We do not assert that death is the only
aim of life; we do not overlook the presence of life by
the side of death. We recognise two fundamental in-
stincts, and ascribe to each of them its own aim. How
the two mingle in the vital process, how the death in-
stinct is pressed into the service of Eros, especially when
it is turned outwards in the form of
these are problems which remain for future investiga-
tion. We can go no further than the point at which this

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prospect opens up before us. The question whether
all instincts without exception do not possess a con-
servative character, whether the erotic instincts also
do not seek the reinstatement of an earlier state of
things, when they strive towards the synthesis of living
substance into larger wholes-this question, too, must
be left unanswered.

We have wandered somewhat far from our thesis,
but I will tell you the starting-point of these reflections
upon the theory of the instincts. It was the same thing
that led us to a revision of the relation between the ego
and the unconscious: the impression we received from
our analytical work that the patient who puts up a re-
sistance very often knows nothing about it. But he is
unconscious not only of the fact of his resistance but
of the motives for it. It was necessary for us to look
for these motives or this motive, and we found it to our
surprise in a strong need for punishment, which we
could not help associating with masochistic wishes. The
practical value of this discovery is no less than its theo-
retical importance, for this need for punishment is the
worst enemy of our therapeutic efforts. It is satisfied by
the suffering which is bound up with the neurosis, and
therefore holds fast to the state of illness. It seems as
though this factor, the unconscious need for punishment,
plays a part in every neurotic disease. The truth of
this view is brought home to one in the most convincing
way by cases in which we see neurotic suffering vanish
at the appearance of suffering of another kind. I will
give you an instance of this. I once succeeded in free-
ing a middle-aged spinster from a symptom-complex
that had condemned her to a miserable existence for

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about fifteen years, and had quite prevented her from
taking any part in life. She felt that she was now re-
stored to health, and plunged into a whirl of activity in
order to develop her talents, which were by no means
small, and derive a little appreciation, enjoyment and
success from life before it was too late. But all her
attempts ended in its being made clear to her or in her
seeing for herself, that she was too old to effect any-
thing in that direction. Every time this happened the
next step for her would nave been a relapse into her
illness, but that she could no longer bring about; in-
stead of it an accident would always befall her, which in-
capacitated her for some time and caused her suffering.
She would fall down and sprain her foot, or injure her
knee, or else hurt her hand while she was doing some-
thing or other. As soon as she saw how great a part
she herself played in these apparently chance accidents,
she altered her technique, as one might say. Instead of
accidents she contracted on the same occasions slight
illnesses, such as catarrhs, sore throats, influenzal con-
ditions, or rheumatic swellings, until at last, when she
made up her mind to resign herself to inactivity, the
whole business came to an end.

As to the origin of this unconscious need for punish-
ment, there can be, I think, no doubt. It behaves like
a part of the conscience, like the prolongation of con-
science into the unconscious; and it must have the same
origin as conscience, that is to say it will correspond
to a piece of aggressiveness which has been internalized
and taken over by the superego. If only the words
were less incongruous, we should be justified, for all
practical purposes, in calling it 'an unconscious sense

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of guilt. Theoretically, as a matter of fact, we are in
doubt whether we ought to suppose that all aggressive-
ness that has turned back from the external world is
bound by the super-ego, and so used against the ego, or
whether a part of it carries on its silent sinister activily
as a free destructive instinct in the ego and the id.
Probably there is a division of this kind, but we know
nothing further about it. When first the super-ego is
set up there is no doubt that that function is endowed
with that part of the child's aggressiveness against its
parents for which it can find no discharge outwards on
account of its love-fixation and external difficulties; and,
for this reason, the severity of the super-ego need not
correspond to the severity of its upbringing. It is quite
likely that when on subsequent occasions aggressiveness
is suppressed, the instinct follows the path which was
opened to it at that decisive period.

People in whom this unconscious sense of guilt is
dominant, distinguish themselves under dnalytic treat-
ment by exhibiting what is so untvelcome from the point
of view of prognosis-a negative therapeutic reaction.
In the normal course of events, if one gives a patient
the solution of a symptom, at least the temporary dis-
appearance of that symptom should result; with these
patients, on the contrary, the effect is a momentary in-
tensification of the symptom and the suffering that
accompanies it. It often needs only a word of praise
of their behaviour during the cure, the utterance of a
few words of hope as to the progress of the analysis, to
bring about an unmistakable aggravation of their con-
dition. A non-analyst would say that they were lacking

in the 'will to recovery'; from the analytical point of
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ANXIETY AND INSTINCTUAL LIFE

view their behaviour will appear as an expression of an
unconscious sense of guilt, which favours illness with
its attendant sufferings and handicaps. The problems
raised by the unconscious sense of guilt, its relation to
morality, education, criminality and delinquency, is at
the present moment the favourite field of investigation
for psycho-analysts. Here we have quite unexpectedly
emerged into the open from the mental underworld. I
cannot take you any further, but I will detain you for
a {ew moments before I stop with one further considera-
tion. We have got into the habit of saying that our
civilisation is built up at the cost of our sexual im-
pulses, which are inhibited by society, being partly
repressed but partly, on the other hand, made use of
for new aims. However proud we may be of our cul-
tural achievements, we have admitted that it is by no
means easy to satisfy the requirements of this civilisa-
tion and to feel comfortable in its midst, because the
restriction of the instincts which it involves lays a heavy
psychological burden on our shoulders. Now what we
have recognised as true of the sexual instincts holds to
the same extent, and perhaps to an even greater extent,
for the other instincts, for those of aggression. It is
they above all that make communal existence difficult,
and threaten its permanence. The limitation of aggres-
sion is the first and perhaps the hardest sacrifice which
society demands from each individual. We have learnt
in what an ingenious way this unruly element is tamed.
The setting up of the super-ego, which makes the dan-
gerous aggressive impulses its own, is like introducing
a garrison into a province that is on the brink of rebel-
lion. But on the other hand, looking at it from a purely
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psychological point of view, one has to admit that the
ego does not feel at all comfortable when it finds itself
sacrificed in this way to the needs of society, when it has
to submit itself to the destructive impulses of aggres-
sion, which it would have dearly liked itself to set in
motion against others. It is like a carrying-over into
the region of the mind of the dilemma-eat or be eaten
-which dominates the organic world. Fortunately the
instincts of aggression are never alone, they are always
alloyed with the erotic ones. In the cultural conditions
which man has created for himself the erotic instincts
have much to mitigate and much to avert.

152

CHAPTER 5

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN, LECTURE XXXIH

LaptEs AND GENTLEMEN-The whole time that I have
been preparing the lectures I am giving you, I have been
struggling with an internal difficulty. I feel, as one
might say, uncertain of the terms of my licence. It is
quite true that in the course of fifteen years' work,
psycho-analysis has altered and grown; but in spite of
that, an introduction to psycho-analysis might be left un-
changed and unexpanded. It is always at the back of my
mind that there is no raison d'étre for these lectures. For
analysts I say too little and nothing at all that is new,
while to you I say too much and relate things which you
are not in a position to understand and which are not for
your ears. I have looked about for excuses, and have
tried to justify each of my lectures on different grounds.
The first, the one about the theory of dreams, was in-
tended to put you back at once into the atmosphere of
analysis, and to show you how durable our hypotheses
have proved themselves to be. I was tempted to give the
second, which traced the connection between dreams and
the so-called occult, by the opportunity it afforded of
saying something about a field of research in which at
the present time prejudiced expectation is struggling
against passionate opposition; and I allowed myself to
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

hope that you would not refuse me your company on this
expedition, but would follow me with a judgment edu-
cated to tolerance by example of psycho-analysis. The
third lecture, which dealt with the anatomy of the per-
sonality, certainly made the severest demands upon you,
so strange was its subject-matter; but it was quite im-
possible for me to withhold from you this first
contribution to ego-psychology, and, if we had been in
possession of the material fifteen years ago, I should
have had to mention it then. Finally, the last lecture,
which you have probably followed only with the greatest
difficulty, contained some necessary emendations and
new attempts at the solution of the most important prob-
lems; and my introduction would have been positively
misleading if I had kept silent about them. You see
how it is that when one tries to excuse oneself, it comes
out in the end that everything was inevitable, that every-
thing was pre-ordained. I submit to fate; and I beg
that you will do the same.

Nor should to-day's lecture find a place in an intro-
duction; but it may serve to give you an example of the
detailed work of analysis, and there are two things I can
add in its favour. It contains nothing but observed facts,
with hardly any speculative additions, and it is con-
cerned with a theme which claims your attention almost
more than any other. Throughout the ages the prob-
lem of woman has puzzled people of every kind-

Heads in hieroglyphic caps,
Heads in turbans, and black bonnets,
Heads bewigged and thousand other
Poor and sweating heads of humans. . . .
Heine, Nordsee.

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\_ You too will have pondered over this question in so far
as you are men; from the women among you that is not
to be expected, for you are the riddle yourselves. Male
or female is the first differentiation that you make when
you meet another human being, and you are used to
making that distinction with absolute certainty. Ana-
tomical science shares your certainty in one point, but
not much more. Male is the male sexual secretion, the
spermatozoon, and its carrier; female is the egg, and the
organism that contains it. In each sex, organs have been
formed which exclusively subserve the sexual functions;
they have probably been developed from the same basis
into two different formations. In both sexes, moreover,
the other organs, the shape of the body and the tissues
are influenced by sex (the so-called secondary sexual
characters), but this influence is irregular and varying
in degree. And then science tells you something that
runs counter to your expectations, and is probably calcu-
lated to confuse your feelings. It points out to you that
parts of the male sexual apparatus are also to be found
in the body of the female, although in a rudimentary
condition, and vice versa. Science sees in this phe-
nomenon an indication of bi-sexuality, as though the
individual were neither man nor woman, but both at the
same time, only rather more the one than the other. It
then expects you to make yourselves familiar with the
idea that the proportions in which the masculine and the
feminine mingle in an individual are subject to quite
extraordinary variations. And even though, apart from
very rare cases, only one kind of sexual product-ova
or seminal cells-is present in any one individual, you
will go wrong if you take this factor as being of decisive
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

importance, and you must conclude that what constitutes
masculinity or femininity is an unknown element which
it is beyond the power of anatomy to grasp.

Can psychology do any better? We are used to con-
sider masculine and feminine as mental qualities as well,
and have also carried the notion of bi-sexuality over into
mental life. We speak of a human being, whether male
or female, behaving in a masculine or a feminine way.
But you will at once observe that that is simply following
the lead of anatomy and convention. You can give the
concepts of masculine and feminine no new content. The
difference is not a psychological one; when you say
"masculine," you mean as a rule 'active', and when you
say 'feminine' you mean 'passive.' Now it is quite true
that there is such a correlation. The male sexual cell is
active and mobile; it seeks out the female one, while the
latter, the ovum, is stationary, and waits passively. This
behaviour of the elementary organisms of sex is more or
less a model of the behaviour of the individuals of each
sex in sexual intercourse. The male pursues the female
for the purpose of sexual union, seizes her and pushes
his way into her. But with that you have, so far as
psychology goes, reduced the quality of masculinity to
the factor of aggressiveness. You will begin to doubt
whether you have hit upon anything fundamental here,
when you consider that in many classes of animals the
female is the stronger and more aggressive party, and
the male is only active in the single act of sexual inter-
course. That is the case, for instance, with spiders. The
functions of caring for the young, too, and of rearing
them, which seems to us so essentially feminine, are not,
among animals, always associated with the female sex.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

In some species of animals, quite high in the scale, one
finds that the sexes share in the duties of looking after
the young, or even that the male devotes himself to
it alone. Even in the sphere of human sexual life, one
soon notices how unsatisfactory it is to identify mascu-
line behaviour with activity and feminine with passivity.
The mother is in every sense of the word active in her
relations with her child; it is just as true to say that she
gives suck to the child, as that she lets it suck her breasts.
The further you go from the sexual field in the narrower
sense of the word the more apparent it becomes that the
two ideas do not coincide. Women can display great
activity in a variety of directions, while men cannot live
together with their kind unless they develop a high de-
gree of passive pliability. If you thereupon say that
these facts precisely prove that men and women are psy-
chologically bi-sexual, I shall infer that you have decided
to identify activity with masculinity and passivity with
femininity. But I advise you not to do that. It seems to
me to serve no good purpose and to give us no new in-
formation.

One might make an attempt to characterise femininity
psychologically by saying that it involves a preference
for passive aims. That is naturally not the same as
passivity; it may require a good deal of activity to
achieve a passive end. It may be that the part played
by women in the sexual function leads them to incline
towards passive behaviour and passive aims, and that
this inclination extends into their ordinary life to a
greater or less degree, according to whether the influence
of her sexual life as a model is limited or far-reaching.

But we must take care not to underestimate the influ-
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ence of social conventions, which also force women
into passive situations. The whole thing is still very
obscure. We must not overlook one particularly con-
stant relation between femininity and instinctual life.
The repression of their aggressiveness, which is imposed
upon women by their constitutions and by society, fa-
vours the development of strong masochistic impulses,
which have the effect of binding erotically the destruc-
tive tendencies which have been turned inwards. Maso-
chism is then, as they say, truly feminine. But when,
as so often happens, you meet with masochism in men,
what else can you do but say that these men display
obvious feminine traits of character?

You are now prepared for the conclusion that psy-
chology cannot solve the riddle of femininity. The
solution must, I think, come from somewhere else, and
it cannot come until we have learnt in general how the
differentiation of living creatures into two sexes came
about. We know nothing whatever about the matter,
and yet sex-differentiation is a most remarkable char-
acteristic in organic life, and one by which it is sharply
cut off from inanimate nature. Meanwhile we shall find
plenty to occupy ourselves with in the study of those
human individuals who are characterised as manifestly
or preponderantly female by the possession of female
genitals. It is in harmony with the nature of psycho-
analysis that it does not try to describe what women are
-that would be a task which it could hardly perform-
but it investigates the way in which women develop out
of children with their bi-sexual disposition. We have
learnt a certain amount about this recently, thanks to

the fact that several excellent women analysts have be-
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

gun to work on the problem. A special piquancy has
been lent to the discussion of this subject by the ques-
tion of the difference between the sexes; for, whenever
a comparison was made which seemed to be unfavour-
able to their sex, the ladies were able to express a sus-
picion, that we, the men analysts, had never overcome
certain deep-rooted prejudices against the feminine, and
that consequently our investigations suffered from bias.
On the other hand, on the basis of bi-sexuality, we found
it easy to avoid any impoliteness. We had only to say:
'This does not apply to you. You are an exception, in
this respect you are more masculine than feminine."

In approaching the study of the sexual development
of women we start with two preconceptions: firstly, that,
as in the case of men, the constitution will not adapt
itself to its function without a struggle; and secondly,
that the decisive changes will have been set in motion
or completed before puberty. Both of these preconcep-
tions tum out to be justified. Further, a comparison
with what happens in the case of the boy shows us that
the development of the little girl into a normal woman
is more difficult and more complicated; for she has two
additional tasks to perform, to which there is nothing
corresponding in the development of the man. Let us
follow the parallel from the very beginning. Certainly
the original material is different in the boy and the
girl; it does not require psycho-analysis to find that out.
The difference in the formation of their genital organs
is accompanied by other bodily differences, which are
too familiar for me to need to mention them. In their
instinctual disposition, as well, there are differences

which foreshadow the later nature of the woman. The
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

little girl is as a rule less aggressive, less defiant, and
less self-sufficient; she seems to have a greater need for
affection to be showr her, and therefore to be more
dependent and docile. The fact that she is more easily
and more quickly taught to control her excretions is
very probably only the result of this docility; urine and
stool are, as we know, the first gifts that the child can
offer to those who look after it, and control over them
is the first concession which can be wrung from the
instinctual life of the child. One gets the impression,
too, that the little girl is more intelligent and more lively
than the boy of the same age; she is more inclined to
meet the external world half way, and, at the same time,
she makes stronger object-cathexes. I do not know
whether the view that she gets a start in development
has been confirmed by more exact observations, but in
any case it is quite clear that the little girl cannot be
called intellectually backward. But these sexual differ-
ences are of no great importance; they can be out-
balanced by individual variations. For the purposes
which we have immediately in view they may be left
on one side.

Both sexes seem to pass through the early phases of
libidinal development in the same way. One might
have expected that already in the sadistic-anal phase
we should find that the girl showed less aggressiveness;
but this is not the case. Women analysts have found
from the analysis of children's play that the aggressive
impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired as
regards copiousness and violence. With the onset of
the phallic phase the difference between the sexes be-

comes much less important than their similarities. We
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are now obliged to recognise that the little girl is a little
man. As we know, in the boy this phase is charac-
terised by the fact that he has discovered how to obtain
pleasurable sensations from his little penis, and asso-
ciates its state of excitation with his ideas about sexual
intercourse. - The little girl does the same with her even
smaller clitoris. It seems as though with her, all her
masturbatory actions center round this penis-equivalent,
and that the actual female vagina is still undiscovered
by both sexes. It is true that, here and there, reports
have been made that tell us of early vaginal sensations
as well; but it cannot be easy to discriminate between
these and anal sensations or from sensations of the
vaginal vestibule; in any case they cannot play a very
important role. We may assume that, in the phallic
phase of the girl, the clitoris is the dominant erotogenic
zone. But it is not destined to remain so; with the
change to femininity, the clitoris must give up to the
vagina its sensitivity, and, with it, its importance, either
wholly or in part. This is one of the two tasks which
have to be performed in the course of the woman's de-
velopment; the more fortunate man has only to con-
tinue at the time of his sexual maturity what he has
already practised during the period of early sexual
expansion.

