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-anal­y­sis; 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 neu­roses 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 felt, 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 für (ärztliche) Psy­cho­anal­yse, in which the most impor­tant work on our sub­ject has appeared since 1913. In the ear­lier vol­umes you will find one recur­ring 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 fin­ished 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 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 inscribe their dreams for inter­pre­ta­tion, or ask for infor­ma­tion 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 under­stand 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 itself, 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 cer­tain 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 dis­tur­bance. For how could we expect from the inves­ti­ga­tion 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 assump­tion, put for­ward the pos­tu­late, that even this unin­tel­li­gi­ble 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 utter­ance 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 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 con­cepts 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 solu­tion 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 impres­sion 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 dis­plays all sorts of char­ac­ter­is­tics to which we are not com­pletely indif­fer­ent. It may be coher­ent, smoothly com­posed, like a lit­er­ary work, or unin­tel­li­gi­bly con­fused, almost like a delir­ium; it may have absurd ele­ments, 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 men­tioned. 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 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 dif­fer­ence 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 notices that they have more in common with the con­tent 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 between 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 been 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 con­fused nature.

But let us have no mis­un­der­stand­ing. The asso­ci­a­tions 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 clev­er­ness 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 utter­ances what we have no busi­ness to find there; and indeed it is no easy matter to show the pro­pri­ety of our behav­iour 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 per­ma­nent mean­ing, which need not, how­ever, be ambigu­ous, 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 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, the for­got­ten dream will come into his mind quite sud­denly. 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 par­tic­u­lar piece. Expe­ri­ence shows that it is this very piece of the dream which is the most valu­able; we sup­pose 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 fur­ther increase of the resis­tance sup­presses the asso­ci­a­tions alto­gether, and thus frus­trates the inter­pre­ta­tion of the dream entirely.

From all this we draw the con­clu­sion that the resis­tance 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 between 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 respon­si­ble 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 resist­ing? Now for us a resis­tance is the sure sign of a con­flict. There must be a force present which is trying 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 com­pris­ing 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 com­mu­ni­ca­tion 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 unrec­og­niz­able. If there­fore the dream does not faith­fully rep­re­sent the dream-thoughts, if a process of inter­pre­ta­tion is nec­es­sary to bridge the gulf between the two, this is the result of the coun­ter­act­ing, inhibit­ing and restrain­ing force whose exis­tence we have inferred from per­ceiv­ing 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 uncon­scious and the con­scious, dom­i­nates our lives, and that the resis­tance against the inter­pre­ta­tion of dreams, the 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 con­flict 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 prod­uct, 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 already 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 con­di­tion for the devel­op­ment of a psy­chosis. The most pen­e­trat­ing study of seri­ous cases of psy­chosis will reveal 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 unbear­ably painful that the threat­ened ego, in a despair­ing ges­ture of oppo­si­tion, throws itself into the arms of the uncon­scious impulses. The harm­less dream-psy­chosis is the result of a con­sciously willed, and only 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 during sleep.

Here we have an oppor­tu­nity of answer­ing the ques­tion whether the dream has also a func­tion to per­form, whether any useful task is entrusted to it. The con­di­tion 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 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, I 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 pro­cesses 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 neu­rotic 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 affec­tively 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 expres­sion that it obtains is enfee­bled, dis­torted and dis­guised; 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 occu­py­ing the mental life, even during sleep. We can, indeed, have no doubt about this: the uncon­scious impulse 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-inter­pre­ta­tion shows us, more­over, that this is the mean­ing of all dream­ing. In every dream an instinc­tual wish is dis­played as ful­filled. The nightly cut­ting-off of mental life from real­ity, and the regres­sion to prim­i­tive mech­a­nisms which it makes pos­si­ble, enable this desired instinc­tual 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 char­ac­ter­is­tics 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 them­selves, 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 (‘egosyn­tonic’), since it sub­serves the wish to sleep by drain­ing 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 hal­lu­ci­na­tory sat­is­fac­tion. The latent dream-thoughts are there­fore turned into a col­lec­tion of sen­sory images and visual scenes. As they are trav­el­ling in this direc­tion some­thing hap­pens to them which seems to us new and bewil­der­ing. All the verbal appa­ra­tus by means of which the more subtle thought-rela­tions are expressed, the con­junc­tions and prepo­si­tions, the vari­a­tions of declen­sion and con­ju­ga­tion, are lack­ing, because the means of por­tray­ing them are absent: just as in prim­i­tive, 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 appa­ra­tus 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 pic­tures 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 mate­rial 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 dis­place­ment 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 attached 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 sep­a­rately. They may be trans­ferred to some­thing else, they may remain where they were, they may undergo 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 unim­por­tant ones, so that what seems to be pushed to the fore­front 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 rep­re­sen­ta­tion 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. Dis­place­ment 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 façade, such as cannot cor­re­spond to its real con­tent, may be alto­gether absent in some cases, or only 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 pre­ced­ing 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 under­stand 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 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 inves­ti­ga­tors have made a start on the exper­i­men­tal con­fir­ma­tion of our theory of dream-sym­bol­ism. Dr. Schröt­ter 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 inter­course 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 with a crude sexual con­tent, and then noted the dis­tor­tions 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 exper­i­ments 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 pic­tures. 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 Sil­berer 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 com­par­i­son 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, 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 cer­e­mony 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, Wel­ten­man­tel und Him­mel­szelt). 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 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 Yonder (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 con­di­tion 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 man­i­fest 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 devel­op­ments which the raw mate­rial has under­gone. None 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 mytho­log­i­cal themes find their expla­na­tion through dream-inter­pre­ta­tion. The story of the Labyrinth, for exam­ple, 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 intrauter­ine 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 her­self, should not lead you astray; it has indeed a spe­cial 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 remem­ber 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 con­di­tion 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 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 undis­guised 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 myself, 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, 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 func­tion of the mind. If we are faced with a pure pun­ish­ment-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 influ­enced 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 func­tion 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 sat­is­fac­tory 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 at the back of trau­matic hys­te­ria) are con­tin­u­ally being put back into the trau­matic sit­u­a­tion in dreams. Accord­ing to our accep­ta­tion of the func­tion of dreams, this ought not to be the case. What cona­tive impulse could pos­si­bly be sat­is­fied 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 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-ful­fil­ment; in order to take these last objec­tions into account, you may say that the dream is an attempted wish-ful­fil­ment. 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 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 sur­prised if lesser dis­tur­bances of the func­tion of the dream occur in other cir­cum­stances.