We shall return to the part played by the clitoris,
but shall now pass on to the second task with which the
girl's development is burdened. The first love-object
of the boy is his mother, and she remains as such in the
formation of his Oedipus-complex, and, ultimately,
throughout his whole life. For the little girl, too, her
mother must be her first object (together with figures of

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nurses and other attendants that merge into hers); the
first object-cathexes, indeed, follow the lines of the satis-
faction of the great and simple needs of life, and the
circumstances in which the child is nursed are the same
for both sexes. In the Oedipus situation, however, the
father has become the little girl's love-object, and it is
from him that, in the normal course of development, she
should find her way to her ultimate object-choice. The
girl has, then, in the course of time to change both her
erotogenic zone and her object, while the boy keeps both
of them unchanged. The question then arises of how
this comes about. In particular, how does the little girl
pass from an attachment to her mother to an attachment
to her father? or, in other words, how does she pass
from her masculine phase into the feminine phase which
has been biologically marked out for her?

Now it would provide us with an ideally simple solu-
tion of the problem if we could assume that, from a
certain age onwards, the elementary influence of hetero-
sexual attraction makes itself felt, and draws the little
girl towards men, while the same principle allows the
boy to keep to his mother. One could even assume
further, that, in doing this, children are following a hint
given them by the sexual preferences of their parents.
But things are not so convenient as this. We hardly
know whether we can seriously believe in the mysterious
and unanalysable force, of which the poets sing so
enthusiastically. Painstaking investigations have re-
sulted in findings of quite a different kind, the material
for which, at all events, was easily obtainable. You
must know that the number of women who until late in
life remain tenderly attached to father-objects, or indeed

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to their real fathers, is very large. We have made the
most surprising discoveries about these women who dis-
play intense and prolonged father-fixations,. We knew,
of course, that there had been an earlier stage in which
they were attached to their mother; but we did not know
that it was so rich in content, that it persisted so long,
and that it could leave behind it so many occasions for
fixations and predispositions. During this time, their
father is no more than an irksome rival. In many cases
the attachment to the mother lasts beyond the fourth
year; almost everything that we find later in the father-
relation was already present in that attachment, and has
been subsequently transferred on to the father. In
short, we gain the conviction that one cannot under-
stand women, unless one estimates this pre-oedipal
atachment to the mother at its proper value.

Now we should very much like to know what the
libidinal relations of the little girl to her mother are.
The answer is that they are manifold. Since they pass
through all the three phases of infantile sexuality, they
take on the characteristics of each separate phase, and
express themselves by means of oral, sadistic-anal, and
phallic wishes. These wishes represent active as well
'as passive impulses; if one relates them to the differen-
tiation of the sexes which comes about later (which one
should avoid doing as far as possible), one can speak
of them as masculine and feminine. They are, in addi-
tion, completely ambivalent-both of a tender and of a
hostile-aggressive nature. - It often happens that the hos-
tile wishes only become apparent after they have been
turned into anxiety-ideas. It is not always easy to point
out the way in which these early sexual wishes are

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formulated. What is most clearly expressed is the de-,
sire to get the mother with child as well as the corre-
sponding one, to have a child by the mother; both belong
to the phallic phase, and seem sufficiently strange, though
their existence is established beyond all doubt by ana-
lytic observation. The attraction of these investigations
lies in the extraordinary facts which they bring to light.
Thus, for instance, one discovers the fear of being mur-
dered or poisoned, which may later on form the nucleus
of a paranoic disorder, already present in this pre-
oedipal stage and directed against the mother. Or, to
take another case. You will remember that interesting
episode in the history of analytical research which
caused me so many painful hours? At the time when
my main interest was directed on to the discovery of
infantile sexual traumas, almost all my female patients
told me that they had been seduced by their fathers.
Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that these
stories were false, and thus I came to understand that
hysterical symptoms spring from phantasies and not
from real events. Only later was 1 able to recognise in
this phantasy of seduction by the father the expression
of the typical Oedipus-complex in woman. And now
we find, in the early pre-oedipal history of girls, the
seduction-phantasy again; but the seducer is invariably
the mother. Here, however, the phantasy has a footing
in reality; for it must in fact have been the mother who
aroused (perhaps for the first time) pleasurable sensa-
tions in the child's genitals in the ordinary course of
attending to its bodily needs.

I dare say that you are prepared to suspect that this
description of the richness and strength of the sexual

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relations of the little girl to her mother is very much
exaggerated. One has, after all, plenty of opportunity
of watching little girls, and one notices nothing of the
sort. But the objection cannot be sustained. One can
see enough of such things in children, if one under-
stands how to observe them, and, besides this, you must
consider how little the child is able to give preconscious
expression to its sexual wishes, and how little it can
communicate them. We are therefore acting entirely
within our rights in studying the subsequent traces and
consequences of this emotional field in persons in whom
these developmental processes show a particularly clear,
or even exaggerated, growth. Pathology, as you know,
has always assisted us, by isolation and exaggeration, in
making recognisable things which would normally re-
main hidden. And since our researches have been car-
ried out on people who are by no means grossly ab-
normal, we may, I think, consider the results of them
worthy of belief.

We will now turn our attention to the question of why
this strong attachment of the girl to her mother comes
to grief. We are aware that that is what usually hap.
pens to it; it is fated to give way to an attachment to
her father. And here we stumble on a fact which points
in the right direction. This step in development is not
merely a question of a change of object. The turning
away from the mother occurs in an atmosphere of an-
tagonism; the attachment to the mother ends in hate.
Such a hatred may be very marked and may persist
throughout an entire lifetime; it may later on be care-
fully overcompensated; as a rule, one part of it is over-
come, while another part persists The outcome is

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naturally very strongly influenced by the actual events
of later years. We will confine ourselves to studying
this hatred at the actual time at which the turn towards
the father takes place, and to inquiring into its motives.
We are then met by a long list of complaints and griev-
ances, levelled at the mother, which are intended to
justify the antagonistic feelings of the child; they vary
much in value, and we shall examine them further.
Many are obvious rationalisations, and we have yet to
find the true source of the antagonism. i hope you will
bear with me, if on this occasion I conduct you through
all the details of a psycho-analytical investigation.

The complaint against the mother that harks back
furthest, is that she has given the child too little milk,
which is taken as indicating a lack of love. Now this
complaint has a certain justification in the civilised
human family. The mothers often have not enough
nourishment for their children, and content themselves
with nursing them for nine months or six or even less.
Among primitive peoples children remain at the breast
for as long as two or three years. The figure of the wet-
nurse is as a rule merged in that of the mother; where
this does not take place, the complaint against the mother
takes another form, namely, that she sent the nurse, who
was so ready to feed the child, away too soon. But
whatever may have been the true state of affairs, it is
impossible that the child's complaint can be as often
justified as it is met with. It looks far more as if the
desire of the child for its first form of nourishment is
altogether insatiable, and as if it never got over the pain
of losing the mother's breast. I should not be at all
surprised if an analysis of a member of a primitive race,

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who must have sucked the mother's breast when he could
already run and talk, brought the same complaint to
light. It is probable, too, that the fear of poisoning is
connected with weaning. Poison is the nourishment that
makes one ill. Perhaps, moreover, the child traces his
early illnesses back to this frustration. It requires a
good deal of intellectual training before we can believe
in chance; primitive and uneducated people, and cer-
tainly children, can give a reason for everything that
happens. Perhaps this reason was originally a motive
(in the animistic sense). In many social strata, even
to this day, no one can die, without having been done to
death by some one else, preferably by the doctor. And
the regular reaction of a neurotic to the death of some
one intimately connected with him is to accuse himself
of being the cause of the death.

The next accusation against the mother flares up when
the next child makes its appearance in the nursery. If
possible this complaint retains the connection with oral
frustration: the mother could not or would not give the
child any more milk, because she needed the nourish-
ment for the new arrival. In cases where the two chil-
dren were born so close together that lactation was inter-
fered with by the second pregnancy, this complaint has
a real foundation. It is a remarkable fact that even
when the difference between the children's ages is only
eleven months, the older one is nevertheless able to take
in the state of affairs. But it is not only the milk that
the child grudges the undesired interloper and rival, but
all the other evidences of motherly care. It feels that
it has been dethroned, robbed and had its rights invaded,
and so it directs a feeling of jealous hatred against its

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little brother or sister, and develops resentment against
its faithless mother, which often finds expression in a
change for the worse in its behaviour. It begins to be
'naughty,' irritable, intractable, and unlearns the con-
trol which it has acquired over its excretions. All
this has been known for a long time, and is accepted as
self-evident, but we seldom form a right ided of the
strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacious hold
they have on the child, and the amount of influence they
exert on its later development. These jealous feelings
are particularly important because they are always
being fed anew during the later years of childhood, and
the whole shattering experience is repeated with the ar-
rival of every new brother or sister. Even if the child
remains its mother's favovrite, things are not very dif-
ferent; its demands for affection are boundless; it
requires exclusive attention and will allow no sharing
whatever.

A potent source of the child's antagonism against its
mother is found in its many sexual wishes, which change
with its libidinal phases. These cannot, for the most
part, be satisfied. The strongest of these frustrations
occurs in the phallic stage, when the mother forbids
pleasurable activities centring round the genital organs
-often with an accompaniment of harsh threats and
every indication of disapproval-activities to which,
after all, she herself stimulated the child. It might be
thought that we had here motives enough for the little
girl's alienation from her mother. In that case it might
be our view that estrangement follows inevitably from
the nature of infantile sexuality, from the child's un-
limited demands for love and the unfulfillable nature of

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its sexual wishes. One might even believe that this
first love relation of the child is doomed to extinction
for the very reason that it is the first, for these early
object-cathexes are always ambivalent to a very high
degree; alongside the child's intense love there is
always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the
more passionately the child loves an object, the more
sensitive it will be to disappointments and frustrations
coming from it. In the end, the love is bound to capitu-
late to the accumulated hostility. Or, on the other hand,
one might reject the idea of a fundamental ambivalence
of this kind in the libidinal cathexes, and point to the
fact that it is the peculiar nature of the mother-child
relationship which leads, equally inevitably, to the dis-
turbance of the child's love, since even the mildest form
of education cannot avoid using compulsion and intro-
ducing restrictions, and every such encroachment on its
freedom must call forth as a reaction in the child a
tendency to rebellion and aggressiveness. A discussion
of these possibilities might, I think, be very interesting,
but at this point an objection suddenly arises, which
forces our attention in another direction. All of these
factors-slights, disappointments in love, jealousy and
seduction followed by prohibition-operate as well in
the relationship between the boy and his mother, and
yet are not sufficient to alienate him from the mother-
object. If we do not find something which is specific
for the girl, and which is not present at all, or not
present in the same way in the case of the boy, we shall
not have explained the ending of the girl attachment
to her mother.

I think that we have discovered this specific factor,

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in a place where we might indeed have expected it, but
in a surprising form. In a place where we might have
expected it, I say, for it lies in the castration complex.
The anatomical distinction between the sexes must, after
all, leave its mark in mental life. It was a surprise,
however, to discover from analyses that the girl holds
her mother responsible for her lack of a penis, and
never forgives her for that deficiency.

You will note that we ascribe a castration-complex
to the female sex as well as to the male. We have
good grounds for doing so, but that complex has not
the same content in girls as in boys. In the boy the
castration-complex is formed after he has learnt from
the sight of the female genitals that the sexual organ
which he prizes so highly is not a necessary part of
every human body. He remembers then the threats
which he has brought on himself by his playing with his
penis, he begins to believe in them, and thence forward
he comes under the influence of castration-anxziety, which
supplies the strongest motive force for his further de-
velopment. The castration-complex in the girl, as well,
is started by the sight of the genital organs of the other
sex. She immediately notices the difference, and-it
must be admitted-its significance. She feels herself
at a great disadvantage, and often declares that she
would 'like to have something like that too," and falls
a victim to penis-envy, which leaves ineradicable traces
on her development and character-formation, and, even
in the most favourable instances, is not overcome without
a great expenditure of mental energy. That the girl
recognises the fact that she lacks a penis, does not mean
that she accepts its absence lightly. On the contrary,

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she clings for a long time to the desire to get something
like it, and believes in that possibility for an extraordi-
nary number of years; and even at a time when her
knowledge of reality has long since led her to abandon
the fulfilment of this desire as being quite unattainable,
analysis proves that it still persists in the unconscious,
and retains a considerable charge of energy. The de-
sire after all to obtain the penis for which she so much
longs may even contribute to the motives that impel a
grown-up woman to come to analysis; and what she
quite reasonably expects to get from analysis, such as
the capacity to pursue an intellectual career, can often
be recognised as a sublimated modification of this re-
pressed wish.

One cannot very well doubt the importance of penis-
envy. Perhaps you will regard the hypothesis that envy
and jealousy play a greater part in the mental life of
women than they do in that of men as an example of
male unfairness. Not that I think that these character-
istics are absent in men, or that they have no other
origin in women except envy of the penis, but I am
inclined to ascribe the greater amount of them to be
found in women to this latter influence. Many analysts,
however, tend to minimize the importance of this first
wave of penis-envy in the phallic phase. They think
that the signs one comes across of this attitude in women
are in the main a secondary formation, which has come
about through regression to the early infantile impulse
in question on the occasion of some subsequent conflict.
Now this is one of the general problems of depth psy-
chology. In the case of many pathological-or merely
unusual-instinctual attitudes, for example with all

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sexual perversions, the question arises how much of their
force is to be attributed to early infantile fixations and
how much to the influence of later experiences and de-
velopments. It is almost always a question of comple-
mental series, such as we have postulated when dealing
with the actiology of the neuroses. Both sets of factors
share in the causation in a varying proportion; a less
in the one set will be balanced by a more in the other.
The infantile factor in every case paves the way; it is
not always the decisive force, though it often is. But
with regard to the particular case of penis-envy, I should
like to come down decidedly in favour of the pre-
ponderance of the infantile factor.

The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in
the life of the girl. Three lines of development diverge
from it; one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis,
the second to a modification of character in the sense of
masculinity complex, and the third to normal femininity.
We have learnt a good deal, though not everything,
about all three. The fundamental content of the first
is that the little girl, who has hitherto lived a masculine
life, and has been able to obtain pleasure through the
excitation of her clitoris, and has connected this be-
haviour with the sexual wishes (often of an active char-
acter) which she has directed towards her mother, finds
her enjoyment of phallic sexuality spoilt by the influence
of penis-envy. She is wounded in her self-love by the
unfavourable comparison with the boy who is so much
better equipped, and therefore gives up the masturbatory
satisfaction which she obtained from her clitoris, re-
pudiates her love towards her mother, and at the same
time often represses a good deal of her sexual impulses

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in general. No doubt this turning away from her mother
does not come to pass at one blow, for at first the girl
looks on her castration as a personal misfortune, and
only gradually extends it to other females, and even-
tually to her mother. Her love had as its object the
phallic mother; with the discovery that the mother is
castrated it becomes possible to drop her as a love-
object, so that the incentives to hostility which have -
been so long accumulating, get the upper hand. 'This
means, therefore, that as a result of the discovery of
the absence of a penis, women are as much depreciated
in the eyes of the girl as in the eyes of the boy, and
later, perhaps, of the man.

You all know what an overwhelming aetiological im-
portance is attributed by neurotics to their masturbatory
practices. They make them responsible for all their
troubles, and we have the greatest difficulty in getting
them to believe that they are wrong. But as a matter of
fact we ought to admit that they are in the right, for
masturbation is the executive agent of infantile sexu-
ality, from the faulty development of which they are
suffering. The difference is that what the neurotics are
blaming is the masturbation of the pubertal stage; the
infantile masturbation, which is the one that really
matters, has for the most part been forgotten by them.
I wish I could find an opportunity for giving you a
circumstantial account of how important all the factual
details of early masturbation are in determining the
subsequent neurosis or character of the individual con-
cerned-such details as whether it was discovered or
not, how the parents combated it or whether they per-
mitted it, and whether the subject succeeded in sup-

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pressing it himself. All these details will have left
indelible traces upon his development. But in fact I
am resieved that it is not necessary for me to do this; it
would be a difficult and weary task, and at the end you
would embarrass me because you would quite certainly
ask for some practical advice as to how one should
behave towards the masturbation of small children as a
parent or educator. The history of the development of
girls, which is the subject I am telling you about, offers
an instance of the child itself striving to free itself from
masturbation. - But it does not always succeed. Where
penis-envy has aroused a strong impulse against cli-
toritic masturbation, but where the latter will not give
way, there follows a ficree battle for freedom, in which
the girl herself takes over, as it were, the role of the
mother whom she has set aside, and expresses her whole
dissatisfaction with the inferior clitoris, by striving
against the gratification derived from it. Many years
latev, when her masturbatory activity has long ago been
suppressed, we may find an interest persisting which we
must interpret as a defence against the temptation, which
she still fears. It finds expression in {eelings of sym-
pathy for persons to whom she ascribes similar diffi-
culties; it may enter into her motives for marriage, and
may indeed determine her choice of a husband or lover.
The settling of the problem of infantile masturbation is
truly no casy or unimportant task.

When the little girl gives up clitoritic masturbation,
she surrenders a certain amount of activity. Her pas-
sive side has now the upper hand, and in turning to
her {ather she is assisted in the main by passive in-
stinctual impulses. You will see that a step in devel-

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opment, such as this one, which gets rid of phallic
. activity, must smooth the path for femininity. If in the
process not too much is lost through repression, this
feraininity may prove normal. The wish with which
the girl turns to her father, is, no doubt, ultimately the
wish for the penis, which her mother has refused her
and which she now expects from her father. The femi-
nine situation is, however, only established when the
wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child-
the child taking the place of the penis, in accordance
with the old symbolic equation. It does not escape us
that at an earlier stage the girl has already desired a
child, before the phallic phase was interfered with; that
was the meaning of her playing with dolls. But this
play was not really an expression of her femininity, it
served, in identifying her with her mother, the purpose
of substituting activity for passivity,. She was the
mother, and the doll was herself; now she could do
everything to the doll that her mother used to do with
her. Only with the onset of the desire for a penis does
the doll-child become a child by the father, and, thence-
forward, the strongest feminine wish, Her happiness is
great indeed when this desire for a child one day finds
a real fulfilment; but especially is this so if the child
is a little boy, who brings the longed-for penis with him.
In the idea of having a child by the father, the accent is
often enough placed on the child, and not on the father.
Thus the old masculine wish for the possession of a
penis still shows under the completely developed femi-
ninity. But perhaps we should rather think of this
desire for a penis as something essentially feminine in
itself.
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With the transference of the child-penis wish on to
her father, the girl enters into the situation of the
Oedipus-complex. The hostility against her mother,
which did not require to be newly created, now receives
a great reinforcement, for her mother becomes a rival,
who gets everything from her father that she herself
wants. The girl's Oedipus-complex has long concealed
from us the pre-oedipal attachment to her mother which
is so important and which leaves behind it such lasting
fixations. For the girl, the Oedipus situation is the con-
clusion of a long and difficult period of development,
it is a kind of temporary solution of her problem, a state
of equilibrium which is not lightly to be given up, espe-
cially as the onset of the latency period is not far off.
And here we notice a difference between the two sexes
in the relation between the Qedipus-complex and the
castration-complex, a difference which is probably a
momentous one. The boy's Oedipus-complex, in which
he desires his mother, and wants to get rid of his father
as a rival, develops naturally out of the phase of phallic
sexuality. The threat of castration, however, forces him
to give up this attitude. Under the influence of the dan-
ger of losing his penis, he abandons his Oedipus-
complex; it is repressed and in the most normal cases
entirely destroyed, while a severe super-ego is set up
as its heir. What happens in the case of the girl is
almost the opposite. The castration-complex prepares
the way for the Oedipus-complex instead of destroying
it; under the influence of her penis-envy the girl is
driven from her attachment to her mother, and enters
the Oedipus situation, as though it were a haven of
refuge. When the fear of castration disappears, the

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primary motive is removed, which has forced the boy
to overcome his Oedipus-complex. The girl remains in
the Oedipus situation for an indefinite period, she only
abandons it late in life, and then incompletely. The
formation of the super-ego must suffer in these circum-
stances; it cannot attain the strength and independence
which give it its cultural importance and feminists
are not pleased if one points to the way in which this
factor affects the development of the average feminine
character.

Let us now go back a little. We have mentioned, as
the second possible reaction after the discovery of
female castration, the development of a strong mascu-
linity complex. What is meant by this is that the girl
refuses, as it were, to accept the unpalatable fact, and,
in an outburst of defiance, exaggerates still further the
masculinity which she has displayed hitherto. She
clings to her clitoritic activities, and takes refuge in an
identification either with the phallic mother, or with
the father. What is the determinant which leads to this
state of affairs? We can picture it as nothing other than
a constitutional factor: the possession of a greater de-
gree of activity, such as is usually characteristic of the
male. The essential thing about the process is, after all,
that at this point of development the onset of passivity,
which makes possible the change over to femininity, is
avoided. The most extreme achievement of this mas-
culinity complex seems to occur when it influences the
girl's object-choice in the direction of manifest homo-
sexuality. Analytic experience teaches us, it is true,
that female homosexuality is seldom or never a direct
continuation of infantile masculinity, It seems to be

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characteristic of female homosexuals that they too take
the father as love-object for a while, and thus become
implicated in the Oedipus situation. Then, however,
they are driven by the inevitable disappointments which
they experience from the father into a regression to their
early masculinity complex. One must not overestimate
the importance of these disappointments; girls who
eventually achieve femininity also experience them with-
out the same results. The preponderance of the consti-
tutional factor seems undeniable, but the two phases in
the development of female homosexuality are admira-
bly reflected in the behaviour of homosexuals, who just
as often and just as obviously play the parts of mother
and child towards each other as those of man and wife.

What I have been telling you is what one might call
the pre-history of women. It is an achievement of the
last few years, and you may have been interested in it
as an example of detailed work in analysis. Since
women are our theme, I am going to permit myself to
mention by name a few women to whom this investiga-
tion owes important contributions. Dr. Ruth Mack
Brunswick was the first to describe a case of neurosis
which went back to a fixation in the pre-oedipal state,
and in which the Oedipus situation was not reached at
all. It took the form of paranoia with delusions of
jealousy, and proved accessible to treatment. Dr.
Jeanne Lamplde Groot has from her own unequivocal
observations established the fact of the girl's phallic
activities towards her mother which seem so hard to
believe. Dr. Helene Deutsch has shown that the erotic
behaviour of homosexual woman reproduces the mother-
child relationship.

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It is not my intention to trace the further course of
femininity through puberty up to the time of maturity.
Our views on the subject are indeed not complete enough
for me to do so. In what follows, I will merely men-
tion a few separate points. Bearing in mind the early
history of femininity, I will emphasise the fact that its
development remains open to disturbance from the
traces left behind by the previous masculine period.
Regressions to fixations at these pre-coedipal phases
occur very often; in many women we actually find a
repeated alternation of periods in which either mascu-
linity or femininity has obtained the upper hand. What
we men call 'the enigma of woman' is probably based
in part upon these signs of bi-sexuality in female life.
But another question seems to have become ripe for dis-
cussion in the course of these investigations. We have
called the motor force of sexual life "libido" This
sexual life is dominated by the polarity, masculine-
feminine; one is therefore tempted to consider the re-
lation of the libido to this polarity. It would not be
surprising if it turned out that each form of sexuality
had its own special form of libido, so that one kind of
libido pursued the aims of the masculine sexual life,
and the other those of the feminine. Nothing of the
sort, however, is the case. There is only one libido
which is as much in the service of the male as of the
female sexual function. To it itself we can assign no
sex; if, in accordance with the conventional analogy
between activity and masculinity, we choose to call it
masculine, we must not forget that it also includes im-
pulses with passive aims. Nevertheless the phrase
'{eminine libido' cannot possibly be justified. It is our

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

impression that more violence is done to the libido when
it is forced into the service of the female function;
and that-to speak teleologically-Nature has paid less
careful attention to the demands of the female function
than to those of masculinity. And-again speaking
teleologically-this may be based on the fact that the
achievement of the biological aim is entrusted to the ag-
gressiveness of the male, and is to some extent inde-
pendent of the co-operation of the female.

The sexual frigidity of women, the frequency of
which seems to confirm this last point, is still a phe-
nomenon which is insufficiently understood. Sometimes
it is psychogenic, and, if so, it is accessible to influence;
but in other cases one is led to assume that it is constitu-
tionally conditioned or even partly caused by an ana-
tomical factor.

I have promised to put before you a few more of
the mental characteristics of mature femininity, as we
find them in our analytical observation. We do not
claim for these assertions more than that they are true
on the whole; and it is not always easy to distinguish
between what is due to the influence of the sexual func-
tion and what to social training. We attribute to women
a greater amount of narcissism (and this influences their
object-choice) so that for them to be loved is a stronger
need than to love. Their vanity is partly a further
effect of penis-envy, for they are driven to rate their
physical charms more highly as a belated compensation
for their original sexual inferiority. Modesty, which is
regarded as a feminine characteristic par excellence, but

is far more a matter of convention than one would
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

think, was, in our opinion, originally designed to hide
the deficiency in her genitals. We do not forget that,
later on, it takes over other functions. People say that
women contributed but litile to the discoveries and in-
ventions of civilisation, but perhaps after all they did
discover one technical process, that of plaiting and weay-
ing. If this is so, one is tempted to guess at the uncon-
scious motive at the back of this achievement. Nature
herself might be regarded as having provided a model
for imitation, by causing pubic hair to grow at the
period of sexual maturity so as to veil the genitals.
The step that remained to be taken was to attach the
hairs permanently together, whereas in the body they
are fixed in the skin and only tangled with one another.
If you repudiate this idea as being fantastic, and
accuse me of having an idée fixe on the subject of the
influence exercised by the lack of a penis upon the de-
velopment of femininity, I cannot of course defend
myself.

The conditions of object-choice in women are often
enough made unrecognisable by social considerations.
Where that choice is allowed to manifest itself freely,
it often occurs according to the narcissistic ideal of the
man whom the girl would have liked to be. If the girl
has remained attached to her father, if that is to say
she has remained in the Oedipus-complex, then she
chooses according to a father-type. Since, when she
turned from her mother to her father, the antagonistic
part of her ambivalent feelings remained directed on to
her mother, such a choice should ensure a happy mar-

riage. But very often a factor emerges which in gen-
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

eral imperils such solutions of the ambivalence-conflict.
The antagonism which has been left behind may follow
in the wake of the positive attachment, and extend to the .
new object. The husband, who had in the first instance
inherited his position from the father, comes in the
course of time to inherit the position of the mother as
well. In this way it may easily occur that the second
part of a woman's life is taken up with a struggle against
her husband, just as the shorter earlier part was occu-
pied with rebellion against her mother. After this re-
action has been lived out, a second marriage may easily
turn out far more satisfactorily. Another change in a
woman's nature, for which neither husband nor wife are |
prepared, may come about after the first child has been
born. Under the influence of her own motherhood, her
identification with her mother may be revived (an iden-
tification against which she has struggled up to the time
of her marriage) and may attract to itself all the libido
that she has at her disposal, so that the repetition-com-
pulsion may reproduce an unhappy marriage of the
parents. That the old factor of lack of penis has not
even yet forfeited its power is seen in the different reac-
tions of the mother according to whether the child born
is a son or a daughter. The only thing that brings a
mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to a son;
it is quite the most complete relationship between human
beings, and the one that is the most free from ambiva-
lence. The mother can transfer to her son all the
ambition which she has had to suppress in herself, and
she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that
has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has
succeeded in making her husband into her child and in
acting the part of a mother towards him.

The mother-identification of the woman can be seen
to have two levels, the pre-oedipal, which is based on
the tender attachment to the mother and which takes her
as a model, and the later one, derived from the Oedipus-
complex, which tries to get rid of the mother and replace
her in her relationship with the father. Much of both
remains over for the future. One is really justified in
saying that neither is overcome to any adequate extent
during the process of development. But the phase of
tender pre-coedipal attachment is the decisive one; it
paves the way for her acquisition of those characteris-
tics which will later enable her to play her part in the
sexual function adequately, and carry out her inesti-
mable social activities. In this identification, too, she
acquires that attractiveness for the man which kindles
his oedipal attachment to his mother into love. Only
what happens so often is, that it is not he himself who
gets what he wanted, but his son. One forms the im-
pression that the love of man and the love of woman
are separated by a psychological phase-difference.

It must be admitted that women have but little sense
of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the pre-
ponderance of envy in their mental life; for the de-
mands of justice are a modification of envy; they lay
down the conditions under which one is willing to part
with it. We say also of women that their social inter-
ests are weaker than those of men, and that their

capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less.
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

The former is no doubt derived from the unsocial char-
acter which undoubtedly attaches to all sexual relation-
ships. Lovers find complete satisfaction in each other,
and even the family resists absorption into wider organi-
sations. The capacity for sublimation is subject to the
greatest individual variations. In spite of this I can-
not refrain from mentioning an impression which one
receives over and over again in analytic work. A man
of about thirty seems a youthful, and, in a sense, an
incompletely developed individual, of whom we expect
that he will be able to make good use of the possibili-
ties of development, which analysis lays open to him.
But a woman of about the same age frequently staggers
us by her psychological rigidity and unchangeability.
Her libido has taken up its final positions, and seems
powerless to leave them for others. There are no paths
open to her for further development; it is as though the
whole process had been gone through, and remained in-
accessible to influence for the future; as though, in fact,
the difficult development which leads to femininity had
exhausted all the possibilities of the individual. As
therapeutists we deplore this state of affairs, even when
we are successful in removing her sufferings by solving
her neurotic conflict.

That is all I had to say to you about the psychology
of women. It is admittedly incomplete and fragmen-
tary, and sometimes it does not sound altogether flat-
tering. You must not forget, however, that we have only
described women in so far as their natures are deter-
mined by their sexual function. The influence of this
factor is, of course, very far-reaching, but we must re-

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN

member that an individual woman may be a human
being apart from this. If you want to know more about
femininity, you must interrogate your own experience,
'or turn to the poets, or else wait until Science can give
you more profound and more coherent information.

185

CHAPTER 6

EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS,
LECTURE XXXIV

Laptes anp GEntcEmEN-May I for once, tired, as
one might say, of dry topics, speak to you about mat-
ters which have very little theoretical importance, but
which will be of interest to you in so far as you are
friendlily disposed towards psycho-analysis? Let us
suppose that in a moment of idleness you take up a
German or American or English novel, in which you
expect to find a description of men and conditions as
they are to-day. After reading a few pages you come
upon the first mention of psycho-analysis, and then soon
after upon another, even though the context does not
seem to require it. You must not imagine that this has
anything to do with the application of 'depth-psy-
chology," with a view to a better understanding of the
characters in the book or of their behaviour (though,
of course, there are quite serious literary works in which
this is attempted). No, such references are for the most
part contemptuous remarks, by means of which the
author seeks to display his wide reading or his intel-
lectual superiority. And you will not always get the
impression that he really knows what he is talking about.
Or, again, you may go for your recreation to some so-
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

cial gathering; it need not necessarily be in Vienna.

fter a short time the conversation will turn on psycho-
analysis, and you will hear a great variety of people
giving their opinion upon it, usually in tones of dog-
matic certainty. This judgment is nearly always a de-
rogatory one, often abusive, and at the very least de-
risive. If you are so imprudent as to disclose the fact
that you know something about the subject, every one
rushes up to you, and asks for information and explana-
tions, until after a little time you are convinced that
all these severe judgments had been made in the absence
of any knowledge; that hardly any of these adversaries
have ever had a book about analysis in their hands, or,
if they have, that they have never been able to over-
come the first resistance which people experience on
coming in contact with a new subject.

You may perhaps expect that an introduction to
psycho-analysis should give you some indication of
what arguments you should use in order to correct these
vulgar errors about analysis, what books to recommend
for those who want more knowledge, or even what ex-
amples from your reading and experience you should
bring into the discussion in order to alter the attitude
of your interlocutors. I beg you to do nothing of the
sort. -It would be quite useless, and your wisest course
would be to hide your better knowledge altogether. If
that is impossible, then restrict yourselves to saying that,
so far as you know, psycho-analysis is a special branch
of science, that it is exceedingly difficult to understand
and to judge, that it is concerned with very serious mat-
ters, so that one cannot pass it off with a few jokes, and

that it would be better to choose some other topic as a
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

social pastime. Of course you will not take part in any
attempts at interpretation if imprudent people repeat
their dreams, and you will resist the temptation to curry
favour for analysis by giving accounts of cures that it
has brought about.

You may, however, raise the question why these
people, whether they write books or make conversation,
should behave so badly, and you will incline to the view
that the cause does not lie entirely with the people them-
selves, but with psycho-analysis as well. That is my
opinion too; what you meet with in literature and con-
versation in the shape of prejudice is the after-effect of
an earlier judgment, the judgment, namely, which the
representatives of official science have passed upon the
young science of psycho-analysis. I have already com-
plained about it once before in a historical survey of
the subject, and I shall not do so again-perhaps even
that was once too often; but indeed there was no logical
blunder, no offence against decency and good taste
which the scientific opponents of psycho-analysis did
not permit themselves in those days. It was a situa-
tion such as actually occurred in the middle ages, in
which a wrong-doer, or even a mere political opponent,
was put in the pillory and exposed to the ill-treatment
of the mob. And perhaps you do not fully realise how
high up in our society the mob spirit extends, and to
what lengths people will go when they feel that they are
a part of a crowd and superior to personal responsi-
bility. At the beginning of those times I stood more or
less alone, and I very soon saw that polemics would do
no good, and that complaints and appeals to worthier
minds were senseless, since there were no courts before

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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

which one could plead one's cause. That being so, I
took another path; I made use of applied psycho-
analysis for the first time by explaining the behaviour
of the crowd as an expression of the same resistance
which I had to struggle against in my individual pa-
tients. I kept off all polemics, and influenced my fol-
lowers, as they gradually gathered, to do the same.
This mode of behaviour was satisfactory. The ban
under which analysis was placed in those days has since
been lifted; but, just as a belief which has been given
up lingers on as a superstition, just as a theory which
science has abandoned is preserved as a popular belief,
so to-day the original excommunication of psycho-
analysis in scientific circles survives in the mocking con-
tempt of the writers and conversationalists. You will
therefore no longer be surprised at their behaviour.
You must not, however, expect the good news that
the struggle is at an end, with the recognition of analysis
as a science and its admission as a subject for university
study. There is no question of that; the battle is still
going on, but in a more respectable way. There is an-
other new factor, and that is that in the scientific world
a kind of buffer state has been formed between analysis
and its opponents, consisting of people who will allow
that there is something in analysis (and even believe in
it, subject to the most diverting reservations), but who,
on the other hand, reject other parts of it, as they are
eager to let every one know. What determines their
choice is not easy to guess. It seems to be a matter of
personal sympathies. Some take objection to sexuality,
others to the unconscious; the existence of symbolism
seems to be particularly disliked. The circumstance

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

that the structure of psycho-analysis, although unfin-
ished, nevertheless already possesses a unified organisa-
tion from which one cannot select elements according to
one's whim, seems not to enter the minds of these
eclectics. When I consider these half or quarter fol-
lowers I never get the impression from any of them
that their rejections are based on an examination of
the material. There are a great many distinguished men
who fall into this category. They are certainly to be
excused on the ground that their time and their interests
are devoted to other things, to the subjects, in fact, by
the mastery of which they have achieved so much. But,
that being so, would it not be better for them to reserve
their judgments instead of taking sides so strongly? In
the case of one of these great men, I once succeeded in
making a rapid conversion. He was a world-famous
critic, who had followed contemporary trends of thought
with benevolent understanding and prophetic vision. I
only got to know him when he had already passed his
eightieth year, but he was still fascinating in conversa-
tion. You can easily guess to whom I am referring.
And it was not I who raised the subject of psycho-
analysis. He began it by comparing himself in the most
modest way with myself, saying: 'I am only a literary
man, and you are a man of science and a discoverer.
But there is one thing I should like to say to you: I have
never had any sexual feeling for my mother!' 'But
there's no need at all for you to have been conscious of
it, was my reply, 'such processes are unconscious in
grown-up people.' 'Oh, so that's your idea," he said,
greatly relieved, and pressed my hand. We went on
talking for a few hours longer on the best of terms.
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

I heard later that during the few remaining years of his
life he repeatedly expressed himself in friendly terms
about analysis, and liked to make use of what was for
him a new word-'repression.'