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 con­nec­tion 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 phe­nom­e­non. Even we, who have made them an object of sci­en­tific study, cannot deny that sev­eral strands link them up with those obscure regions. Mys­ti­cism—Occultism—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 beyond 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 phi­los­o­phy. 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 as we treat any other mate­rial for sci­en­tific inves­ti­ga­tion. 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 expla­na­tion. 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 noth­ing 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 unthink­able. 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 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 inven­tor 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 test­ing 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 atti­tude 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 con­dem­na­tion. For a long time it was thought to be an absurd thesis that the stones which we now call mete­orites should have reached the earth from outer space, 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 uncon­scious. We ana­lysts, there­fore, have spe­cial reason to be cau­tious in making use of intel­lec­tual argu­ments 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 becomes 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 per­cep­tion, and forces us to con­firm and agree with­out real jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Any one who takes these human weak­nesses 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 appari­tions 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 accounts 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 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 cannot be dis­proved. But about what hap­pens in the present, 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 inten­tions. 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 man­i­fest­ing 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, how­ever, 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 pur­pose. On the con­trary, they are regarded as par­tic­u­larly 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 there­fore 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 nowa­days as a pro­tec­tion against the untrust­wor­thi­ness of medi­ums. Unfor­tu­nately the modern con­trol tech­nique puts an end to the easy acces­si­bil­ity of occult obser­va­tions. 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 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 pen­e­trate. 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 improb­a­bil­ity 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 believed 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 con­vince 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 occultism’ wrote to me about a dream which seemed to him to be remark­able. He pref­aced his story with the infor­ma­tion 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 I 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 daugh­ter’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 inter­course 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 simul­tane­ity of the dream and the event was a mere coin­ci­dence. 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 con­sid­ered 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 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 delighted 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 con­clu­sion 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 expla­na­tion 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 assump­tion.

We can now leave the sub­ject of dreams and telepa­thy; I 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 appli­ca­tion of psycho-anal­y­sis may throw a light on other so-called occult facts. There is, for exam­ple, the phe­nom­e­non of thought-trans­fer­ence, which is closely allied to telepa­thy and, indeed, can be iden­ti­fied with it with­out much dif­fi­culty. It is held that psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­cesses, ideas, states of excite­ment, voli­tions, which occur in the mind of one person, can be trans­ferred through space to another, with­out the usual means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion (words or signs) being employed. Inci­den­tally it is remark­able that it is actu­ally these phe­nom­ena 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 pro­fes­sional 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. Unfor­tu­nately the evi­den­tial value of this infor­ma­tion is reduced on account of the numer­ous omis­sions which are neces­si­tated by the rules of pro­fes­sional secrecy. I have, how­ever, care­fully avoided any dis­tor­tions. This is the story of one of my female patients, who had an expe­ri­ence of the kind we are dis­cussing with a for­tune-teller.

She was the eldest of a family of broth­ers and sis­ters, grew up with an extraor­di­nar­ily strong attach­ment to her father, had mar­ried young, and had found entire sat­is­fac­tion in her mar­ried life. There was only one thing want­ing to make her hap­pi­ness com­plete; she was child­less, 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, became 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 for­tuneteller 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 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 unmis­tak­able expres­sion of sat­is­fac­tion, as though she were look­ing back with plea­sure upon a happy expe­ri­ence. 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 incom­pre­hen­si­ble 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 actu­ally 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 ful­filled, how could she feel oth­er­wise than friendly towards the prophet? But do you think that Mon­sieur le Pro­fesseur 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 evi­dence 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-trans­fer­ence. 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 impres­sion 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 pro­duc­tions, phan­tasies or dreams of the people con­cerned. 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 evi­dence together there remains a heavy weight of prob­a­bil­ity 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 med­i­cal exam­i­na­tion; but he was not in a con­di­tion to take it, because, as he com­plained, he had lost all his inter­ests, all power of con­cen­tra­tion, and even the fac­ulty of a well-ordered memory. The his­tory of this paralysing 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 had 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 per­suaded to give their con­sent. While they were engaged, 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 person 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 per­mit­ted myself to ask: ‘What is it that makes you find this prophecy so mar­vel­lous? We have already reached the late autumn, and your brother-in-law is not dead yet, or you would have told me long ago. The prophecy there­fore 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 over­come 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 patient 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 impelled 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 him­self from her, for the obses­sion was becom­ing a worry to him: he noticed that his pro­fes­sional life was suf­fer­ing 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 obtained 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 there­fore 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 him­self, 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 inten­tion. It was only by a mir­a­cle that he escaped death, and it was only after care­ful nurs­ing that he recov­ered. But this reck­less act made a deep impres­sion upon the woman he was in love with; she responded to his atten­tions, 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 detach­ing 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 dis­sat­is­fac­tion, 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 con­scious; 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 revenge 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 revenge was actu­ally directed towards the latter was only betrayed by the cir­cum­stances that he made her a con­fed­er­ate 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, 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 spec­i­men which had been brought to him would commit sui­cide 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 exam­ples 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 phe­nom­ena, 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. But your inter­est will not stop there. You will want to know to what con­clu­sion that far richer vein of mate­rial, 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 increased 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 exam­ple 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 work­ing 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 psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal tech­nique.) I had only time to say ‘How do you do?’, and arrange an appoint­ment for later on. Dr. Forsyth had a spe­cial claim upon my inter­est; for he was the first for­eigner who came to me after the iso­la­tion 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 charm­ing 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 bring­ing 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 stim­u­lat­ing 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]. I was much struck by this piece of infor­ma­tion; Dr. Forsyth’s card was beside me, and I showed it to him.

These are the facts. I dare say they will seem to 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 lit­er­a­ture. 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 Galswor­thy called The Man of Prop­erty, the sub­ject of which is an imag­i­nary family named Forsyte. Galswor­thy’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 between 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 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 expect­ing 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-uni­ver­stät 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 ‘Alp­traum’ is ‘night­mare.’ This asso­ci­a­tion seemed to have noth­ing more in common with the others than the ele­ment of ‘Eng­lish’; but he reminded me of a triv­ial occur­rence 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 night­mare. 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 physi­cian 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 man­aged 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 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 Forsyth too,—or rather only a Mr. Fore­sight, as the girl called me.’ And now, start­ing from the idea of ‘Eng­lish,’ 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 cer­tainly 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 allu­sion 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 for­eign 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 ana­lyt­i­cal work: the expla­na­tion of three ideas which were 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 ques­tion 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 dis­played 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 befallen the devel­op­ment of psycho-anal­y­sis. It is pos­si­ble, there­fore, that I said to Mr. P.: ‘I have been 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 pub­lished 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 cannot 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 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. Fore­sight 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. Per­haps I too have that secret lean­ing towards the mirac­u­lous 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 men­tioned 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 any­thing 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 neigh­bour­hood 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, there is Dr. Forsyth, whose arrival means the end of my anal­y­sis; and prob­a­bly he has just left the Pro­fes­sor.’ 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 posi­tion with regard to this prob­lem—not com­pletely con­vinced 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 con­cerned 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.

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 exten­sion 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 trans­for­ma­tions, such as speak­ing and hear­ing across the tele­phone, 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 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 devel­op­ment 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 con­di­tions: for exam­ple, in crowds roused to a state of pas­sion­ate 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 common phe­nom­e­non. It would fit in with our expec­ta­tions if we could show that it occurs par­tic­u­larly in the mental 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, pub­lished 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 reported such remark­able phe­nom­ena as the fol­low­ing. One day in her ana­lytic hour the mother was talk­ing about a gold coin which had fig­ured in one of her child­hood 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 coin­ci­dence, 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.

The Anatomy Of The Mental Personality, Lecture XXXI

Ladies and 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 rela­tion 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 exter­nal 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.

You know better than that. From the very begin­ning 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 moment did we forget this resist­ing, reject­ing and repress­ing factor, which we believed to be fur­nished with its own spe­cial forces, the ego-instincts, and which cor­re­sponds 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 pro­nounce­ment 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 psy­cho­log­i­cal under­world that pre­ceded it. Why that should be the case, I cannot say for cer­tain. My orig­i­nal expla­na­tion was that you would feel that, whereas hith­erto I have been telling you in the main about facts, how­ever 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 facts is not much greater in our ego-psy­chol­ogy than it was in the psy­chol­ogy of the neu­roses. Other expla­na­tions turned out to be equally unten­able, and I now think that the char­ac­ter of the mate­rial itself is respon­si­ble, 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 begin­ning 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 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 obser­va­tions: ‘now he is going to say this, now he is dress­ing him­self to go out,’ and so on. Such obser­va­tion 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 some­thing that is for­bid­den and for which he will be pun­ished. 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 impres­sion 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. The next step is soon taken. The actual con­tent of the delu­sion of obser­va­tion makes it prob­a­ble that the obser­va­tion 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 begin­ning 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 pre­lim­i­nary to the judi­cial aspect of con­science is another. And since the process of rec­og­niz­ing a thing as a sep­a­rate 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, mag­ni­fy­ing 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 ques­tion of arriv­ing at new ways of look­ing at things and new group­ings of the facts than of making new dis­cov­er­ies. I will not ask you, there­fore, to aban­don your crit­i­cal atti­tude but merely to await fur­ther devel­op­ments. The facts of pathol­ogy give our efforts a back­ground for which you will look in vain in pop­u­lar psy­chol­ogy. 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 dis­posal, 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 con­di­tion 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 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 between the ego and the super-ego. It is a very remark­able expe­ri­ence to observe moral­ity, which was osten­si­bly 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 unques­tion­ably 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 frag­ment of psy­cho­log­i­cal truth which is con­tained in the asser­tion that con­science is of divine origin! but the 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 impulses. 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 dom­i­nates 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 pro­ceeds 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 par­ents, 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 harsh­ness even when the up-bring­ing has been gentle and kind, and avoided threats and pun­ish­ment as far as pos­si­ble. We shall return to this con­tra­dic­tion later, when we are deal­ing with the trans­mu­ta­tion of instincts in 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 the first case his ego is altered on the model of his father, in the second case that is not nec­es­sary. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and object-choice are broadly speak­ing inde­pen­dent 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 chil­dren 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 iden­ti­fi­ca­tions with its par­ents, which have prob­a­bly long been present, become greatly inten­si­fied. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tions of 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, becom­ing, as it were, more imper­sonal. Another thing that we must not forget is that the child values its par­ents 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. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tions 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 gen­uine struc­tural entity, and have not been merely per­son­i­fy­ing 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 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 par­ents, 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 ele­men­tary. 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 infe­rior 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 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 digres­sion. 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 con­tem­po­rary 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 writ­ing 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 allo­cated to it the activ­i­ties of self-obser­va­tion, con­science, and the hold­ing up of ideals. It fol­lows from our account of its origin that it is based upon an over­whelm­ingly impor­tant bio­log­i­cal fact no less than upon a momen­tous psy­cho­log­i­cal fact, namely the lengthy depen­dence 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 sig­nif­i­cance if we turn our atten­tion to these sources. In gen­eral, 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 them­selves 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 under­stand­ing the social behav­iour of man, in grasp­ing the prob­lem of delin­quency, for exam­ple, and per­haps, too, in pro­vid­ing us with some prac­ti­cal hints upon edu­ca­tion, It is prob­a­ble that the so-called mate­ri­al­is­tic con­cep­tions 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 super­struc­tures 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 psy­cho­log­i­cal group is a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als, who have intro­duced 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 cannot 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 oppo­site 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 dis­cussed. He may also become sub­jec­tively aware of the resis­tance by expe­ri­enc­ing painful feel­ings when he approaches 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. Expe­ri­ence shows that we were right, but, if so, his resis­tance too must have been uncon­scious, just as uncon­scious 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 resis­tance 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 use­less 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 con­scious­ness. 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 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, i.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 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 por­tions 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 con­scious, 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 impor­tance 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 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 uncon­scious, if we were cer­tain that they were still some­thing 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 uncon­scious 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-dis­tur­bance, 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 recog­nise 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 uncon­scious. Such an obser­va­tion as this jus­ti­fies us in also regard­ing what we have called ‘latent’ as some­thing ‘uncon­scious.’ The con­sid­er­a­tion of these dynamic rela­tions puts us in a posi­tion to dis­tin­guish two kinds of uncon­scious: one which is trans­formed into con­scious arise, and another in the case of which such a trans­for­ma­tion is dif­fi­cult, can only come about with a con­sid­er­able 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 expe­di­ent. 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 ‘uncon­scious,’ to serve our pur­poses in describ­ing mental phe­nom­ena. 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 exis­tence 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 another, 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 occur 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 pre­con­scious and of the uncon­scious, and of a con­flict between the ego and the Ucs. system; so that the word ‘uncon­scious’ 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 effect and enables us to remove a com­pli­ca­tion. We evi­dently 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 pro­noun 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 con­cerned in what fol­lows.

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 con­scious­ness 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 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 geo­graph­i­cal con­fig­u­ra­tions, hills, plains and chains of lakes, and with mixed nation­al­i­ties living in it, Ger­mans, Mag­yars and Slo­vaks, who, more­over, are engaged 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 moun­tains, 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 inac­ces­si­ble 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 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 organ­i­sa­tion 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 with­out neu­tral­is­ing each other or draw­ing apart; at most they com­bine in com­pro­mise for­ma­tions under the over­pow­er­ing eco­nomic pres­sure towards dis­charg­ing their energy. There is noth­ing in the id which can be com­pared 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. 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 pas­sage of time. This seems to offer us the pos­si­bil­ity of an 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. Instinc­tual 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 con­di­tion 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 inde­pen­dent 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 char­ac­ter­is­tics 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 atten­tion to the rela­tion between it and the most super­fi­cial por­tion of the mental appa­ra­tus; which we call the Pcpt-cs (per­cep­tual-con­scious) system. This system is directed on to the exter­nal world, it medi­ates per­cep­tions 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 exter­nal world for the id, and so of saving it; for the id, blindly striv­ing to grat­ify its instincts in com­plete dis­re­gard 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 con­trols 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 dethrones 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, 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 con­tradis­tinc­tion to the id, is a ten­dency to syn­the­sise its con­tents, 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 char­ac­ter­is­tic 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 con­trol­ling them, but the latter is only achieved through the mental rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the instinct becom­ing sub­or­di­nated 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 cir­cum­spec­tion, 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 pur­po­sively 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 retained or given up. The object-cathexes pro­ceed from the instinc­tual demands of the id. The first busi­ness of 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 ful­filled. 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 bar­rier 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 incom­pat­i­ble; 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 per­son­i­fied 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 Ucs. com­mands of the id with its own Pcs. ratio­nal­i­sa­tions, to gloss over the con­flicts between the id and real­ity, and with diplo­matic dis­hon­esty to dis­play a pre­tended regard 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 well under­stand how it is that we so often cannot repress the cry: ‘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 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 exhaust­ing 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 cannot 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 sep­a­ra­tions, 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 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.