A well-known saying enjoins us to learn from our
enemies. I must own that I have never been able to
manage it; but it occurred to me that it might be in-
structive for you if I were to call up all the reproaches
and objections which the opponents of psycho-analysis
have levelled at it, and then point out all the obvious
misrepresentations and logical blunders which they con-
tain. But on second thoughts I said to myself that it
would not be at all interesting but wearisome and disa-
greeable, and would, in fact, be precisely what I have
taken such pains to avoid all these years. You will have
to excuse me, therefore, if I refrain from following up
this line of thought any further and spare you the judg-
ments of our so-called scientific opponents. After all,
we are here dealing almost exclusively with people whose
sole claim to be heard rests on their impartiality-
which they have preserved by keeping away from the
facts of psycho-analysis. But I am aware that in other
cases you will not let me get away so cheaply. You
will point out that, after all, there are a great many
people to whom my last remark does not apply. These
people, you will say, have not kept away from analytical
experience; they have analysed patients, they have per-
haps even heen analysed themselves, they were actually
my colleagues for some time, and now they have come
to other conclusions, and formed other theories, on the
basis of which they have left me and have founded in-
dependent schools of psycho-analysis. You will expect

191

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

me to give some explanation of the possibility and mean-
ing of these dissenting movements which have occurred
so frequently in the history of analysis.

Very well, then, I will try; but I shall only do it
briefly, for it throws less light upon the nature of analy-
sis than you might expect. I am sure that what you think
of first will be Adler's Individual Psychology, which in
America, for example, is looked on as being equal in
importance to our psycho-analysis and as running on
parallel lines, and is constantly mentioned in the same
breath with it. In reality Individual Psychology has
very little to do with analysis, but, for certain historical
reasons, lives a sort of parasitic existence at its expense.
The qualifications which we have predicated for this
group of opponents only apply to the founders of In-
dividual Psychology to a very limited extent. The name
itself is unsuitable, and seems to be a product of em-
barrassment; we cannot assent to any interference with
its correct application as meaning the opposite of Group
Psychology; for the matter of that our own concern is,
first and foremost, the psychology of the human indi-
vidual. I am not going into an objective criticism of
Adler's Individual Psychology to-day, for that is no part
of my programme in these lectures; besides which, I
have already made such an attempt elsewhere, and I
have little occasion for altering what I there said. I will,
however, give you an illustration of the impression it
makes, by telling you of a small incident which occurred
to me in my pre- analytic years.

In the neighbourhood of the little Moravian town in
which I was born and which I left as a child of three
years old, there is a modest health resort, beautifully

192

EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

placed in a setting of green. During my school years
I often spent my holidays there. Some twenty years
later the illness of a near relative of mine afforded me
an opportunity of seeing the place again. In a con-
versation with the doctor in charge of the place, who
had attended my relative, I enquired about his dealings
with the-I believe-Slovakian peasants, who were his
only clientele during the winter. He told me that his
medical treatment was carried on in the following way.
In his consulting hours the patients came into his room
and formed up in a line. One after another they came for-
ward and told him their complaints. One of them might
have pains in the back, or a stomach-ache, or a feeling
of tiredness in the legs, etc. The doctor then examined
him, and, when he had formed his conclusions told him
the diagnosis, which was in every case the same. He
translated the word to me, and what it amounted to was:
'bewitched.' I was astonished, and asked whether the
patients made no objection to his saying the same thing
to all of his patients. 'Oh, no!" he answered, 'they are
very much pleased; it is exactly what they expect. Each
one as he goes back to his place in the line says to the
others by his looks and gestures: "There's a fellow who
knows what's what!"' At that time I little thought in
what circumstances I should meet with an analogous
situation.

For whether a person is a homosexual, or a nec-
rophilist, or an anxiety-ridden hysteric, or a shut-in ob-
sessional, or a raving madman-in every case the
Individual Psychologist of the Adlerian persuasion will
assign as the motive force of his condition the fact that
he wants to assert himself, to over-compensate for his

193

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

inferiority, to be on top, and to move over from the
feminine to the masculine line. We used to hear exactly
the same kind of thing when we were young students at
hospital. Hysterics, we were told, produce their symp-
toms in order to make themselves interesting and to at-
tract attention to themselves. It is extraordinary how
these old profundities recur! But even at the time this
little bit of psychology did not seem to us to cover the
problem of hysteria; it left unexplained, for instance,
why people who suffer from it do not make use of some
means for the attainment of their ends. Some element
of this doctrine of the Individual Psychologists must of
course be correct, though they regard this fragmentary
explanation as a complete one. The instinct of self-
preservation will attempt to turn every situation to its
own account; the ego will try to get some advantage even
out of being ill. In psycho-analysis we call this the
secondary gain from illness." But indeed, when one
thinks of the facts of masochism, of the unconscious
need for punishment and of the neurotic tendency to
self-injury, all of which seem to imply the existence of
instinctual impulses which run counter to self-preserva-
tion, one comes to question even the general validity of
the platitude on which the theoretical structure of In-
dividual Psychology is built. But, to the mass of man-
kind, a theory like this must be exceedingly welcome,
which takes no complications into account, which intro-
duces no new and difficult concepts, which knows nothing
of the unconscious, which removes at a single blow the
problem of sexuality, that weighs so heavily on every-
body, and which confines itself to revealing the devices
by means of which people try to make life comfortable.
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

For the mass of mankind are themselves comfort-loving;
they require only a single reason to serve as an explana-
tion, they are not grateful to science for its intricacies,
and they like to have simple answers given to their ques-
tions and to feel that their problems are settled once
and for all. Once one sees how closely Individual Psy-
chology approximates to the fulfilment of these require-
ments, one cannot help remembering a couplet from
Wallenstein:

If the idea were not so deuced clever,
One might be tempted just to call it stupid. _

Specialist criticism, which has been so uncompromis-
ingly opposed to psycho-analysis, has, in general,
handled Individual Psychology with a velvet glove. It
is, indeed, true that in America one of the most dis-
tinguished psychiatrists published a paper against Adler,
entitled 'Enough,' in which he gave strong expression to
his dissatisfaction with the 'repetition-compulsion' of the
Individual Psychologists. If others have behaved far
more kindly, the opposition to analysis is largely re-
sponsible.

I need not say much about other schools that have
split off from us. That such splits have occurred is no
argument for or against the truth of psycho-analysis.
You have only to think of the strong emotional factors
which make it difficult for many people to co-operate
with others or adopt a subordinate position, and of the
still greater difficulty which is embodied in the proverb:
'Quot capita tot sensus. - When the differences of
opinion had gone beyond a certain limit, the best thing
to do was to part company, and thenceforward to go

195

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

different ways, especially if the theoretical difference
involved an alteration in analytical technique. Let us
take, for example, an analyst who thinks very little of
the influence of the patient's past, and looks for the cause
of a neurosis exclusively in contemporary motives and
expectations directed towards the future. If that is so,
he will also neglect the analysis of the patient's child-
hood and start on an altogether different technique; and
he will have to make up for the absence of the effects
of childhood-analysis by increasing his own didactic
influence and by directly recommending the adoption
of certain aims in life. We, for our part, would then
say: 'That may be a philosophy, but it is no longer
analysis' Or another analyst may come to hold the
view that the anxiety-experience of birth is the root of
all later neurotic disturbances; in that case he may think
it proper to restrict analysis to the effects of this one
experience, and to promise therapeutic success after a
three to four months' treatment. You will observe that
I have chosen two examples which proceed from diamet-
rically opposed premises. It is an almost universal
characteristic of these dissenting movements' that each
of them seizes upon one fragment out of the wealth of
motives found in psycho-analysis (such, for instance, as
the instinct for the power, the ethical conflict, the mother,
genitality, etc.), and on the basis of this appropriation
makes itself independent. If it seems to you that such
secessions are commoner to-day in the history of psycho-
analysis than they are in any other movement of thought,
I do not know whether I should agree with you. If it
be so, we must attribute the responsibility to the close
relationship between theoretical outlook and therapeutic
196

EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

practice, which is to be found in psycho-analysis. Mere
differences of opinion would be borne with for far
longer. People like to accuse us psycho-analysts of in-
tolerance. The only evidence of this disagreeable char-
acteristic was precisely our separation from people who
thought differently from ourselves. Apart from that,
we have taken no steps against them; on the contrary,
they are now in clover; they are far better off than be-
fore, because, in parting company with us, they have
in most cases got rid of one of the burdens under which
we groan-the odium of infantile sexuality, for instance,
or the ludicrousness of symbolism-and they are now
regarded by the world at large as at all events semi-
respectable, which we, who remain behind, cannot even
yet claim to be. It was they themselves, moreover, who
-excepting for one noteworthy example-effected the
separation.

And what more do you ask of us in the name of toler-
ance? When any one has expressed an opinion that we
hold to be fundamentally false, do you wish us to speak
to him like this? 'Thank you so much for contradict-
ing us. You have saved us from the danger of self-
complacency, and have given us an opportunity of prov-
ing to the Americans that we really are as "broad-
minded" as they could possibly wish. We do not be-
lieve a word of what you say, but that does not matter.
You are just as right as we are, in all probability. After
all, who can ever know who is in the right? In spite of
our disagreement you must allow us to put forward your
views in our publications. And we hope that you on
your part will be so kind as to support ours although you
disbelieve in them.' This will obviously be the usage

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of the future in scientific circles, when the misapplica-
tion of Einstein's theory of relativity has completely won
the day. It is true that for the moment we have not
gone quite so far as that. We have confined ourselves,
in the old-fashioned way, to putting forward only our
own convictions; we expose ourselves to the danger of
making mistakes, for no one can avoid that, and we
reject' anything that contradicts our views. As to the
right to change our opinions, if we think we have found
something better, we have made full use of it in psycho
analysis.

One of the first applications of psycho-analysis was
that we were able to understand the opposition we had
to meet on account of our psycho-analytic activities.
Other applications, of an objective nature, can lay claim
to a more general interest. Our first intention was, as
you know, to understand the disturbances of the human
mind, because an astonishing experience had shown us
that in this case understanding and cure go almost hand
in hand and that a practicable path leads from the one
to the other. And for a long time this was our only
intention. Then, however, we came to recognise the
close relationship, in fact, the underlying identity, sub-
sisting between pathological and so-called normal proc-
esses. So psycho-analysis. became 'depth-psychology';
and, since nothing that man makes or does can be under-
stood without the aid of psychology, the applications of
psycho-analysis to numerous fields of knowledge, and
especially to the mental sciences, came about automati-
cally, forced themselves on our attention and demanded
elaboration. Unluckily the tasks which we now under-
took brought us up against obstacles, which, lying as

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they do in the very nature of the situation, have not yet
been overcome. Such an application presupposes a
technical knowledge which the analyst does not possess;
while those who do possess the knowledge-the experts
-do not know anything of analysis, and perhaps do not
want to know anything. The result has been that analysts
have entered the lists in such fields as those of my-
thology, the history of civilisation, ethnology, the science
of religion, etc., as amateurs, with a more or less ade-
quate equipment, often collected in a hurry. In those
fields they were treated by the specialists, who were
established there, as no better than interlopers; and their
methods, as well as their findings, in so far as they at-
tracted any attention at all, were, to begin with, rejected.
But the position is steadily improving; in every field the
number of people who study psycho-analysis with a view
to making use of it in their special researches is growing,
in the same way that colonists take the place of pioneers.
Here we may expect a rich harvest of new knowledge.
Applications of psycho-analysis are always confirma-
tions of it as well. In regions where scientific work is
more remote from practical activity the inevitable dif-
ferences of opinion will be less embittered.

I feel greatly tempted to take you through all the ap-
plications of psycho-analysis in the field of mental sci-
ence. There are things which every one who has intel-
lectual interests would think worth knowing, and to hear
no more for a time about abnormalities and illness
would give us a well-earned relief. But I must resist
the temptation; it would once more take us too far out-
side the framework of these lectures, and, to tell you the
truth, I should not be competent to do it. It is true that

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I took the first step along some of these lines, but to-day
I no longer command a view over the whole field, and I
should have to spend much time in study in order to .
grasp all that has been added since I made my first at-
tempts. Those of you who are disappointed by my re-
fusal can make up for it by reading our journal, Imago,
which is devoted to the non-medical applications of
analysis.

There is one subject, however, that I cannot pass by
so easily, though this is not because I have any special
understanding of it or have done much work on it my-
self. On the contrary, I have hardly ever occupied my-
self with it. But it is of immense importance, and rich
in hopes for the future; perhaps, indeed, it is the most
important of all the activities of analysis. I refer to
the application of psycho-analysis to education, to the
up-bringing of the next generation. I am at least glad
to be able to say that my daughter, Anna Freud, has
made this her life-work, and is in this way making good
my own neglect of the subject. One can easily see the
path that has led to this application of analysis. When,
during the treatment of an adult neurotic, we tried to
trace the determination of his symptoms, we were always
led back into his early childhood. A knowledge of the
later aetiological factors was not sufficient either for
our understanding of his condition or to effect a cure.
The result was that we were forced to acquaint our-
selves with the psychological peculiarities of the years
of infancy; and we learnt a great many things which
could not have been discovered except through analysis,
and were in a position to set right a number of generally
accepted beliefs about childhood. We came to see that

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the first years of infancy (up to about the age of five)
are, for a number of reasons, of special importance.
This is, in the first place, because they contain the first
expansion of sexuality, which leaves behind decisive de-
terminants for the sexual life of maturity; and, in the
second place, because the impressions of this period
come up against an unformed and weak ego, upon which
they act like traumas. The ego cannot defend itself
against the emotional storms which they call forth except
by repression, and in this way it acquires in childhood
all its predispositions to subsequent illnesses and dis-
turbances of function. We have come to realise that the
difficulty of childhood consists in the fact that the child
has, in a short span of time, to make its own the acquisi-
tions of a cultural development which has extended over
tens of thousands of years; it has, that is, to attain
instinctual control and social adaptation, or, at any rate,
their first elements. It can only achieve a part of this
alteration through its own development; a great deal
must be forced upon it by education. We are not in
the least surprised that the child often performs its task
only incompletely. A great many children in these early
years pass through conditions which may be compared
with neuroses, and this is certainly true of all those who
develop a manifest. illness later on. In not a few cases
the neurotic illness does not wait till they are grown
up, but breaks out in childhood and is a source of great
trouble to parents and doctors.

We have had no hesitation in applying analytic
therapy to such children as either display unambiguous
neurotic symptoms, or are on the way to an unfavour-

able character-development. The anxiety expressed by
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opponents of analysis, that the child might be harmed by
the process, has turned out to be quite unfounded. The
advantage gained by this procedure is that we have been
able to confirm in the living subject what we have only
inferred, as though from historical documents, in the
case of adults. But the advantages gained by the chil-
dren themselves was most satisfactory. It turned out
that the child is a most favourable subject for analytic
therapy; successes were radical and permanent. Nat-
urally one has to make extensive alterations in the tech-
nique of treatment which has been developed for adults
when one is dealing with children. The child is, psycho-
logically, a different thing from the adult; it does not
yet possess a super-ego, it cannot make much use of the
method of free association, and transference plays a dif-
ferent part with it, since its real parents are still there.
The internal resistances, against which we have to fight
in the case of adults, are in the case of children for
the most part replaced by external difficulties. If the
parents make themselves into vehicles for the resistance,
the aims of the analysis and even the process of the
analysis itself, are often endangered. For this reason
it is often necessary to combine a certain amount of
analytic influencing of the parents with the analysis of
the children. On the other hand, the inevitable differ-
ences between child analysis and adult analysis are
diminished by the fact that many of our patients have
still kept so many of their infantile character-traits that
the analyst, once more adapting himself to his patient,
cannot avoid making use of certain parts of the tech-
nique of child analysis in their case too. It is in the

nature of things that child analysis should have become -

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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

the special field of women analysts, and this will no
doubt continue to be so.

The view that the majority of our children pass
through a neurotic phase in the course of their develop-
ment automatically raises a hygienic question. It may
be asked whether it would not be advantageous to come
to the aid of a child with analysis even where there is
no sign of a disturbance, as a precautionary measure in
the interests of its health, just as nowadays one inocu-

' lates healthy children against diphtheria, without waiting
for them to fall ill of the disease. The discussion of
this question is to-day only a matter of academic in-
terest. I can venture to speak about it to you; but the
greater number of our contemporaries would regard the
mere idea as nothing short of criminal, and, when one
considers the attitude of most parents towards analysis,
one must, as yet, give up any hope of its realisation.
Such a prophylactic against nervous disease, which
would probably be very effective, presupposes an en-
tirely different structure of society. The application of
psycho-analysis to education must be looked for to-day
in quite a different direction. Let us get a clear idea of
what the primary business of education is. The child
has to learn to control its instincts. To grant it complete
freedom, so that it obeys all its impulses without any
restriction, is impossible. It would be a very instructive
experiment for child-psychologists, but it would make
life impossible for the parents and would do serious
damage to the children themselves, as would be seen
partly at the time, and partly during subsequent years.
The function of education, therefore, is to inhibit, for-
bid and suppress, and it has at all times carried out this

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function to admiration. But we have learnt from an-
alysis that it is this very suppression of instincts that
involves the danger of neurotic illness. You will re-
member that we have gone into the question of how this
comes about in some detail. Education has therefore to
steer its way between the Scylla of giving the instincts
free play and the Charybdis of frustrating them. Un-
less the problem is altogether insoluble, an optimum
of education must be discovered, which will do the most
good and the least harm. It is a matter of finding out
how much one may forbid, at which times and by what
methods. And then it must further be considered that
the children have very different constitutional disposi-
tions, so that the same educational procedure cannot pos-
sibly be equally good for all children. A moment's
consideration will show us that, so far, education has
fulfilled its function very badly, and has done children
serious injury. If we can find an optimum of education
which will carry out its task ideally, then we may hope
to abolish one of the factors in the aetiology of neurotic
illness, viz., the influence of accidental infantile traumas.
The other factor, the power of a refractory instinctual
constitution, can never be got rid of by education.
When, therefore, one comes to think of the difficult tasks
with which the educator is confronted; when one reflects
that he has to recognise the characteristic constitution of
each child, to guess from small indications what is going
on in its unformed mind, to give him the right amount
of love and at the same time to preserve an effective
degee of authority, then one cannot help saying to one-

self that the only adequate preparation for the profes-
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

sion of educator is a good grounding in psycho-analysis.
The best thing would be for him to be analysed himself,
for, after all, without personal experience one cannot
get a grasp of analysis. The analysis of teachers and
educators seems to be a more practicable prophylactic
measure than the analysis of children themselves; and
there are not such great obstacles against putting it into
practice.