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 suc­ceed in upset­ting the normal rela­tions between the dif­fer­ent 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 pro­ce­dure 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 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.

Anxiety And Instinctual Life, Lecture XXXII

Ladies and 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 infor­ma­tion 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 incom­plete­ness of our obser­va­tions, for it is actu­ally the com­mon­est 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 con­nec­tion. 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 reca­pit­u­late 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 them—but we asserted that anx­i­ety is prob­a­bly also the trace of a cer­tain impor­tant event, taken over by inher­i­tance, and there­fore com­pa­ra­ble to the onto­ge­net­i­cally 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 neu­rotic 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 objec­tive anx­i­ety we explained it as a con­di­tion of increased 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 rep­e­ti­tion 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-devel­op­ment, 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 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 con­clu­sions. With regard to anx­ious expec­ta­tion, clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence has taught us that there is a reg­u­lar rela­tion­ship between it and the dis­po­si­tion of the libido in the sexual life. The most fre­quent cause of anx­i­ety-neu­ro­sis is undis­charged exci­ta­tion. A libid­i­nal exci­ta­tion 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 sup­port in cer­tain almost uni­ver­sal pho­bias of small chil­dren. 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; 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 anx­i­eties. 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 descrip­tion 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 quan­tity 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 exam­ple, 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 pre­serves 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 intol­er­a­ble 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 neu­rotic 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; 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 con­nec­tion with temp­ta­tions aroused in him by meet­ing people in the street. In his phobia he makes a dis­place­ment 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 expressed 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-for­ma­tion, 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 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 con­fir­ma­tion of our theory in the fact that the three main vari­eties 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 posi­tion, 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 noticed 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 inves­ti­ga­tion 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 attached 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 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 pre­pared 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 pri­mar­ily a matter of whether cas­tra­tion is really per­formed; 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 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 pun­ish­ment 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 cas­tra­tion-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 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 common 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. I 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 valu­able 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 before 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 imma­tu­rity 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 phase; and finally, fear of the super-ego, which occu­pies a spe­cial posi­tion, to the period of latency. As devel­op­ment 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 degree. 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 syphili­do­pho­bia. 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 direc­tion involves the risk of severe ill­nesses. There is no doubt that per­sons whom we call neu­rotic remain infan­tile 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 char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of neu­rotics; why it should be so is not so easy to say.

I hope you have not lost the thread of our dis­course, and that you remem­ber that we are dis­cussing the rela­tions between anx­i­ety and repres­sion. We have dis­cov­ered 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 sit­u­a­tions 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 organ­i­sa­tion. 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 quan­ti­ties 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 auto­matic 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 some­thing to what I have said, to make it seem accept­able to you. First of all, I must admit that I have tried to 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 impor­tant 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 exper­i­men­tal 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 mod­i­fi­ca­tion 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 is that cre­ates this thing called char­ac­ter. The incor­po­ra­tion 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 libid­i­nal 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. Its 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 repressed 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 antic­i­pa­tions. 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 in ques­tion. We are there­fore pre­pared to believe that the effects of repres­sion will be very varied, and some­times more and some­times less exten­sive. In many cases the repressed impulse may retain its libid­i­nal cathexis, and con­tinue to exist unal­tered in the id, although under the per­pet­ual pres­sure of the ego. In other instances it seems to undergo com­plete destruc­tion, in which case its libido is finally diverted into other chan­nels. I have sug­gested that this is what hap­pens 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 actu­ally 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 intro­duced by the danger-signal. The most remark­able exam­ple of this is to be found in the obses­sional neu­ro­sis, 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 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 patience; 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 influ­ence 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 danger-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 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-sit­u­a­tion? 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 exci­ta­tion, 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 trau­matic factor, which cannot be dealt with in accor­dance with the norms of the plea­sure-prin­ci­ple. We can imme­di­ately 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 some­thing else, how­ever, and per­haps this is the solu­tion 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 exci­ta­tion 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 repres­sions 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 fun­da­men­tal repres­sions arise directly from trau­matic fac­tors, where the ego comes into con­tact with an exces­sive libid­i­nal 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 factor, and sec­ondly, as a signal that a trau­matic factor of this kind threat­ens to recur.

Ladies and Gen­tle­men—I am sure you are delighted 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 cannot 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 mythol­ogy. 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 assertive­ness, 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 cir­cum­spec­tion. 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, cor­re­spond­ing to our two great needs—hunger and love. How­ever jeal­ously we may in other con­nec­tions have defended the inde­pen­dence of psy­chol­ogy from all other sci­ences, nev­er­the­less we are here over­shad­owed by the immutable bio­log­i­cal fact that the living indi­vid­ual serves two pur­poses, self-preser­va­tion and the preser­va­tion 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 con­comi­tants of bio­log­i­cal pro­cesses. In accor­dance with this view, we intro­duced the ‘ego-instincts’ and the ‘sexual instincts’ into psycho-anal­y­sis. Under the former head­ing we placed every­thing that had to do with the preser­va­tion, main­te­nance and advance­ment of the indi­vid­ual. 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 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 expen­di­ture 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 expe­ri­enced 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 admit­ted, 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 ‘sub­li­ma­tion’. We have also grounds for the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of what we call ‘aim-inhib­ited’ instincts; these pro­ceed from famil­iar sources and have unam­bigu­ous aims, but come to a stop on their way to sat­is­fac­tion, with the result that a per­ma­nent object-cathexis and an endur­ing driv­ing force come into being. Of such a kind, for instance, is the feel­ing of affec­tion, whose source undoubt­edly 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 dis­tinc­tion between the sexual instincts and the instincts of self-preser­va­tion which would be of the utmost the­o­ret­i­cal 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 reflex­ion, 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 impulses 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 infor­ma­tion; 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 sat­is­fac­tion in some­thing that may be called ‘organ-plea­sure’. The gen­i­tals are the latest of these ero­to­genic 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 func­tion. 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 con­trol of the sphinc­ters. We have learnt a great many inter­est­ing details about this remark­able stage of devel­op­ment 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, estab­lished 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 dif­fer­en­ti­ate 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 towards 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 there is no ambiva­lence in the rela­tion to the object, i.e. the mother’s breast. The second stage, which is dis­tin­guished 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 organ­i­sa­tions, and obtains per­ma­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the econ­omy of the libido and in the char­ac­ter of the indi­vid­ual. 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 ques­tion here; it is a matter for a spe­cialised trea­tise on the psy­chol­ogy of the neu­roses.

We have been able to study the trans­for­ma­tion of instincts 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 the mul­ti­plic­ity of the chan­nels along which these instinc­tual 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 prim­i­tive 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 penis. But the inter­est in that part of the body has, besides 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 people’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 forget 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 organ­i­sa­tion.