I will only mention, in passing, an indirect advantage
which analysis may bring to the education of children,
an advantage which may eventually come to have con-
siderable importance. Parents who have experienced
an analysis themselves, and who have derived much
benefit from it, among other things an insight into the
mistakes in their own upbringing, will treat their chil-
dren with better understanding, and will spare them a
great deal which they were not spared themselves.
Parallel with the efforts of the analyst to influence edu-
cation, run other investigations into the cause and pre-
vention of delinquency and criminology. Here again I
shall only open the door and show you what lies behind
it, but I shall not take you inside. If your interest in
psycho-analysis is maintained, you will be able to learn
a great deal that is both new and valuable on these sub-
jects. I cannot, however, leave the theme of education
without mentioning one particular point of view. It has
been said-and no doubt with justice-that every educa-
tion is partisan; it aims at making the child adapt itself
to whatever social system is the established one, without
consideration of how valuable or how stable that system

may be. If, it is argued, one is convinced of the short-
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comings of our present-day social arrangements, one
cannot think it right to give them the added support of
this psycho-analytical education of ours. We must place
before it another and a higher aim, one which is emanci-
pated from the social standards that are dominant to-day.
I do not feel, however, that this argument is valid. It
is demanding more of analysis than its functions can jus-
tify. The physician who is called in to treat a case of
pneumonia has no need to consider whether the patient
is a good man, a suicide, or a criminal; whether he de-
serves to remain alive, or whether it is for his advan-
tage to do so. This other aim which it is sought to
place before education would be a partisan one as well,
and it is not the business of the analyst to decide be-
tween parties. I am not now considering the fact that
people will refuse to allow psycho-analysis to have any
influence at all on education if it confesses to aims which
are incompatible with the existing social order. Psycho-
analytic education will be assuming an unwarranted re-
sponsibility if it sets out to make its pupils into
revolutionaries. It will have done its task if it sends
them away as healthy and as efficient as possible. There
are enough revolutionary elements contained within it-
self to ensure that no one brought up under its influence
will in later life be on the side of reaction and suppres-
sion. I should go so far as to say that revolutionary
children are not desirable from any point of view.
Ladies and Gentlemen-I shall conclude by saying
a few words on the therapeutic aspect of psycho-analysis.
I discussed the theoretical side of the subject fifteen
years ago, and I cannot formulate it in any other way
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

to-day; but I will say something about the practical ex-
perience which we have had with it during the interval.
You know, of course, that psycho-analysis orginated as
a therapeutic procedure; it has gone far beyond that,
but it has never given up its original field of work, and
it still relies upon contact with clinical material for its
further advances and development. The accumulation
of empirical data upon which we base our theories can
be obtained in no other way. Our therapeutic failures
are constantly setting us new tasks, and the requirements
of real life are an efficient protection against carrying
to excess the speculation, which we, nevertheless, cannot
avoid in our work. I have already, in my former lec-
tures, given an account of the means by which psycho-
analysis helps the patient, and along what lines; to-day
we will consider to what extent it succeeds.

You are perhaps aware that I have never been a
therapeutic enthusiast; and there is no danger of my
using this as an opportunity for ringing the praises of
analysis in this respect. I would rather say too little
than too much. At a time when I was still the only
analyst, people who were apparently kindly disposed
to my opinions used to say to me: 'That is all very nice
and clever; but show me a case that you have cured by
analysis.' This was one of the many formulas that suc-
ceeded one another, as time went on, whose function it
was to put the inconvenient novelty on one side. To-day
it is as out of date as many others; the analyst, like any
other therapeutist, has his collection of letters of grati-
tude from patients who have been cured. And the
analogy does not end there. Psycho-analysis really is-

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a form of therapy, just as other methods are. It has
its triumphs, its defeats, its difficulties, its limitations
and its indications. There was a time when people at-
tacked analysis with the accusation that it was not to be
taken seriously as a therapy, because it did not venture
to publish any statistics of its successes. Since then
the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in Berlin, which was
founded by Dr. Max Eitingon, has published a report
of its work during the first ten years of its existence.
The proportion of recoveries which have been effected
give us ground neither for boasting nor for feeling
ashamed. But such statistics are not instructive, be-
cause the material with which they deal is so heterogene-
ous that it would need a very large number of cases
to prove anything. It is better to examine one's own
individual experience. As to that, I may say that I do
not think our successes can compete with those of
Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe
in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the ex-
istence of the unconscious. But if we disregard super-
natural competition, we must compare psycho-analysis
with other methods of psycho-therapy. Nowadays one
need hardly take into consideration organic physical
treatment of neurotic conditions. As a psycho-thera-
peutic method, analysis does not stand in opposition to
other methods employed in this branch of medicine; it
does not invalidate them nor does it exclude them.
There would be no theoretical objection to a physician
who described himself as a psycho-therapeutist using
analysis upon his patients alongside other thera-

peutic methods, according to the peculiar character of
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

the case and the favourable or unfavourable nature of
the circumstances. In actual fact, it is the question of
technique which renders necessary the specialisation of
medical practice. So, for example, it became necessary
to separate surgery and orthopaedics. The practice
of psycho-analysis is difficult and exacting! It cannot
well be dealt with like a pair of spectacles, which can
be put on for reading and taken off when one wants to
go for a walk. As a rule psycho-analysis either pos-
sesses the doctor entirely or not at all. The psycho-
therapeutists who occasionally make use of analysis do
not, as far as my experience goes, stand on a firm
analytical basis; they have not accepted analysis as a
whole, but have watered it down, and perhaps removed
its 'sting'; they cannot be counted as analysts. In my
opinion this is to be regretted; but a co-operation in
medical practice between an analyst and a psycho-
therapeutist who limits himself to other methods, would
be altogether advantageous.

Compared with other psycho-therapeutic procedures,
psycho-analysis is far and away the most powerful.
That is quite as it should be since it costs the most trouble
and time, and one would not make use of it for slight
cases; in suitable cases one can remove disturbances,
and bring about alterations which could not be hoped
for in pre-analytic times. But it has also perfectly
clearly felt limitations. The therapeutic ambitions of
many of my followers have led them to be at great pains
to remove such hindrances, so that all neurotic dis-
turbances might be curable by means of psycho-analysis.
They have attempted to compress the work of analysis

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into a shorter period, to intensify the transference so
that it should be superior to any resistance, and to com-
bine other methods of influence with analysis in order
to obtain a cure. These enterprises are no doubt praise-
worthy, but in my opinion they are in vain. They also
involve the danger of oneself being drawn away from
analysis and of drifting into a boundless sea of experi-
mentation. The expectation that we shall be able to
cure all neurotic symptoms is, I suspect, derived from
the lay belief that neuroses are entirely superfluous
things which have no right whatever to exist. As a mat-
ter of fact they are serious, constitutionally determined
affections, which are seldom restricted to a few out-
breaks, but make themselves felt as a rule over long
periods of life, or even throughout its entire extent.
Our analytic experience that we can influence them to a
far-reaching degree, if we can get hold of the historical
precipitating causes and the incidental accessory factors,
has made us neglect the constitutional factor in our
therapeutic practice. And we are in fact powerless to
deal with it; but in our theory we ought always to bear
it in mind. In any case, the complete inaccessibility of
the psychoses to analytic therapy should, in view of their
close relationship to the neuroses, moderate our op-
timism in regard to the latter. The therapeutic efficiency
of psycho-analysis is limited by a whole series of im-
portant factors, which can scarcely be dealt with at all.
With children, where one might hope to have the great-
est successes, there are the external difficulties of the
parental situation; yet after all these are bound up with
the very fact of being a child. With adults we are
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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

© primarily concerned with two factors, the degree of their
mental rigidity and the form of their disease with all the
deeper-seated determinants that lie behind it. The
former of these is often unjustifiably overlooked. How-
ever great the plasticity of mental life may be, and
however great the possibility of reviving past states, not
everything can be brought to life again. A great many
alterations seem final, and correspond to scars left be-
hind by processes which have run their course. In other
cases one gets an impression of a general rigidity of
the whole mind ; mental processes, which one could very
well redirect into other channels, seem incapable of leay-
ing their old courses. But perhaps this is the same as
what we have said already, but looked at from another
point of view. Only too often one seems to see that
the therapeutic process is merely lacking in the neces-
sary motive force to enable it to bring about the altera-
tion. Some specific tendency, some particular instine-
tual component, is too strong in comparison with the
counter-forces that we can mobilize against it. This is
quite generally so in the case of the psychoses. We
understand them in so far as we know quite well where
we ought to apply the levers, but they are not able to lift
the weight. In this connection we may hope that in the
future our knowledge of the action of hormones-you
know, of course, what they are-will provide us with a
means of coping successfully with the quantitative fac-
tors involved in these diseases; but to-day we are far
from having reached that desirable goal. I can under-
stand that the uncertainty prevailing in all these matters
is a constant incentive towards perfecting the technique
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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

of analysis, especially in the matter of the transference.
The beginner in analysis, in particular, will be in doubt,
when he is unsuccessful, whether he ought to blame the
peculiarity of the case or his own unskilful handling
of the therapeutic procedure. But, as I have said al-
ready, I do not think that there is much to be gained
by directing one's energies along these channels.

The other limitation to analytical successes is im-
posed by the form of the disease. You know already
that the field in which analytical therapy can be applied
is that of the transference-neuroses, phobias, hysterias,
obsessional neuroses, and besides these such abnormali-
ties of character as have been developed instead of these
diseases. Everything other than these, such as narcis-
sistic or psychotic conditions, is more or less unsuitable.
Now it would be perfectly legitimate to save oneself
from failures by carefully excluding such cases. If this
precaution were taken, the statistics of analysis would
be very much improved. Yes; but this is not so easy
as it seems. Our diagnoses can very often only be made
ex post facto. They are like the test for witch-finding
applied by the Scottish king, of which I have read in
one of Victor Hugo's books. This king declared that
he had an infallible method for detecting witches. He
put them to simmer in a cauldron of boiling water, and
then tasted the soup. According to the taste he could
say 'that was a witch," or 'that was not a witch" The
same thing happens with us, except that it is we who
are the sufferers. We cannot give an opinion about a
patient who comes for treatment, or a candidate for
training, until we have studied him analytically for some

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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

weeks or months. We are, in fact, always buying a pig
in a poke. The subject comes to us with undefined, gen-
eral troubles which do not allow of any certain diag-
nosis. After a period of probation it may turn out that
the case is an unsuitable one. Then, if he is a candi-
date, we send him away; or, if he is a patient, we keep
him on a little while to see whether we cannot take a
more favourable view of him. The patient has his re-
venge by swelling our list of failures, and the rejected
candidate, it may be (if he is paranoid), by writing
psycho-analytical books himself. You will observe that
our caution has not been of much value to us.

I am afraid these details will have gone beyond the
scope of your interests. But I should be even more
distressed if you were to think that I intend to diminish
your respect for psycho-analysis as a therapeutic pro-
cedure. Perhaps I have really set about the business
clumsily. I wanted, you see, to achieve the opposite:
to excuse the therapeutic limitations of analysis by in-
dicating how unavoidable they are. With the same ob-
ject in view, let me turn to another point, namely the
complaint that analytic treatment takes up a dispropor-
tionately long time. The answer to that is that psycho-
logical changes only come about very slowly; if they
occur quickly and suddenly it is a bad sign. It is true
that the treatment of a serious neurosis may easily last
several years, but if a successful result is achieved you
must ask yourselves how long the illness itself would
otherwise have lasted. It would probably have lasted a
decade for every year of treatment, which means that
the illness would never have passed off at all, as we so

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NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

often find in untreated cases. In many instances we
have reasons for resuming an analysis after an interval
of many years; new events in the patient's life have
called out in him new pathological reactions, though in
the meantime he has been perfectly healthy. The first
analysis had not actually brought all his pathological
dispositions to the surface, and it was natural that the
analysis should have been broken off as soon as it was
successful. There are also people who are so seriously
afflicted that they have to be kept under analytic care
throughout their whole lives and taken back into an-
alysis from time to time; but such people would other-
wise be incapable of carrying on their lives at all, and
one must be thankful that they can be kept going by
means of this intermittent and recurrent treatment. The
analysis of characterological disturbances, too, involves
a lengthy treatment, but it is often successful; and it may
be asked whether there is any other form of treatment
that could even attempt to deal with this problem.
Therapeutic ambition may make us feel unsatisfied with
these results, but after all we have the examples of
tuberculosis and lupus before us, which teach us that one
can only meet with success if the treatment is adapted
to the character of the disease.

I have told you that psycho-analysis began as a thera-
peutic procedure, but it is not in that light that I wanted
to recommend it to your interest, but because of the
truths it contains, because of the information it gives
us about that which is of the greatest importance to
mankind, namely his own nature, and because of the
connections it has shown to exist between the most vari-

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EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

ous of his activities, As a form of therapy it is one
among many, though certainly prima inter pares. If it
had no therapeutic value, it would not have been dis-
covered from clinical material and would not have con-
tinued to develop for more than thirty years.

215

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10>

CHAPTER 7

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE, LECTURE XXXV

LaptEs anp GENTLEMEN-In the last lecture we were
occupied with trivial everyday affairs, with putting, as
it were, our modest house in order. We will now take
a bold step, and risk an answer to a question which has
repeatedly been raised in non-analytic quarters, namely,
the question whether psycho-analysis leads to any par-
ticular Weltanschauung, and if so, to what.

'W eltanschauung' is, I am afraid, a specifically Ger-
man notion, which it would be difficult to translate into
a foreign language. If I attempt to give you a definition
of the word, it can hardly fail to strike you as inept.
\By Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual con-
struction, which gives a unified solution of all the prob-
lems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive
'hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no ques-
tion is left open and in which everything in which we
are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the
possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal
wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing,
one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to
strive after, and how one ought to organise one's emo-
tions and interests to the best purpose.

If that is what is meant by a Weltanschauung, then

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the question is an easy one for psycho-analysis to an-
swer. As a specialised science, a branch of psychology
-'depth-psychology' or psychology of the unconscious
-it is quite unsuited to form a Weltanschauung of its
own; it must accept that of science in general. The
scientific Weltanschauung is, however, markedly at vari-
ance with our definition. The unified nature of the ex-
planation of the universe is, it is true, accepted by
science, but only as a programme whose fulfilment is
postponed to the future. Otherwise it is distinguished
by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is,
at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection

of certain elements which are alien to it. "It asserts that} ->

there is no other source of knowledge of the universe,
but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified
observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no
knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or
inspiration. - It appears that this way of looking at things
came very near to receiving general acceptance during
the last century or two. It has been reserved for the
present century to raise the objection that such a Welten-
schauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it over-
looks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the
needs of the human mind.

This objection cannot be too strongly repudiated. It
cannot be supported for a moment, for the spirit and
the mind are the subject of scientific investigation in
exactly the same way as any non-human entities. Psycho-
analysis has a peculiar right to speak on behalf of the
scientific Weltanschauung in this connection, because it
cannot be accused of neglecting the part occupied by the
mind in the universe. The contribution of psycho-

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analysis to science consists precisely in having extended
research to the region of the mind. Certainly without
such a psychology, science would be very incomplete.
But if we add to science the investigation of the intel-
lectual and emotional functions of men (and animals),
we find that nothing has been altered as regards the
general position of science, that there are no new sources
of knowledge or methods of research. Intuition and in-
spiration would be such, if they existed; but they can
safely be counted as illusions, as fulfilments of wishes.
It is easy to see, moreover, that the qualities which, as
we have shown, are expected of a Weltanschauung have -
a purely emotional basis. Science takes account of the
fact that the mind of man creates such demands and is
ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest
ground for thinking them justified. On the contrary, it
does well to distinguish carefully between illusion (the
results of emotional demands of that kind) and knowl-
edge.

This does not at all imply that we need push these
wishes contemptuously aside, or underestimate their
value in the lives of human beings. We are prepared
to take notice of the fulfilments they have achieved for
themselves in the creations of art and in the systems of
religion and philosophy; but we cannot overlook the
fact, that it would be wrong and highly inexpedient to
allow such things to be carried over into the domain of
knowledge. For in that way one would open the door
which gives access to the region of the psychoses,
whether individual or group psychoses, and one would
drain off from these tendencies valuable energy which
is directed towards reality and which seeks by means

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of reality to satisfy wishes and needs as far as this is
possible.

From the point of view of science we must neces-
sarily make use of our critical powers in this direction,
and not be afraid to reject and deny. It is inadmissible
to declare that science is one field of human intellectual
activity, and that religion and philosophy are others, at
least as valuable, and that science has no business to
interfere with the other two, that they all have an equal
claim to truth, and that every one is free to choose
whence he shall draw his convictions and in what he
shall place his belief. Such an attitude is considered
particularly respectable, tolerant, broad-minded, and
free from narrow prejudices. Unfortunately it is not
tenable; it shares all the pernicious qualities of an en-
tirely unscientific Weltanschauung and in practice comes
to much the same thing. The bare fact is that truth
cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or
limitations, that scientific research looks on the whole
field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an
uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other
power that seeks to usurp any part of its province.