In the course of these stud­ies of the pre­gen­i­tal phases of the libido, we have gleaned some new pieces of infor­ma­tion about the for­ma­tion of char­ac­ter. We have been made aware of a triad of char­ac­ter­is­tics which are almost always to be found together: order­li­ness, par­si­mo­nious­ness and obsti­nacy, and we have con­cluded from the anal­y­sis of per­sons pos­sess­ing them that these char­ac­ter­is­tics 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 between 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-for­ma­tions; 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 instinc­tual 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 dis­tinc­tion 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 ‘nar­cis­sism’ 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 pos­tu­lates 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 rejec­tion. Why have we our­selves taken so long to bring our­selves to recog­nise the exis­tence of an aggres­sive instinct? 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 con­tra­dicts too many reli­gious prej­u­dices and social con­ven­tions. 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 dis­tur­bances 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 ame­lio­ra­tion 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 expe­ri­ence 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 phe­nom­ena of sadism and masochism. You know that we use the word ‘sadism’ when sexual sat­is­fac­tion depends 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 ten­den­cies 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 cor­ner­stone 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 under­stand­ing of patho­log­i­cal pro­cesses. For fusions may be undone, and such defu­sions of instincts may be expected 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 pre­sented 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 includes 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 masochism, 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 impor­tant 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 people, 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 irre­spon­si­ble 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 con­fir­ma­tion. 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. I 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 towards 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-com­pul­sion.’ 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 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 migra­tions of birds, pos­si­bly all that we describe as a man­i­fes­ta­tion 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 evi­dence of the pres­ence of that com­pul­sion. It has always sur­prised us that the for­got­ten and repressed expe­ri­ences of early child­hood should repro­duce them­selves in dreams and reac­tions during ana­lytic treat­ment, espe­cially 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 trying 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 inan­i­mate 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 recog­nise 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 together 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-oper­a­tion 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 Schopen­hauer. But, Ladies and Gen­tle­men, why should not a bold thinker have divined some­thing that a sober and painstak­ing inves­ti­ga­tion of details sub­se­quently con­firms? And after all, every­thing has been said already, and many people said the same thing before Schopen­hauer. 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 instincts, and ascribe to each of them its own aim. How the two mingle in the vital process, how the death instinct is pressed into the ser­vice of Eros, espe­cially when it is turned out­wards in the form of aggres­sive­ness,—these are prob­lems which remain for future inves­ti­ga­tion. We can go no fur­ther than the point at which this prospect opens up before us. The ques­tion whether all instincts with­out excep­tion do not pos­sess a con­ser­va­tive 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 resis­tance 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 the­o­ret­i­cal 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 free­ing a middle-aged spin­ster from a symp­tom-com­plex that had con­demned her to a mis­er­able exis­tence for about fif­teen years, and had quite pre­vented her from taking any part in life. She felt that she was now restored 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 any­thing in that direc­tion. Every time this hap­pened the next step for her would have been a relapse into her ill­ness, but that she could no longer bring about; instead of it an acci­dent would always befall her, which inca­pac­i­tated 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 some­thing 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 con­di­tions, 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 pun­ish­ment, there can be, I think, no doubt. It behaves like a part of the con­science, like the pro­lon­ga­tion of con­science 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 super-ego. If only the words were less incon­gru­ous, we should be jus­ti­fied, for all prac­ti­cal pur­poses, in call­ing it ‘an uncon­scious sense of guilt.’ The­o­ret­i­cally, as a matter of fact, we are in doubt whether we ought to sup­pose that all aggres­sive­ness 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 activ­ity 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 ana­lytic treat­ment by exhibit­ing what is so unwel­come 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 dis­ap­pear­ance of that symp­tom should result; with these patients, on the con­trary, the effect is a momen­tary inten­si­fi­ca­tion 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 con­di­tion. A non-ana­lyst would say that they were lack­ing in the ‘will to recov­ery’; from the ana­lyt­i­cal point of 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 few moments before I stop with one fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion. We have got into the habit of saying that our civil­i­sa­tion is built up at the cost of our sexual impulses, 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 cul­tural achieve­ments, we have admit­ted that it is by no means easy to sat­isfy the require­ments of this civil­i­sa­tion 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 aggres­sion 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 dan­ger­ous aggres­sive impulses its own, is like intro­duc­ing a gar­ri­son into a prov­ince that is on the brink of rebel­lion. But on the other hand, look­ing at it from a purely 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 aggres­sion, 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.

The Psychology Of Women, Lecture XXXIII

Ladies 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 unchanged 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 intended 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 hope that you would not refuse me your com­pany on this expe­di­tion, but would follow me with a judg­ment edu­cated to tol­er­ance by exam­ple of psycho-anal­y­sis. The third lec­ture, which dealt with the anatomy of the per­son­al­ity, cer­tainly made the sever­est demands upon you, so strange was its sub­ject-matter; but it was quite impos­si­ble 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 prob­lems; 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 every­thing 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 intro­duc­tion; 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 con­cerned with a theme which claims your atten­tion almost more than any other. Through­out the ages the prob­lem 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…

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. Anatom­i­cal 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 cal­cu­lated 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 phe­nom­e­non 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 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 con­sider 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 inter­course. 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. 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 mas­cu­line 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 degree of pas­sive pli­a­bil­ity. If you there­upon say that these facts pre­cisely prove that men and women are psy­cho­log­i­cally 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 infor­ma­tion.

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 influ­ence of social con­ven­tions, which also force women into pas­sive sit­u­a­tions. The whole thing is still very obscure. We must not over­look one par­tic­u­larly con­stant rela­tion between fem­i­nin­ity and instinc­tual life. The repres­sion of their aggres­sive­ness, which is imposed upon women by their con­sti­tu­tions and by soci­ety, favours the devel­op­ment of strong masochis­tic impulses, which have the effect of bind­ing erot­i­cally the destruc­tive ten­den­cies which have been turned inwards. Masochism 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 psy­chol­ogy 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 char­ac­ter­is­tic 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 begun to work on the prob­lem. A spe­cial piquancy has been lent to the dis­cus­sion of this sub­ject by the ques­tion of the dif­fer­ence between the sexes; for, when­ever a com­par­i­son was made which seemed to be unfavourable to their sex, the ladies were able to express a sus­pi­cion, 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 pre­con­cep­tions turn 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 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 shown 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 dif­fer­ences are of no great impor­tance; they can be out­bal­anced 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 becomes much less impor­tant than their sim­i­lar­i­ties. We are now obliged to recog­nise that the little girl is a little man. As we know, in the boy this phase is char­ac­terised by the fact that he has dis­cov­ered how to obtain plea­sur­able sen­sa­tions from his little penis, and asso­ciates 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 devel­op­ment; the more for­tu­nate man has only to con­tinue 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 nurses and other atten­dants that merge into hers); the first object-cathexes, indeed, follow the lines of the sat­is­fac­tion 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 solu­tion of the prob­lem if we could assume that, from a cer­tain age onwards, the ele­men­tary influ­ence of het­ero­sex­ual 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 resulted 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 to their real fathers, is very large. We have made the most sur­pris­ing dis­cov­er­ies about these women who dis­play 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 under­stand women, unless one esti­mates this pre-oedi­pal attach­ment 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 dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion 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 addi­tion, com­pletely ambiva­lent—both of a tender and of a hos­tile-aggres­sive nature. It often hap­pens that the hos­tile 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 for­mu­lated. What is most clearly expressed is the desire to get the mother with child as well as the cor­re­spond­ing 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 ana­lytic 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 mur­dered 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 I 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 sen­sa­tions 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 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 under­stands 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 remain hidden. And since our researches have been car­ried out on people who are by no means grossly abnor­mal, 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 hap­pens 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 antag­o­nism; 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 care­fully over­com­pen­sated; as a rule, one part of it is over­come, while another part per­sists. The out­come is 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 griev­ances, 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, 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 cer­tainly 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 nour­ish­ment for the new arrival. In cases where the two chil­dren were born so close together that lac­ta­tion was inter­fered 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 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 con­trol 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 idea 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 arrival of every new brother or sister. Even if the child remains its mother’s favourite, things are not very dif­fer­ent; 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 unlim­ited demands for love and the unful­fil­l­able nature of 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 capit­u­late 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 dis­tur­bance of the child’s love, since even the mildest form of edu­ca­tion cannot avoid using com­pul­sion and intro­duc­ing 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, 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-anx­i­ety, which sup­plies the strong­est motive force for his fur­ther devel­op­ment. 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, she clings for a long time to the desire to get some­thing like it, and believes in that pos­si­bil­ity for an extra­or­di­nary 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 desire 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 repressed 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 char­ac­ter­is­tics 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 psy­chol­ogy. In the case of many patho­log­i­cal—or merely unusual—instinc­tual atti­tudes, for exam­ple with all 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 devel­op­ments. It is almost always a ques­tion of com­ple­men­tal series, such as we have pos­tu­lated when deal­ing with the aeti­ol­ogy 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 pre­pon­der­ance 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 behav­iour with the sexual wishes (often of an active char­ac­ter) 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, repu­di­ates her love towards her mother, and at the same time often represses a good deal of her sexual impulses 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 even­tu­ally 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 impor­tance 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 sex­u­al­ity, 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 con­cerned—such details as whether it was dis­cov­ered or not, how the par­ents com­bated it or whether they per­mit­ted it, and whether the sub­ject suc­ceeded in sup­press­ing it him­self. All these details will have left indeli­ble traces upon his devel­op­ment. But in fact I am relieved 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 cli­toritic mas­tur­ba­tion, but where the latter will not give way, there fol­lows a fierce 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 later, 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 feel­ings of sym­pa­thy for per­sons to whom she ascribes sim­i­lar dif­fi­cul­ties; 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 easy or unim­por­tant task.

When the little girl gives up cli­toritic mas­tur­ba­tion, she sur­ren­ders a cer­tain amount of activ­ity. Her pas­sive side has now the upper hand, and in turn­ing to her father she is assisted in the main by pas­sive instinc­tual impulses. You will see that a step in devel­op­ment, 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 fem­i­nin­ity 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 fem­i­nine 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, thence­for­ward, 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 fem­i­nin­ity. But per­haps we should rather think of this desire for a penis as some­thing essen­tially fem­i­nine in itself.

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 con­clu­sion 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, espe­cially 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 Oedi­pus-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 danger 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 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 cir­cum­stances; 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 mas­culin­ity 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 degree 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 mas­culin­ity com­plex seems to occur when it influ­ences the girl’s object-choice in the direc­tion of man­i­fest homo­sex­u­al­ity. Ana­lytic expe­ri­ence teaches us, it is true, that female homo­sex­u­al­ity is seldom or never a direct con­tin­u­a­tion of infan­tile mas­culin­ity. It seems to be 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 with­out the same results. The pre­pon­der­ance of the con­sti­tu­tional factor seems unde­ni­able, but the two phases in the devel­op­ment of female homo­sex­u­al­ity are admirably 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 inves­ti­ga­tion 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.

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 men­tion 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-oedi­pal phases occur very often; in many women we actu­ally find a repeated alter­na­tion of peri­ods in which either mas­culin­ity 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 dis­cus­sion 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 rela­tion 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 impulses with pas­sive aims. Nev­er­the­less the phrase ‘fem­i­nine libido’ cannot pos­si­bly be jus­ti­fied. It is our 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 aggres­sive­ness of the male, and is to some extent inde­pen­dent 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 phe­nom­e­non 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 con­sti­tu­tion­ally con­di­tioned or even partly caused by an anatom­i­cal 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 func­tion 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 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 little to the dis­cov­er­ies and inven­tions of civil­i­sa­tion, but per­haps after all they did dis­cover one tech­ni­cal process, that of plait­ing and weav­ing. If this is so, one is tempted to guess at the uncon­scious 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 devel­op­ment 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 mar­riage. But very often a factor emerges which in gen­eral 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 occu­pied with rebel­lion against her mother. After this reac­tion 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 iden­ti­fi­ca­tion 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-com­pul­sion 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 reac­tions 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 ambiva­lence. 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 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-oedi­pal attach­ment is the deci­sive one; it paves the way for her acqui­si­tion of those char­ac­ter­is­tics which will later enable her to play her part in the sexual func­tion ade­quately, and carry out her ines­timable 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 impres­sion 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 pre­pon­der­ance of envy in their mental life; for the demands 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 inter­ests are weaker than those of men, and that their capac­ity for the sub­li­ma­tion of their instincts is less. The former is no doubt derived from the unso­cial char­ac­ter which undoubt­edly attaches to all sexual rela­tion­ships. Lovers find com­plete sat­is­fac­tion in each other, and even the family resists absorp­tion into wider organ­i­sa­tions. The capac­ity for sub­li­ma­tion is sub­ject to the great­est indi­vid­ual vari­a­tions. In spite of this I cannot 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 pos­si­bil­i­ties 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 inac­ces­si­ble 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 frag­men­tary, and some­times it does not sound alto­gether flat­ter­ing. You must not forget, how­ever, that we have only described women in so far as their natures are deter­mined by their sexual func­tion. The influ­ence of this factor is, of course, very far-reach­ing, but we must remem­ber 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.

Explanations, Applications And Orientations, Lecture XXXIV

Ladies and gen­tle­man—May I for once, tired, as one might say, of dry topics, speak to you about mat­ters 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-psy­chol­ogy,’ 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 intel­lec­tual 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 social gath­er­ing; it need not nec­es­sar­ily be in Vienna. After 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 dog­matic cer­tainty. This judg­ment is nearly always a deroga­tory one, often abu­sive, and at the very least deri­sive. 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 expla­na­tions, 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 over­come 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 exam­ples 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 mat­ters, so that one cannot pass it off with a few jokes, and that it would be better to choose some other topic as a 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 them­selves, but with psycho-anal­y­sis as well. That is my opin­ion too; what you meet with in lit­er­a­ture and con­ver­sa­tion 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 com­plained 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 sit­u­a­tion 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 respon­si­bil­ity. 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 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 patients. I kept off all polemics, and influ­enced my fol­low­ers, 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 con­tempt 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 another 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 that the struc­ture of psycho-anal­y­sis, although unfin­ished, nev­er­the­less already pos­sesses a uni­fied organ­i­sa­tion 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 fol­low­ers 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 con­ver­sa­tion. 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. 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 instruc­tive 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 con­tain. But on second thoughts I said to myself that it would not be at all inter­est­ing but weari­some and dis­agree­able, 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 judg­ments 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 per­haps even been 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 inde­pen­dent schools of psycho-anal­y­sis. You will expect me to give some expla­na­tion of the pos­si­bil­ity and mean­ing 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 anal­y­sis 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 Indi­vid­ual Psy­chol­ogy to a very lim­ited extent. The name itself is unsuit­able, and seems to be a prod­uct of embar­rass­ment; 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 indi­vid­ual. 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 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 con­ver­sa­tion 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 clien­tèle 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 for­ward 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 necrophilist, or an anx­i­ety-ridden hys­teric, or a shut-in obses­sional, 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 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 symp­toms in order to make them­selves inter­est­ing and to attract 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-preser­va­tion, one comes to ques­tion even the gen­eral valid­ity of the plat­i­tude on which the the­o­ret­i­cal struc­ture of Indi­vid­ual Psy­chol­ogy is built. But, to the mass of mankind, a theory like this must be exceed­ingly wel­come, which takes no com­pli­ca­tions into account, which intro­duces 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 every­body, and which con­fines itself to reveal­ing the devices by means of which people try to make life com­fort­able. For the mass of mankind are them­selves com­fort-loving; they require only a single reason to serve as an expla­na­tion, they are not grate­ful to sci­ence for its intri­ca­cies, and they like to have simple answers given to their ques­tions and to feel that their prob­lems are set­tled once and for all. Once one sees how closely Indi­vid­ual Psy­chol­ogy approx­i­mates to the ful­fil­ment of these require­ments, 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 uncom­pro­mis­ingly 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 dis­tin­guished 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 respon­si­ble.