Of the three forces which can dispute the position of
science, religion alone is a really serious enemy. Art
is almost always harmless and beneficent, it does not
seek to be anything else but an illusion. Save in the
case of a few people who are, one might say, obsessed
by Art, it never dares to make any attacks on the realm
of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it be-
haves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain
extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts
company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that

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it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the
universe, though in fact that picture must needs fall to
pieces with every new advance in our knowledge. Its
methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates
the epistemological value of our logical operations, and
to a certain extent admits the validity of other sources of
knowledge, such as intuition. And often enough one
feels that the poet Heine is not unjustified when he says
of the philosopher:

With his night-cap and his night-shirt tatters,
He botches up the loop-holes in the structure of the world.

But philosophy has no immediate influence on the
great majority of mankind; it interests only a small
number even of the thin upper stratum of intellectuals,
while all the rest find it beyond them. In contradistine-
tion to philosophy, religion is a tremendous force, which
exerts its power over the strongest emotions of human
beings. As we know, at one time it included everything
that played any part in the mental life of mankind, that
it took the place of science, when as yet science hardly
existed, and that it built up a Weltanschauung of incom-
parable consistency and coherence, although it has been
severely shaken, which has lasted to this day.

If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full
grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it
undertakes to do for men. It gives them information
about the source and origin of the universe, it assures
them of protection and final happiness amid the chang-
ing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and
actions by means of precepts which are backed by the

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whole force of its authority. It fulfils, therefore, three
functions. In the first place, it satisfies man's desire
for knowledge; it is here doing the same thing that
science attempts to accomplish by its own methods, and
here, therefore, enters into rivalry with it. It is to the
second function that it performs, that religion no doubt
owes the greater part of its influence. In so far as re-
ligion brushes away men's fear of the dangers and vicis-
situdes of life, in so far as it assures them of a happy
ending, and comforts them in their misfortunes, science
cannot compete with it. Science, it is true, teaches how
one can avoid certain dangers and how one can combat
many sufferings with success; it would be quite untrue
- to deny that science is a powerful aid to human beings,
but in many cases it has to leave them to their suffering,
and can only advise them to submit to the inevitable.
In the performance of its third function, the provision
of precepts, prohibitions, and restrictions, religion is
furthest removed from science. For science is content
with discovering and stating the facts. It is true that
from the applications of science, rules and recommenda-
tions for behaviour may be deduced. In certain circum-
stances they may be the same as those which are lafd
down by religion, but even so the reasons for them will
be different.

It is not quite clear why religion should combine these
three functions. What has the explanation of the origin
of the universe to do with the inculcation of certain
ethical precepts? - Its assurances of protection and hap-
piness are more closely connected with these precepts.
They are the reward for the fulfilment of the commands;
only he who obeys them can count on receiving these

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benefits, while punishment awaits the disobedient. For
the matter of that something of the same kind applies to
science; for it declares that any one who disregards its
inferences is liable to suffer for it.

One can only understand this remarkable combina-
tion of teaching, consolation and precept in religion, if
one subjects it to genetic analysis. We may begin with
the most remarkable item of the three, the teaching about
the origin of the universe-for why should a cosmogony
be a regular element of religious systems? The doctrine
is that the universe was created by a being similar to
man, but greater in every respect, in power, wisdom, and
strength of passion, in fact by an idealized superman.
Where you have animals as creators of the universe, you
have indications of the influence of Totemism, which I
shall touch on later, at any rate with a brief remark.
It is interesting to notice that this creator of the universe
is always a single god, even when many gods are be-
lieved in. Equally interesting is the fact that the creator
is nearly always a male, although there is no lack of
indication of the existence of female deities and many
mythologies make the creation of the world begin pre-
cisely with a male god triumphing over a female god-
dess, who is degraded into a monster. This raises the
most fascinating minor problems, but we must hurry on.
The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-
Creator is openly called Father. - Psycho-analysis
concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the
grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
The religious man's picture of the creation of the uni-
verse is the same as his picture of his own creation.

If this is so, then it is easy to understand how it is

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that the comforting promises of protection and the severe
ethical commands are found together with the cos-
mogony. - For the same individual, to whom the child
owes its own existence, the father (or, more correctly,
the parental function which is composed of the father
and the mother), has protected and watched over the
weak and helpless child, exposed as it is to all the
dangers which threaten in the external world; in its
father's care it has felt itself safe. Even the grown man,
though he may know that he possesses greater strength,
and though he has greater insight into the dangers of
life, rightly feels that fundamentally he is just as help-
less and unprotected as he was in childhood and that in
relation to the external world he is still a child. Even
now, therefore, he cannot give up the protection which
he has enjoyed as a child. But he has long ago realised
that his father is a being with strictly limited powers and
by no means endowed with every desirable attribute.
He therefore looks back to the memory-image of the
overrated father of his childhood, exalts it into a Deity,
and brings it into the present and into reality. The emo-
tional strength of this memory-image and the lasting
nature of his need for protection are the two supports of
his belief in God.

The third main point of the religious programme, its
ethical precepts, can also be related without any diffi-
culty to the situation of childhood. In a famous pas-
sage, which I have already quoted in an earlier lecture,
the philosopher Kant speaks of the starry heaven above
us and the moral law within us as the strongest evidence
for the greatness of God. However odd it may sound
to put these two side by side-for what can the heavenly

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bodies have to do with the question whether one man
loves another or kills him? nevertheless it touches on a
great psychological truth. The same father (the
parental function) who gave the child his life and pre-
served it from the dangers which that life involves, also
taught it what it may or may not do, made it accept
certain limitations of its instinctual wishes, and told it
what consideration it would be expected to show towards
its parents and brothers and sisters, if it wanted to be
tolerated and liked as a member of the family circle,
and later on of more extensive groups. The child is
brought up to know its social duties by means of a sys-
tem of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it
is taught that its security in life depends on its parents
(and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being
able to believe in its love for them. This whole state of
affairs is carried over by the grown man unaltered into
his religion. The prohibitions and commands of his
parents live on in his breast as his moral conscience;
God rules the world of men with the help of the same
system of rewards and punishments, and the degree of
protection and happiness which each individual enjoys,
depends on his fulfilment of the demands of morality;
the feeling of security, with which he fortifies himself
against the dangers both of the external world and of
his human environment, is founded on his love of God
and the consciousness of God's love for him. Finally,
he has in prayer a direct influence on the divine will,
and in that way insures for himself a share in the divine
omnipotence.

I am sure that while you have been listening to me,
a whole host of questions must have come into your

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minds which you would like to have answered. I cannot
undertake to do so here and now, but I am perfectly
certain that none of these questions of detail would
shake our thesis that the religious Weltanschauung is
determined by the situation that subsisted in our child-
hood. It is therefore all the more remarkable that, in
spite of its infantile character, it nevertheless has a fore-
runner. There was, without doubt, a time when there
were no religions and no gods. It is known as the age of
animism. | Even at that time the world was full of spirits
in the semblance of men (demons, as we call them),
and all the objects in the external world were their dwell-
ing-place or perhaps identical with them, but there was
no supreme power which had created them all, which
controlled them, and to which it was possible to turn for
protection and aid. The demons of animism were
usually hostile to man, but it seems as though man had
more confidence in himself in those days than later on.
He was no doubt in constant terror of these evil spirits,
but he defended himself against them by means of cer-
tain actions to which he ascribed the power to drive them
away. Nor did he think himself entirely powerless in
other ways. If he wanted something from nature-
rain, for instance-he did not direct a prayer to the
Weather-god, but used a spell, by means of which he
expected to exert a direct influence over nature; he him-
self made something which resembled rain. In his fight
against the powers of the surrounding world his first
weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern
technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic
is derived from the overestimation of the individual's
own intellectual operations, from the belief in the 'omnip-
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otence of thoughts, which, incidentally, we come across
again in our obsessional neurotics. We may imagine
that the men of that time were particularly proud of
their acquisition of speech, which must have been ac-
companied by a great facilitation of thought. They
attributed magic power to the spoken word. This fea-
ture was later on taken over by religion. 'And God said:
Let there be light, and there was light' But the fact
of magic actions shows that animistic man did not rely
entirely on the force of his own wishes. On the con-
trary, he depended for success upon the performance of
an action, which would cause Nature to imitate it. If
he wanted it to rain, he himself poured out water; if
he wanted to stimulate the soil to fertility, he offered it
a performance of sexual intercourse in the fields. ,

You know how tenaciously anything that has once
found psychological expression persists. You will there-
fore not be surprised to hear that a great many mani-
festations of animism have lasted up to the present day,
mostly as what are called superstitions; side by side
with and behind religion. But more than that, you can
hardly avoid coming to the conclusion that our phi-
losophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes
of thought such as the overestimation of the magic of
words and the belief that real processes in the external
world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts. It
is, to be sure, an animism without magical practices.
On the other hand we should expect to find that in the
age of animism there must already have been some kind
of morality, some rules governing the intercourse of men
with one another. But there is no evidence that they
were closely bound up with animistic beliefs. Probably

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they were the immediate expression of the distribution
of power and of practical necessities.

It would be very interesting to know what determined
the transition from animism to religion; but you may
imagine in what darkness this earliest epoch in the evolu-
tion of the human mind .is still shrouded. It seems to
be a fact that the earliest form in which religion ap-
peared was the remarkable one of totemism, the worship
of animals, in the train of which followed the first
ethical commands, the taboos. In a book called Totem
und Tabu, I once worked out a suggestion, in accordance
with which this change is to be traced back to an up-
heaval in the relationships in the human family. The
main achievement of religion, as compared with ani-
mism, lies in the psychic binding of the fear of demons.
Nevertheless, the evil spirit still has a place in the re-
ligious system as a relic of the previous age.

So much for the pre-history of the religious Weltan-
schauung. Let us now turn to consider what has hap-
pened since, and what is still going on under our own
eyes. The scientific spirit, strengthened by the observa-
tion of natural processes, began in the course of time
to treat religion as a human matter, and to subject it to
a critical examination. This test it failed to pass. In
the first place, the accounts of miracles roused a feeling
of surprise and disbelief, since they contradicted every-
thing that sober observation had taught, and betrayed
all too clearly the influence of human imagination. In
the next place, its account of the nature of the universe
had to be rejected, because it showed evidence of a lack
of knowledge which bore the stamp of earlier days, and
because, owing to increasing familiarity with the laws

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of nature, it had lost its authority. The idea that the
universe came into being through an act of generation
or creation, analogous to that which produces an indi-
vidual human being, no longer seemed to be the most
obvious and self-evident hypothesis; for the distinction
between living and sentient beings and inanimate nature
had become apparent to the human mind, and had made
it impossible to retain the original animistic theory. Be-
sides this, one must not overlook the influence of the
comparative study of different religious systems, and the
impression they give of mutual exclusiveness and intol-
erance.

Fortified by these preliminary efforts, the scientific
spirit at last summoned up courage to put to the test the
most important and the most emotionally significant ele-
ments of the religious Weltanschauung. The truth could
have been seen at any time, but it was long before any
one dared to say it aloud: the assertions made by re-
ligion that it could give protection and happiness to men,
if they would only fulfil certain ethical obligations, were
unworthy of belief. It seems not to be true that there
is a power in the universe, which watches over the well-
being of every individual with parental care and brings
all his concerns to a happy ending. On the contrary the
destinies of man are incompatible with a universal prin-
ciple of benevolence or with-what is to some degree
contradictory-a universal principle of justice. Earth-
quakes, floods and fires do not differentiate between the
good and devout mar, and the sinner and unbeliever.
And, even if we leave inanimate nature out of account
and consider the destinies of individual men in so far as
they depend on their relations with others of their own

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kind, it is by no means the rule that virtue is rewarded
and wickedness punished, but it happens often enough
that the violent, the crafty and the unprincipled seize
the desiiable goods of the earth for themselves, while
the pious go empty away. Dark, unfeeling and unlov-
ing powers determine human destiny; the system of re-
wards and punishments, which, according to religion,
governs the world, seems to have no existence. This is
another occasion for abandoning a portion of the ani-
mism which has found refuge in religion.

The last contribution to the criticism of the religious
Weltanschauung has been made by psycho-analysis,
which has traced the origin of religion to the helpless-
ness of childhood, and its content to the persistence of
the wishes and needs of childhood into maturity. This
does not precisely imply a refutation of religion, but it
is a necessary rounding off of our knowledge about it,
and, at least on one point, it actually contradicts it, for
religion lays claim to a divine origin. This claim, to
be sure, is not false if our interpretation of God is ac-
cepted.

The final judgment of science on the religious Welt-
anschauung, then, runs as follows. While the different
religions wrangle with one another as to which of them
is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of
religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an
attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which
we are placed, by means of the wish-worid, which we
have developed inside us as a result of biological and
psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end.
Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in
which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of

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the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Ex-
perience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The
ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its
weight, require some other foundations instead, for
human society cannot do without them, and it is dan-
gerous to link up obedience to them with religious be-
lief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in
man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting
acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civi-
lised individual must pass through on his way from
childhood to maturity.

You are, of course, perfectly free to criticise this ac-
count of mine, and I am prepared to meet you half
way. What I have said about the gradual crumbling of
the religious Weltanschauung was no doubt an incom-
plete abridgment of the whole story; the order of the
separate events was not quite correctly given, and the co-
operation of various forces towards the awakening of
the scientific spirit was not traced. I have also left out
of account the alterations which occurred in the religious
Weltanschauung itself, both during the period of its
unchallenged authority and afterwards under the in-
fluence of awakening criticism. Finally I have, strictly
speaking, limited my remarks to one single form of re-
ligion, that of the Western peoples. I have, as it were,
constructed a lay-figure for the purposes of a demonstra-
tion which I desired to be as rapid and as impressive as
possible. Let us leave on one side the question of
whether my knowledge would in any case have been
sufficient to enable me to do it better or more com-
pletely. I am aware that you can find all that I have
said elsewhere, and find it better said ; none of it is new.

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But I am firmly convinced that the most careful elabora-
tion of the material upon which the problems of religion
are based would not shake these conclusions.

As you know, the struggle between the scientific spirit
and the religious Weltanschauung is not yet at an end;
it is still going on under our very eyes to-day. However
little psycho-analysis may make use as a rule of polemi-
cal weapons, we will not deny ourselves the pleasure of
looking into this conflict. Incidentally, we may perhaps
arrive at a clearer understanding of our attitude towards
the Weltanschauung. You will see how easily some of the
arguments which are brought forward by the supporters
of religion can be disproved; though others may suc-
ceed in escaping refutation.

The first objection that one hears is to the effect that
it is an impertinence on the part of science to take re-
ligion as a subject for its investigations, since religion
is something supreme, something superior to the capac-
ities of the human understanding, something which must
not be approached with the sophistries of criticism. In
other words, science is not competent to sit in judgment
on religion. No doubt it is quite useful and valuable, so
long as it is restricted to its own province; but religion
does not lie in that province, and with religion it can
have nothing to do. If we are not deterred by this
brusque dismissal, but enquire on what grounds religion
bases its claim to an exceptional position among human
concerns, the answer we receive, if indeed we are
honoured with an answer at all, is that religion cannot
be measured by human standards, since it is of divine
origin, and has been revealed to us by a spirit which
the human mind cannot grasp. It might surely be

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thought that nothing could be more easily refuted than
this argument; it is an obvious pefiftio principii, a 'beg-
ging of the question.' The point which is being called
in question is whether there is a divine spirit and a
revelation; and it surely cannot be a conclusive reply to
say that the question cannot be asked, because the Deity
cannot be called in question. What is happening here is
the same kind of thing as we meet with occasionally in
our analytic work. If an otherwise intelligent patient
denies a suggestion on particularly stupid grounds, his
imperfect logic is evidence for the existence of a par-
ticularly strong motive for his making the denial, a
motive which can only be of an affective nature and
serve to bind an emotion.

Another sort of answer may be given, in which a
motive of this kind is openly admitted. Religion must
not be critically examined, because it is the highest,
most precious and noblest thing that the mind of man
has brought forth, because it gives expression to the
deepest feelings, and is the only thing that makes the
world bearable and life worthy of humanity. To this
we need not reply by disputing this estimate of religion,
but rather by drawing attention to another aspect of the
matter. We should point out that it is not a question of
the scientific spirit encroaching upon the sphere of re-
ligion, but of religion encroaching upon the sphere of
scientific thought. Whatever value and importance re-
ligion may have, it has no right to set any limits to
thought, and therefore has no right to except itself from
the application of thought.

Scientific thought is, in its essence, no different from
the normal process of thinking, which we all, believers

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and unbelievers, alike, make use of when we are going
about our business in everyday life. It has merely
taken a special form in certain respects: it extends its
interest to things which have no immediate obvious
utility, it endeavours to eliminate personal factors and
emotional influences, it carefully eximines the trust-
worthiness of the sense perceptions on which it bases its
conclusions, it provides itself with new perceptions which
are not obtainable by everyday means, and isolates the
determinants of these new experiences by purposely
varied experimentation. | Its aim is to arrive at corre-
spondence with reality, that is to say with what exists
outside us and independently of us, and, as experience
~ bas taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or frustra-
tion of our desires. This correspondence with the real
external world we call truth. - It is the aim of scientific
work, even when the practical value of that work does
not interest us. - When, therefore, religion claims that it
can take the place of science and that, because it is
beneficent and ennobling, it must therefore be true, that
claim is, in fact, an encroachment, which, in the interests
of every one, should be resisted. It is asking a great
deal of a man, who has learnt to regulate his everyday
affairs in accordance with the rules of experience and
with due regard to reality, that he should entrust pre-
cisely what affects him most nearly to the care of an
authority which claims as its prerogative freedom from
all the rules of rational thought. And, as for the pro-
tection that religion promises its believers, 1 hardly
think that any of us would be willing even to enter a
raotor-car, if the driver informed us that he drove with-
out allowing himself to be distracted by traffic regula-
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tions, but in accordance with the impulses of an exalted
imagination.