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 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 child­hood 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 dia­met­ri­cally 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 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 intol­er­ance. The only evi­dence of this dis­agree­able char­ac­ter­is­tic 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 before, 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 tol­er­ance? 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 con­tra­dict­ing us. You have saved us from the danger of self-com­pla­cency, and have given us an oppor­tu­nity of prov­ing to the Amer­i­cans that we really are as “broad­minded” as they could pos­si­bly wish. We do not believe 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 of the future in sci­en­tific cir­cles, when the mis­ap­pli­ca­tion 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, sub­sist­ing between patho­log­i­cal and so-called normal pro­cesses. So psycho-anal­y­sis became ‘depth-psy­chol­ogy’; and, since noth­ing that man makes or does can be under­stood with­out the aid of psy­chol­ogy, the appli­ca­tions of psycho-anal­y­sis to numer­ous fields of knowl­edge, and espe­cially to the mental sci­ences, came about auto­mat­i­cally, forced them­selves on our atten­tion and demanded elab­o­ra­tion. Unluck­ily the tasks which we now under­took brought us up against obsta­cles, which, lying as 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 mythol­ogy, the his­tory of civil­i­sa­tion, eth­nol­ogy, the sci­ence of reli­gion, etc., as ama­teurs, with a more or less ade­quate 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 attracted 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 con­fir­ma­tions of it as well. In regions where sci­en­tific work is more remote from prac­ti­cal activ­ity the inevitable dif­fer­ences of opin­ion will be less embit­tered.

I feel greatly tempted to take you through all the appli­ca­tions of psycho-anal­y­sis in the field of mental sci­ence. There are things which every one who has intel­lec­tual 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 out­side the frame­work of these lec­tures, and, to tell you the truth, I should not be com­pe­tent to do it. It is true that 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 attempts. Those of you who are dis­ap­pointed by my refusal 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 myself. On the con­trary, I have hardly ever occu­pied myself 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 our­selves 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 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 deter­mi­nants 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 dis­tur­bances 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 acqui­si­tions 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 unfavourable char­ac­ter-devel­op­ment. The anx­i­ety expressed by 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 chil­dren them­selves was most sat­is­fac­tory. It turned out that the child is a most favourable sub­ject for ana­lytic ther­apy; suc­cesses were rad­i­cal and per­ma­nent. Nat­u­rally one has to make exten­sive alter­ations in the tech­nique of treat­ment which has been devel­oped for adults when one is deal­ing with chil­dren. The child is, psy­cho­log­i­cally, 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 dif­fer­ent 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 dif­fer­ences 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 tech­nique of child anal­y­sis in their case too. It is in the nature of things that child anal­y­sis should have become 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 devel­op­ment 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 inoc­u­lates 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 inter­est. 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 entirely 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, forbid and sup­press, and it has at all times car­ried out this func­tion to admi­ra­tion. But we have learnt from anal­y­sis that it is this very sup­pres­sion of instincts that involves the danger of neu­rotic ill­ness. You will remem­ber 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. Unless 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 dis­po­si­tions, so that the same edu­ca­tional pro­ce­dure cannot pos­si­bly 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 degree of author­ity, then one cannot help saying to one-self that the only ade­quate prepa­ra­tion for the pro­fes­sion 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 con­sid­er­able 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 chil­dren 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 edu­ca­tion, run other inves­ti­ga­tions into the cause and pre­ven­tion 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 sub­jects. 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 edu­ca­tion 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 short­com­ings 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 eman­ci­pated 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 jus­tify. 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 deserves to remain alive, or whether it is for his advan­tage 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 between 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. Psy­cho­an­a­lytic edu­ca­tion will be assum­ing an unwar­ranted respon­si­bil­ity 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 itself to ensure that no one brought up under its influ­ence will in later life be on the side of reac­tion and sup­pres­sion. 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 to-day; but I will say some­thing about the prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence 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 lec­tures, 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 suc­ceeded 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 grat­i­tude from patients who have been cured. And the anal­ogy does not end there. Psycho-anal­y­sis really is 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 attacked 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, because the mate­rial with which they deal is so het­ero­ge­neous 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 exis­tence of the uncon­scious. But if we dis­re­gard super­nat­u­ral 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-ther­a­peu­tic 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 ther­a­peu­tic meth­ods, accord­ing to the pecu­liar char­ac­ter of 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 pos­sesses 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 dis­tur­bances might be cur­able by means of psycho-anal­y­sis. They have attempted to com­press the work of anal­y­sis into a shorter period, to inten­sify the trans­fer­ence so that it should be supe­rior to any resis­tance, and to com­bine other meth­ods of influ­ence with anal­y­sis in order to obtain a cure. These enter­prises are no doubt praise­wor­thy, 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 exper­i­men­ta­tion. 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 matter of fact they are seri­ous, con­sti­tu­tion­ally deter­mined affec­tions, which are seldom restricted to a few out­breaks, 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 opti­mism in regard to the latter. The ther­a­peu­tic effi­ciency of psycho-anal­y­sis is lim­ited by a whole series of impor­tant fac­tors, which can scarcely be dealt with at all. With chil­dren, where one might hope to have the great­est 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 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. How­ever 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 behind 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 leav­ing 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 nec­es­sary motive force to enable it to bring about the alter­ation. Some spe­cific ten­dency, some par­tic­u­lar instinc­tual 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 fac­tors involved in these dis­eases; but to-day we are far from having reached that desir­able goal. I can under­stand that the uncer­tainty pre­vail­ing in all these mat­ters is a con­stant incen­tive towards per­fect­ing the tech­nique 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 already, 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 imposed 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 abnor­mal­i­ties of char­ac­ter as have been devel­oped instead of these dis­eases. Every­thing other than these, such as nar­cis­sis­tic 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 weeks or months. We are, in fact, always buying a pig in a poke. The sub­ject comes to us with unde­fined, gen­eral trou­bles which do not allow of any cer­tain diag­no­sis. After a period of pro­ba­tion it may turn out that the case is an unsuit­able one. Then, if he is a can­di­date, 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 revenge 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 pro­ce­dure. 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 indi­cat­ing how unavoid­able they are. With the same object in view, let me turn to another point, namely the com­plaint that ana­lytic treat­ment takes up a dis­pro­por­tion­ately long time. The answer to that is that psy­cho­log­i­cal 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 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 anal­y­sis from time to time; but such people would oth­er­wise 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 ther­a­peu­tic 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 var­i­ous 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 dis­cov­ered from clin­i­cal mate­rial and would not have con­tin­ued to develop for more than thirty years.