And indeed the ban which religion has imposed upon
thought in the interests of its own preservation is by no
means without danger both for the individual and for
society. Analytic experience has taught us that such
prohibitions, even though they were originally confined
to some particular field, have a tendency to spread, and
then become the cause of severe inhibitions in people's
lives. In women a process of this sort can be observed
to follow from the prohibition against their occupying
themselves, even in thought, with the sexual side of their
nature. The biographies of almost all the eminent peo-
ple of past times show the disastrous results of the in-
hibition of thought by religion. Intellect, on the other
hand,-or rather, to call it by a more familiar name,
reason-is among the forces which may be expected to
exert a unifying influence upon men-creatures who can
be held together only with the greatest difficulty, and
whom it is therefore scarcely possible to control. Think
how impossible human society would be if every one had
his own particular multiplication table and his own
private units of weight and length. Our best hope for
the future is that the intellect-the scientific spirit, rea-
son-should in time establish a dictatorship over the
human mind. The very nature of reason is a guarantee
that it would not fail to concede to human emotions and
to all that is determined by them, the position to which
they are entitled. But the common pressure exercised
by such a domination of reason would prove to be the
strongest unifying force among men, and would prepare
the way for further unifications. Whatever, like the

234:

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

ban laid upon thought by religion, opposes such a de-
velopment is a danger for the future of mankind.

The question may now be asked why religion does not
put an end to this losing fight by openly declaring: 'It
is a fact that I cannot give you what men commonly call
truth; to obtain that, you must go to science. But what
I have to give you is incomparably more beautiful, more
comforting and more ennobling than anything that you
could ever get from science. And I therefore say to
you that it is true in a different and higher sense." The
answer is easy to find. Religion cannot make this ad-
mission, because if it did it would lose all influence
over the mass of mankind. The ordinary man knows
only one 'truth'-truth in the ordinary sense of the word.
What may be meant by a higher, or a highest, truth,
he cannot imagine. Truth seems to him as little capable
of having degrees as death, and the necessary leap from
the beautiful to the true is one that he cannot make.
Perhaps you will agree with me in thinking that he is
right in this.

The struggle, therefore, is not yet at an end. The
followers of the religious Weltanschauung act in ac-
cordance with the old maxim: the best defence is attack.
'What,' they ask, 'is this science that presumes to de-
preciate our religion, which has brought salvation and
comfort to millions of men for many thousands of years?
What has science for its part so far accomplished?
What more can be expected of it? On its own ad-
mission, it is incapable of comforting or ennobling us.
We will leave that on one side, therefore, though it is by
no means easy to give up such benefits. But what of its
teaching? - Can it tell us how the world began, and what

235

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

fate is in store for it? Can it even paint for us a
coherent picture of the universe, and show us where the
unexplained phenomena of life fit in, and how spiritual
forces are able to operate on inert matter? If it could
do that we should not refuse it our respect. But it has
done nothing of the sort, not one single problem of this
kind has it solved. It gives us fragments of alleged
knowledge, which it cannot harmonize with one another,
it collects observations of uniformities from the totality
of events, and dignifies them with the name of laws and
subjects them to its hazardous interpretations. And
with what a small degree of certitude does it establish
its conclusions! All that it teaches is only provisionally
true; what is prized to-day as the highest wisdom is
overthrown to-morrow and experimentally replaced by
something else. The latest error is then given the name
of truth,. And to this truth we are asked to sacrifice our
highest good!

Ladies and Gentlemen-in so far as you yourselves
are supporters of the scientific Weltanschauung I do not
think you will be very profoundly shaken by this critic's
attack. In Imperial Austria an anecdote was once cur-
rent which I should like to call to mind in this connec-
tion. On one occasion the old Emperor was receiving
a deputation from a political party which he disliked:
'This is no longer ordinary opposition," he burst out,
'this is factious opposition.. In just the same way you
will find that the reproaches made against science for not
having solved the riddle of the universe are unfairly
and spitefully exaggerated. Science has had too little
time for such a tremendous achievement. It is still very
young, a recently developed human activity. Let us

236

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

bear in mind, to mention only a few dates, that only
about three hundred years have passed since Kepler
discovered the laws of planetary movement; the life of
Newton, who split up light into the colours of the spec-
trum, and put forward the theory of gravitation, came
to end in 1727, that is to say a little more than two hun-
dred years ago; and Lavoisier discovered oxygen shortly
before the French Revolution. I may be a very old man
to-day, but the life of an individual man is very short
in comparison with the duration of human development,
and it is a fact that I was alive when Charles Darwin
published his work on the origin of species. In the same
year, 1859, Pierre Curie, the discoverer of radium, was
born. And if you go back to the beginnings of exact
natural science among the Greeks, to Archimedes, or to
Aristarchus of Samos (cire. 250 B.c.) the forerunner
of Copernicus, or even to the tentative origins of astron-
omy among the Babylonians, you will only be covering
a very small portion of the period which anthropology
requires for the evolution of man from his original ape-
like form, a period which certainly embraces more than
a hundred thousand years. And it must not be forgotten
that the last century has brought with it such a quantity
of new discoveries and such a great acceleration of sci-
entific progress that we have every reason to look for-
ward with confidence to the future of science.

It has to be admitted that the other objections are
valid within certain limits. Thus it is true that the path
of science is slow, tentative and laborious. That can-
not be denied or altered. No wonder that the gentlemen
of the opposition are dissatisfied; they are spoilt, they
have had an easier time of it with their revelation.

237

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

Progress in scientific work is made in just the same way
as in analysis. The analyst brings expectations with
him to his work, but he must keep them in the back-
ground. He discovers something new by observation,
now here and now there, and at first the bits do not fit
together. He puts forward suppositions, he brings con-
structions to one's aid, and gives them up if they are
not confirmed, he must have a great deal of patience,
must be prepared for all possibilities, and must not
jump at conclusions for fear of their leading him to
overlook new and unexpected factors. And in the end
the whole expenditure of effort is rewarded, the scat-
tered discoveries fall into place and he obtains an un-
derstanding of a whole chain of mental events; he has
finished one piece of work and is ready for the next.
But the analyst is unlike other scientific workers in this
onc respect that he has to do without the help which
experiment can bring to research.

But the criticism of science which I have quoted also
contains a great deal of exaggeration. It is not true to
say that it swings blindly from one attempt to another,
and exchanges one error for the next. As a rule the
man of science works like a sculptor with a clay model,
who persistently alters the first rough sketch, adds to it
and takes away from it, until he has obtained a satis-
factory degree of similarity to some object, whether seen
or imagined. And, moreover, at least in the older and
more mature sciences, there is already a solid founda-
tion of knowledge, which is now only modified and
elaborated and no longer demolished. The outlook, in
fact, is not so bad in the world of science.

And finally, what is the purpose of all these pas-

238

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

sionate disparagements of science ? In spite of its pres-
ent incompleteness and its inherent difficulties, we could
not do without it and could not put anything else in its
place. There is no limit to the improvement of which it
is capable, and this can certainly not be said of the re-
ligious Weltanschauung. The latter is complete in its
essentials; if it is an error, it must remain one for ever.
No attempt to minimise the importance of science can
alter the fact that it attempts to take into account our
dependence on the real external world, while religion is
illusion, and it derives its strength from the fact that it
falls in with our instinctual desires.

I must now go on to mention some other types of
Weltanschauung, which are in opposition to the scien-
tific one; I do so, however, unwillingly, because I know
that I am not competent to form a judgment upon them.
I hope, therefore, that you will bear this confession in
mind in listening to what I have to say, and that if your
interest is aroused you will go elsewhere for more trust-
worthy information.

In the first place I ought at this point to name the
various philosophical systems which have ventured to
draw a picture of the world, as it is reflected in the
minds of thinkers whose eyes are as a rule turned away
from it. - But I have already attempted to give a general
characterisation of philosophy and its methods, and I
believe I am more unfitted than almost any one to pass
the individual systems under review. I shall ask you,
therefore, instead to turn your attention to two other
phenomena which, particularly in these days, cannot be
ignored.

The Weltanschauung to which I shall first refer is, as

239

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

it were, a counterpart of political anarchism, and may
perhaps have emanated from it. No doubt there have
been intellectual nihilists of this kind before, but at the
present day the theory of relativity of modern physics
seems to have gone to their heads. It is true that they
start out from science, but they succeed in forcing it to
cut the ground from under its own feet, to commit
suicide, as it were; they make it dispose of itself by
getting it to refute its own premises. One often has an
impression that this nihilism is only a temporary atti-
tude, which will only be kept up until this task has been
completed. When once science has been got rid of,
some kind of mysticism, or, indeed, the old religious
Weltanschauung, can spring up in the space that has
been left vacant. According to this anarchistic doctrine,
there is no such thing as truth, no assured knowledge of
the external world. What we give out as scientific truth
is only the product of our own needs and desires, as they
are formulated under varying external conditions; that
is to say, it is illusion once more. Ultimately we find
only what we need to find, and see only what we
desire to see. We can do nothing else. And since the
criterion of truth, correspondence with an external
world, disappears, it is absolutely immaterial what views
we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And
no one has a right to accuse any one else of error.

For a mind which is interested in epistemology, it
would be tempting to enquire into the contrivances and
sophistries by means of which the anarchists manage to
elicit a final product of this kind from science. One
would no doubt be brought up against situations like
the one involved in the familiar example of the Cretan

240

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

who says that all Cretans are liars. But I am not de-
strous, nor am I capable, of going deeper into this. I
will merely remark that the anarchistic theory only re-
tains its remarkable air of superiority so long as it is
concerned with opinions about abstract things; it breaks
down the moment it comes in contact with practical life.
Now the behaviour of men is guided by their opinions
and knowledge, and the same scientific spirit which
speculates about the structure of the atom or the origin
of man is concerned in the building of a bridge that
will bear its load. If it were really a matter of in-
difference what we believed, if there were no knowledge
which was distinguished from among our opinions by
the fact that it corresponds with reality, then we might
just as well build our bridges of cardboard as of stone,
or inject a tenth of a gramme of morphia into a patient
instead of a hundredth, or take tear-gas as a narcotic
instead of ether. But the intellectual anarchists them-
selves would strongly repudiate such practical applica-
tions of their theory.

The other opposing Weltanschauung is to be taken
far more seriously, and in this case I very deeply regret
the insufficiency of my knowledge. I dare say that you
know more about this subject than I do and that you
have long ago taken up your position for or against
Marxism. The investigations of Karl Marx into the
economic structure of society and into the influence of
various forms of economic organisation upon all de-
partments of human life have in our day acquired an
authority that cannot be denied. How far they are right
or wrong in detail, I naturally do not know. I gather
that it is not easy even for better informed people to

241

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

decide. Some of the propositions in Marx's theory
seem strange to me, such as that the evolution of forms
of society is a process of natural history, or that the
changes in social stratification proceed from one another
in the manner of a dialectical process: I am by no
means certain that I understand these statements rightly;
moreover, they do not sound 'materialistic' but like
traces of the obscure Hegelian philosophy under the in-
fluence of which Marx at one time passed. I do not
know how I can throw off the view which I share with
other laymen, who are inclined to trace back the forma-
tion of classes in society to the struggles which went on
from the beginning of history between various human
hordes. These hordes differed to a slight degree from
one another; and it is my view that social differences
go back to these original differences of tribe or race.
Psychological factors, such as the amount of constitu-
tional aggressiveness and also the degree of cohesion
within the horde, and material factors, such as the pos-
session of better weapons, decided the victory. When
they came to live together in the same territory, the
victors became the masters and conquered the slaves.
There is no sign in all this of natural laws or conceptual
modifications; on the other hand, we cannot fail to
recognise the influence which the progressive control
over natural forces exerts on the social relationships
between men, since men always place their newly won
powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use
them against one another. The introduction of metals,
of bronze and iron, put an end to whole cultural epochs
and their social institutions. I really believe that gun-
powder and fire-arms overthrew chivalry and the domi-
242

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

nation of the aristocracy, and that the Russian despotism
was already doomed before the war was lost, since no
amount of in-breeding among the ruling families of
Europe could have produced a race of Tsars capable of
withstanding the explosive force of dynamite.

It may be, indeed, that with the present economic
crisis which followed upon the Great War, we are merely
paying the price of our latest triumph over nature, the
conquest of the air. This does not sound very con-
vincing, but at least the first links in the chain of argu-
ment are clearly recognisable. The policy of England
was based on the security guaranteed by the seas which
encircle her coasts. The moment Blériot flew over the
Channel in his aeroplane, this protective isolation was
broken through; and on the night on which, in a time
of peace, a German Zeppelin made an experimental
cruise over London, war against Germany became a
certainty." Nor must the threat of submarines be for-
gotten in this connection.

I am almost ashamed of treating a theme of such im-
portance and complexity in such a slight and inadequate
manner, and I am also aware that I have not said any-
thing that is new to you. I only wanted to call your
attention to the fact that the factor of man's control over
nature, from which he obtains his weapons for his strug-
gle with his fellow-men, must of necessity also affect his
economic arrangements. We seem to have travelled a
long way from the problems of a Weltanschauung, but
we shall soon come back to the point. The strength of
Marxism obviously does not lie in its view of history

11 was informed of this in the first year of the war on trustworthy

authority. §
243

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

or in the prophecies about the future which it bases upon
that view, but in its clear insight into the determining
influence which is exerted by the economic conditions
of man upon his intellectual, ethical and artistic reac-
tions. A whole collection of correlations and causal
sequences were thus discovered, which had hitherto been
almost completely disregarded. But it cannot be as-
sumed that economic motives are the only ones which
determine the behaviour of men in society. The un-
questionable fact that different individuals, races and
nations behave differently under the same economic con-
ditions, in itself proves that the economic factor cannot
be the sole determinant. It is quite impossible to under-
stand how psychological factors can be overlooked where
the reactions of living human beings are involved; for
not only were such factors already concerned in the
establishment of these economic conditions, but, even
in obeying these conditions, men can do no more than
set their original instinctual impulses in motion-their
self-preservative instinct, their love of aggression, their
need for love, and their impulse to attain pleasure and
avoid pain. In an earlier lecture we have emphasised
the importance of the part played by the super-ego,
which represents tradition and the ideals of the past, and
which will resist for some time the pressure exerted by
new economic situations. And, finally, we must not for-
get that the mass of mankind, subjected though they are
to economic necessities, are borne on by a process of
cultural development-some call it civilisation-which
is no doubt influenced by all the other factors, but is
equally certainly independent of them in its origin; it
is comparable to an organic process, and is quite capable
244

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

of itself having an effect upon the other factors. It dis-
places the aims of the instincts, and causes men to rebel
against what has hitherto been tolerable; and, moreover,
the progressive strengthening of the scientific spirit
seems to be an essential part of it. If any one were in
a position to show in detail how these different factors
-the general human instinctual disposition, its racial
variations, and its cultural modifications-behave under
the influence of varying social organisation, professional
activities and methods of subsistence, how these factors
inhibit or aid one another-if, I say, any one could show
this, then he would not only have improved Marxism
but would have made it into a true social science. For
sociology, which deals with the behaviour of man in
society, can be nothing other than applied psychology.
Strictly speaking, indeed, there are only two sciences
psychology, pure and applied, and natural science.
When at last the far-reaching importance of economic
conditions began to be realised, the temptation arose to
bring about an alteration in them by means of revolu-
tionary interference, instead of leaving the change to
the course of historical development. Theoretical Marx-
ism, as put into effect in Russian Bolshevism, has ac-
quired the energy, the comprehensiveness and the ex-
clusiveness of a Weltanschauung, but at the same time
it has acquired an almost uncanny resemblance to what
it is opposing. Originally it was itself a part of science,
and, in its realisation, was built up on science and
technology, but it has nevertheless established a han
upon thought, which is as inexorable as was formerly
that of religion. All critical examination of the Marxist

245

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

theory is forbidden; doubts of its validity are as vin-
dictively punished as heresy once was by the Catholic
Church. The works of Marx, as the source of revela-
tion, have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran,
although they are no freer from contradictions and ob-
scurities than these earlier holy books.

And although practical Marxism has remorselessly
swept away all idealistic systems and illusions, it has
nevertheless developed illusions itself, which are no less
dubious and unverifiable than their predecessors. It
hopes, in the course of a few generations, so to alter
men that they will be able to live together in the new
order of society almost without friction, and that they
will do their work voluntarily. In the meantime it
moves elsewhere the instinctual barriers which are es-
sential in any society, it directs outwards the aggressive
tendencies, which threaten every human community, and
finds its support in the hostility of the poor against the
rich, and of the hitherto powerless against the former
holders of power. But such an alteration in human
nature is very improbable. The enthusiasm with which
the mob follow the Bolshevist lead at present, so long
as the new order is incomplete and threatened from out-
side, gives no guarantee for the future, when it will be
fully established and no longer in danger. In exactly
the same way as religion, Bolshevism is obliged to com-
pensate its believers for the sufferings and deprivations
of the present life, by promising them a better life here-
after, in which there will be no unsatisfied needs. It is
true that this paradise is to be in this world; it will be
established on earth, and will be inaugurated within a

246

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

measurable time. - But let us remember that the Jews,
whose religion knows nothing of a life beyond the grave,
also expected the coming of the Messiah here on earth,
and that the Christian Middle Ages constantly believed
that the Kingdom of God was at hand.

There is no doubt what the answer of Bolshevism to
these criticisms will be. 'Until men have changed their
nature," it will say, 'one must employ the methods which
are effective with them to-day. One cannot do without
compulsion in their education or a ban upon thinking or
the application of force even to the spilling of blood;
and if one did not awake in them the illusions you speak
of, one would not be able to bring them to submit to
this compulsion." And it might politely ask us to say how
else it could be done. At this point we should be de-
feated. I should know of no advice to give. I should
admit that the conditions of this experiment would have
restrained me, and people like me, from undertaking
it; but we are not the only ones concerned. There are
also men of action, unshakable in their convictions, im-
pervious to doubt, and insensitive to the sufferings of
any one who stands between them and their goal. It is
owing to such men that the tremendous attempt to in-
stitute a new order of society of this kind is actually
being carried out in Russia now. At a time when great
nations are declaring that they expect to find their salva-
tion solely from a steadfast adherence to Christian picty,
the upheaval in Russia-in spite of all its distressing
features-seems to bring a promise of a better future.
Unfortunately, neither our own misgivings nor the fanat-
ical belief of the other side give us any hint of how

247

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

the experiment will turn out. The future will teach us.
Perhaps it will show that the attempt has been made
prematurely and that a fundamental alteration of the
social order will have little hope of success until new
discoveries are made that will increase our control over
the forces of nature, and so make easier the satisfaction
of our needs. It may be that only then will it be pos-
sible for a new order of society to emerge which will not
only banish the material want of the masses, but at the
same time meet the cultural requirements of individual
men. - But even so we shall still have to struggle for an
indefinite length of time with the difficulties which the
intractable nature of man puts in the way of every kind
of social community.

Ladies and Centlemen-Let me in conclusion sum up
what I had to say about the relation of psycho-analysis
to the question of a Weltanschauung. Psycho-analysis
is not, in my opinion, in a position to create a Welftan-
schauung of its own. It has no need to do so, for it is
a branch of science, and can subscribe to the scientific
Weltanschauung. The latter, however, hardly merits
such a high-sounding name, for it does not take every-
thing into its scope, it is incomplete, and it makes no
claim to being comprehensive or to constituting a system.
Scientific thought is still in its infancy; there are very
many of the great problems with which it has as yet been
unable to cope. A Weltanschauung based upon science
has, apart from the emphasis it lays upon the real world,
essentially negative characteristics, such as that it
itself to truth, and rejects illusions. Those of our fellow-
men who are dissatisfied with this state of things and

248

A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

who desire something more for their momentary peace
of mind may look for it where they can find it. We
shall not blame them for doing so; but we cannot help
them and cannot change our own way of thinking on
their account.

249

INDEX

Abraham, K., 38, 75, 136, 138
Adler, A., 192 ff.
Agoraphobia, 116, 117
Aggression, 14214.
and anxiety, 163
and civilisation, 151 f.
and death instinct, 147
and super-cgo, 149
Aggressiveness-
and id, 149
and infantile sexuality, 168
and masculinity, 156
and women, 158, 160
Alexander, F., 42
Alexander the Great, 140
Ambivalence, 137, 163, 169, 182
Amnesia and infantile sexual ex-
periences, 44
Anal erotism, 135 ff.
and character formation, 140
in dreams, 139
Anarchism, 240
Andreas-Salomé, L., 139
Animism, 225
Antagonism, girls', towards mother,
165, 181
Anus and mouth, 138
Anxiety-
and aggressiveness, 163
and birth, 114, 121, 129, 196
and castration, 120, 122 1{., 170
and danger situations, 115 f., 120,
122, 129
and ego, 118, 122 ff., 128
and hysteria, 115 f., 119
and id, 118, 124, 126
and infantile sexuality, 45
and libido, 115 {., 120, 126, 130
and masturbation, 120
and Oedipus-complex, 119, 127
and phobias, 115 ff., 119
and pleasure-pain principle, 113,
126f., 129 {.

 

and repression, 116, 119, 12314.

and self-preservation, 118

and super-ego, 118 f., 123

in children, 115 f.

moral, 89, 123

objective, 89, 114, 117, 129
Anxicty development, 114

and symptom formation, 116 f.,

125

Anxicty-dreams, 17, 43
Anxicty-neurosis, 115 f.
Anxiety-preparedness, 114
Archimedes, 237
Aristarchus, 237
Aristotle, 27
Art and science, 219
Associations and dreams, 21 f.

Bedouins, 38
Bennett, Arnold, 71
Betlhcim, 36 f.
Birth-
and anxiety, 114, 121, 129,
theories of, 138
Bi-sexuality, 155 ff.
Blériot, 243
Bolshevism, 245 ff.
Boy-
and Oedipus-complex, 176
castration-complex in, 170, 176
sexual development of, 159 ff.
Brunswick, R. Mack, 178
Burlingham, D., 80

Castration-
and anxiety, 120, 122 f., 170
and Oedipus-complex, 120, 176
Castration-anxiety, 170
Castration-complex, 121
and femininity, 172
and masculinity complex, 177
in boys, 170, 176

201

INDEX,

Castration-complex (contd.)
in women, 121, 170, 172
Censorship, 26 f., 30, 34
Character-
and identification, 125 f.
'anal', 140
and penis-envy, 170
and sexual phases, 13614.
'daemonic', 146
treatment of, 212, 214
Child, desire for, and penis, 175
Children-
a-morality of, 89
and anxiety, 115 f.
birth, theories of, 138
neurotic phase of, 203
psycho-analysis of, 200 ff., 210
variety of constitution in, 204
Circumcision, 121
Civilisation, 151, 244
and super-ego, 123
and women, 181
Classes, origin of, 242
Clitoris-
and inferiority-complex, 93
and vagina, 161
as penis equivalent, 161
Compromise formations, 31, 104
Condensation-
and id, 105
in dreams, 33
Conflict, 26, 83, 102
Conscience, 86 f.
and need for punishment, 149
and parental authority, 89 f.
Conscious-
and reality, 27
and super-ego, 98
meaning of, 99
Copernicus, 237
Curie, 237

Danger-situations-

Deutsch, H., 78, 178
Displacement-
and id, 105
and phobia, 118
in dreams, 3314.
Distortion, 45
in dreams, 34
Dreams-
and chance stimuli, 28
and feeling-tone, 20, 33
and psychoses, 27
and residue of previous day, 21,
28, 35,
and trauma, 43 ff.
anxiety-, 17, 43
compromise formations in, 31f.
created by unconscious impulse,
30
forgetting of, 24
function of, 28, 43
hellfeinstory nature of, 31,
3
of rectum and vagina, 139
pairs of, 42
punishment, 43
relations in, 33
sexual nature of, 17
telepathy and, 55
theory of, 15 f.
wish-fulfilment, 17, 35, 42, 45
Dream-censor, 26, 28, 43
Dream-content (manifest), 17, 19,
21, 25 f., 29, 30, 39
*Dream-day', 21
Dream-interpretation, - 19 f., 29,
31
and telepathy, 57, 68
Dream-thoughts, 17, 19, 22, 26,
29 £., 33, 42
Dreams, Interpretation of, 17
PSAT ~ 17, 19, 29 f., 34, 40,
44 {.

and anxiety, 115 f., 120, 122, 129 | Education - and - psycho-analysis,

and castration, 121
Darwin, 237
Death-instinct, 147

200 ff.
Ego-
and aggressiveness, 150

Death, neurotic interpretation of, and anxiety, 118, 122 ff, 128

167
Delinquency, 95
Delusion, 27

of observation, 85

and identification, 107
and illness, 194

and libido, 141, 144
and psycho-analysis, 111

 

252

INDEX

Ego (contd.)-
and repression, 108, 124 f, 132
and resistance, 97
and society, 152
and symptom, 82
and unconscious, 99, 101 {., 105
relation to external world, 105 f.,
108 {., 128
relation to id, 1054, 128
relation to super-ego, 105 f.
relation to time, 1064.
weakness of, in infancy, 116, 122,
201
Ego-ideal and super-cgo, 93
Ego-instincts, 83, 132, 134, 140
Ego-libido, 141
Ego-psychology, 834.
and mania, 88
and melancholia, 87
and psychoses, 85
Einstein, 198
Eisler, J., 40
Eisler, R., 38
Eitingon, M., 208

Facces-
and gifts, 160
and money, 138
Feeling-tonc in dreams, 20, 33
Femininity-
and castration-complex, 172
and dolls, 175
and identification, 91
and masochism, 158
and masturbation, 174
characteristics of, 155 f.
Ferenczi, S., 38 f., 122
Fire and urethal erotisma, 140
Fixation, 137
Folk-lore, symbols in, 38 f.
Fortune-tellers, 59, 64
s: symbols of, in dreams,

Freud, Anna, 200
Frigidity in women, 180

Galsworthy, 71
Genital phase, 186
Girl-

slg n" towards mother, 165,
1

 

latency period in, 176
masturbation - of, - 161,
174
sexual development of, 159 ff.
God-
omniscience of, 80
origin of idea of, 222
Groddeck, G., 102
Groot, J. Lampl de, 178
Grtoup-psychology, 96, 189, 192
Guilt, - unconscious - sense - of,
1491.

172,

Hallucination, 85
Mand-writing expert, 66
Hartmann, 36 f.
Hegel, 212
Heine, 154, 220
Homosexuality, 139
and Individual Psychology, 193
in women, 117 {.
Hugo, Victor, 212
Hunger, 131, 131
Husband and father, 181 f.
Hysteria
and anviety, 115 f., 119
and Individual Psychology, 193
and psycho-analysis, 212
Hysterical symptom, 27
origin of, in phantasy, 164

Id-

and aggressiveness, 149

and anxiety, 118, 124, 126

and condensation, 105

and displacement, 105

and libido, 144

and pleasure-pain principle, 104,

105, 126

and regression, 127

and repression, 101, 124 f,

relation to ego, 105 f., 128

relation to external reality, 110

relation to super-ego, 105 f.
Identification-

and character, 125f.

and ego, 107

and Oedipus-complex, 91.

and super-ego, 90 f.

of girl with mother, 18214,
Iliness-

and masochism, 194

253

INDEX

TIliness-(contd.)
gain from, 194
predisposition to, 201
Imago, 200
Individual Psychology, 93, 192 ff.
Inferiority-complex, 93, 193
and guilt, 93
Instincts, 82
aim-inhibited, 133 f.
and anxiety, 113 ff.
and ego, 107
and id, 104 ff.
and sublimation, 133
component, 135
conservative nature of, 146
death, 147
theory of, 131 ff.
transformation of, 137 {.
of Psycho-analysis, Berlin,
0
fuisefection of external restriction,
8

Jones, Ernest, 73

Kant, 88, 223
Kepler, 237
Korsakow's syndrome, 36

Labyrinth, symbol of, 40
Latency period-

and anxiety, 123

in girls, 176
Lavoisier, 237
Libido-

and anxiety, 115 f., 120, 126,

130

and ego, 141, 144

and sexual polarity, 179

fixation of, 137

theory of, 132 ff., 141 f.
Logic and id, 104
Lourdes, 208

Magic, 225

Mania, 88

Marxism, 241 f.

Masculinity, - characteristics - of,
155 f.

Masculinity complex, 172, 177, 182
Masochism, 142 ff.
and femininity, 158

 

and illness, 194
and resistance, 148
Masturbation-
and anxiety, 120
and female homosexuals, 177.
in girls, 161, 172, 174
in neurotics, 173
Mediums, 52
Medusa, 38
Melancholia, 87, 137
Memory of dreams, 24
Modesty in women, 180
Morality-
and id, 105
origin of, 223 f.
Mother-
antagonism
165 f.
identification with, 1821{f.
phallic, 173
Mystics, 111
Murder, fear of, 167

Narcissism, 141, 212
in women, 180, 181
Negation and id, 104
Neurosis-
and masturbation, 173
and need for punishment, 148
thet of, 27, 43, 122, 137, 172,
19
transference-, 212
treatment of, 196, 200
Neurotic symptoms-.
and dreams, 29 f.
and id, 103
Newton, 237
Nietzsche, 102
Number-
in thought-transference, 61 f.
symbols of, in dreams, 40

of girl towards,

Object-cathexis-
abandoned and identification, 91
and ambivalence, 169
and ego, 108
in women, 160, 162
Object-choice-
and identification, 90 f.
and Oedipus-complex, 181
in women, 180
Object-libido, 141

254

INDEX

Obsession, 27

and anxiety, 117, 127

and Individual Psychology, 193

and psycho-analysis, 212

and sexual phases, 137
Occultism, 47 ff.
Oedipus-complex-

and anxiety, 119, 127

and castration, 120, 176

and female homosexuality, 177

and identification, 911.

and mother identification, 182

and object-choice, 181

and penis-envy, 176

and super-ego, 92, 95, 110, 177

in boys, 176

in girls, 176

in women, 162, 164
Oral erotism, 139
Oral phase, 135, 163
Oral-sadistic phase, 137
Organ-pleasure, 135

Paranoia, 164, 178, 213
< Parental function-

and ego-ideal, 93

and God, 22214.

and super-ego, 89, 95
Penis-

absence of, 170 f., 182

and breast, 139

and child, 175

and faeces, 138
Penis-envy, 139, 170 ff.

and character, 170

and dolls, 175

and having children, 175, 182

and marriage, 181 f.

and masturbation, 174

and Oedipus-complex, 176

and phallic phase, 171

and vanity, 180
Perceptual-conscious system, 105 f.,

109

Phallic phase, 120, 122 f., 136

and frustration, 168

and Oedipus-complex, 176

and penis-envy, 171

of girls, 160 f., 163
Philosophy and science, 219
Phobia, 115 ff., 212

and anxiety, 119

 

Pleasure-pain principle-

and anxiety, 113, 126f., 1294.

and danger, 126, 128, 129

and id, 104, 105, 126

and repetition-compulsion, 146

and repression, 124, 126
Poison, fear of, 164, 167
Preconscious, meaning of, 101
Pre-oedipal attachment-

and mother-identification,

183

and regression, 178

in girls, 163, 176, 178, 183
Psycho-analysis-

and education, 200 ff.

and ego, 111

and psychoses, 210

and religion, 229

and telepathy, 57, 68

and - Weltanschauung,

248

applied, 189

length of treatment, 213

of children, 200 ff., 210

prejudice against, 186 ff., 197 ff.

therapeutic aspect of, 206 fi.
Psychoses, 27, 85, 210
Punishment-dream, 43
faniithent need for, 128 f., 148,

Rank, O., 122
Rationalisation, 34, 109
Reaction-formation, 125, 140
Regression, 137
and dream-work, 31
and penis-envy, 171
and pre-oedipal phase, 178
and repression, 127
Reik, T., 38
Religion, 219 ff.
and psycho-analysis, 229
and science, 227 ff., 234
Repetition-compulsion, 145
and marriage, 182
Repressed impulses, 28
Repression, 97
and anxiety, 116, 119, 12314.
and castration, 121
and ego, 108, 124 f., 132
and id, 104, 124 {.
and Qedipus-complex, 119

163,

216 f.,

255

INDEX

Repression (contd.) -

and pleasure-pain principle, 124,

126

and regression, 127
Repression-resistance, 26 f., 31, 108
Resistance, 83, 97

and ego, 97

and masochism, 148

and need for punishment, 148

to dream-interpretation, 24 ff.

Sadism, 135 ff., 142 ff.
Sadistic-anal phase, 136, 160, 163
Sadistic impulses, 135
Schopenhauer, 147
Schrotter, 36
Science, 52, 217 ff.
and religion, 227 ff.
development of, 227 ff.
future of, 236 ff.
nature of, 232 {.
Secondary elaboration, 34
Seduction fantasy, 164
Self-destruction, 144
Self-injury, 194
Self-preservation, 129, 194
and anxiety, 118
instinct of, 132, 134
Sex, differentiation of, 160 f., 163,
179
Sexuality, 82
anal-sadistic phase, 135 f., 160,
163
and anxiety, 115
and death-instinct, 147
and dreams, 17, 37
and repression, 132
genital phase, 186
infantile, 44, 197
inhibition and castration, 172
instinct of, 132 f., 141
instinct of, and aggression, 141
oral phase, 136, 163
perversion, 143, 172
phallic phase, 120, 122, 136,
160 f., 163, 168, 171, 175, 176
prejudice against, 189
organs, symbols of, 37,

Silberer, 37
Sleep, function of, 27, 45
Sociology, 245

 

Somatic processes and id, 104
Space and id, 104
Speech and magic, 226
Sublimation, 133, 18314.
Suckling, 1664.
Super-ego, 43, 86 ff.
and aggression, 149
and anxiety, 118 {., 123
and character, 126
and civilisation, 123
and ego, 874.
and ego-ideal, 924.
and group-psychology, 96
and identification, 90 f.
and inferiority-complex, 93
and Oedipus-complex, 92, 95,
110, 177
and parental authority, 89
and repression, 98
and tradition, 244
and unconscious, 98, 99, 102, 105
in children, 202
in girls, 177
relation to ego, 105 f.
relation to id, 105 f.
Superstitions, 226
Symbols, 139
examples of, 38
experiments in, 364.
in dreams, 23
prejudice against, 189, 197
Symptom-
and ego, 82
and guilt sense, 150
origin of, 82
Symptom-formation-
and anxiety development, 1161.,
125
and neurotic anxiety, 1161.
and repression, 125
Syphilidophobis, 123
Systems, conscious, pre-conscious,
and unconscious, 101 f.

Telepathy, 541., 78
examples of, 55 fi.
Thought-transference, 59, 79
examples of, 60 ff.
Thirst, 134
Time-
and ego, 106 f.
and id, 104

256

Totem und Tabu, 227
Totemism, 222
Transference, 146
Transference-neuroses, 212
Trauma-

amd aaziety 114 129

and dreams, 43 ff.

infantile sexual, 164
Traumatic neuroses, 43, 4§
Truth, 233

Unconscious, 82
and ego, 99, 101 f., 105
and repressed material, 98
meaning of, 99 ff.
repressed, 28
system of, 29, 101 f.
Urethal erotism, 140
Urine and gifts, 160

Vagina-
and anal erotism, 139
and clitoris, 161
in young girls, 161

Wallenstein, 195
War, Great, 243
Weaving, origin of, 181

INDEX

I eltanschauung-

 

257

Wish-fulfilment,

anarchistic, 2401.

and psycho-analysis, 216 f., 248
Marxian, 241 ff.

religious, 225 ff., 235, 25.,, 240
scientike, 227 &., 2365
unscientific, 219

in dreams, 17,

43 fi.

Womb, return to, 122
Women-

and aggressiveness, 158, 160

and castration-complex, 121, 170,
172

and civilisation, 181

and sublimation, 183 f.

antagonism towards mother in,
165

development of super-ego in, 177

modesty of, 180

narcissism of, 180

sense of justice in, 183

sexual development of, 159 ff.

social interest of, 183

vanity of, 180

Zeitschrift, Internationale fiir (G@rzt-

liche) Psychoanalyse, 16

Zones, erotogenic, 135