A Philosophy Of Life, Lecture XXXV

Ladies and 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 par­tic­u­lar Weltan­schau­ung, and if so, to what.

‘Weltan­schau­ung’ is, I am afraid, a specif­i­cally German 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 con­struc­tion, which gives a uni­fied solu­tion of all the prob­lems of our exis­tence in virtue of a com­pre­hen­sive hypoth­e­sis, a con­struc­tion, there­fore, in which no ques­tion 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 emo­tions and inter­ests to the best pur­pose.

If that is what is meant by a Weltan­schau­ung, then the ques­tion is an easy one for psycho-anal­y­sis to answer. 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 vari­ance with our def­i­ni­tion. The uni­fied nature of the expla­na­tion 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 Wel­tenschau­ung is both empty and unsat­is­fy­ing, that it over­looks 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-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 intel­lec­tual 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 inspi­ra­tion 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 knowl­edge.

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

From the point of view of sci­ence we must nec­es­sar­ily 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 entirely 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 behaves 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 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 con­tradis­tinc­tion 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 incom­pa­ra­ble 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 chang­ing vicis­si­tudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and actions by means of pre­cepts which are backed by the 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 reli­gion brushes away men’s fear of the dan­gers and vicis­si­tudes 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 rec­om­men­da­tions for behav­iour may be deduced. In cer­tain cir­cum­stances they may be the same as those which are laid 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 hap­pi­ness 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 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 com­bi­na­tion 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 believed 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 pre­cisely with a male god tri­umph­ing over a female god­dess, 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 uni­verse is the same as his pic­ture of his own cre­ation.

If this is so, then it is easy to under­stand how it is that the com­fort­ing prom­ises of pro­tec­tion and the severe eth­i­cal com­mands are found together with the cos­mogony. 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 help­less 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 emo­tional 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 dif­fi­culty to the sit­u­a­tion of child­hood. In a famous pas­sage, 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 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 pre­served 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 system 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 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 child­hood. It is there­fore all the more remark­able that, in spite of its infan­tile char­ac­ter, it nev­er­the­less has a fore­run­ner. 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 dwelling-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 cer­tain 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 him­self 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 ‘omnipo­tence 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 accom­pa­nied by a great facil­i­ta­tion of thought. They attrib­uted magic power to the spoken word. This fea­ture 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 con­trary, 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 there­fore not be sur­prised to hear that a great many man­i­fes­ta­tions 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 phi­los­o­phy 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 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 evo­lu­tion of the human mind is still shrouded. It seems to be a fact that the ear­li­est form in which reli­gion appeared 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 upheaval in the rela­tion­ships in the human family. The main achieve­ment of reli­gion, as com­pared with ani­mism, lies in the psy­chic bind­ing of the fear of demons. Nev­er­the­less, the evil spirit still has a place in the reli­gious system as a relic of the pre­vi­ous age.

So much for the pre-his­tory of the reli­gious Weltan­schau­ung. Let us now turn to con­sider what has hap­pened since, and what is still going on under our own eyes. The sci­en­tific spirit, strength­ened by the obser­va­tion 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 every­thing 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 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 indi­vid­ual 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. Besides this, one must not over­look the influ­ence of the com­par­a­tive study of dif­fer­ent reli­gious sys­tems, and the impres­sion they give of mutual exclu­sive­ness and intol­er­ance.

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 ele­ments 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 reli­gion 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 prin­ci­ple of benev­o­lence or with—what is to some degree con­tra­dic­tory—a uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ple of jus­tice. Earth­quakes, floods and fires do not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the good and devout man, 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 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 desir­able goods of the earth for them­selves, while the pious go empty away. Dark, unfeel­ing and unlov­ing powers deter­mine human des­tiny; the system of rewards and pun­ish­ments, which, accord­ing to reli­gion, gov­erns the world, seems to have no exis­tence. This is another occa­sion for aban­don­ing a por­tion of the ani­mism 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 help­less­ness 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 accepted.

The final judg­ment of sci­ence on the reli­gious Weltan­schau­ung, 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-world, 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 the human race. Its con­so­la­tions deserve no trust. Expe­ri­ence 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 dan­ger­ous to link up obe­di­ence to them with reli­gious belief. 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 civilised indi­vid­ual must pass through on his way from child­hood to matu­rity.

You are, of course, per­fectly free to crit­i­cise this account 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 incom­plete abridg­ment of the whole story; the order of the sep­a­rate events was not quite cor­rectly given, and the coop­er­a­tion 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 influ­ence of awak­en­ing crit­i­cism. Finally I have, strictly speak­ing, lim­ited my remarks to one single form of reli­gion, that of the West­ern peo­ples. I have, as it were, con­structed a lay-figure for the pur­poses of a demon­stra­tion 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 com­pletely. I am aware that you can find all that I have said else­where, and find it better said; none of it is new. But I am firmly con­vinced that the most care­ful elab­o­ra­tion 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 polem­i­cal 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 suc­ceed 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 reli­gion as a sub­ject for its inves­ti­ga­tions, since reli­gion is some­thing supreme, some­thing supe­rior to the capac­i­ties 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 thought that noth­ing could be more easily refuted than this argu­ment; it is an obvi­ous peti­tio prin­cipii, a ‘beg­ging 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 par­tic­u­larly 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 reli­gion, but of reli­gion encroach­ing upon the sphere of sci­en­tific thought. What­ever value and impor­tance reli­gion 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 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 exam­ines the trust­wor­thi­ness 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 cor­re­spon­dence with real­ity, that is to say with what exists out­side us and inde­pen­dently of us, and, as expe­ri­ence has taught us, is deci­sive for the ful­fil­ment or frus­tra­tion 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 pre­cisely 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 pro­tec­tion that reli­gion prom­ises its believ­ers, I hardly think that any of us would be will­ing even to enter a motor-car, if the driver informed us that he drove with­out allow­ing him­self to be dis­tracted by traf­fic reg­u­la­tions, 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 people of past times show the dis­as­trous results of the inhi­bi­tion 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, reason—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 ban laid upon thought by reli­gion, opposes such a devel­op­ment 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 admis­sion, 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 accor­dance with the old maxim: the best defence is attack. ‘What,’ they ask, ‘is this sci­ence that pre­sumes to depre­ci­ate 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 admis­sion, 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 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 cur­rent which I should like to call to mind in this con­nec­tion. 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 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 spec­trum, and put for­ward the theory of grav­i­ta­tion, came to end in 1727, that is to say a little more than two hun­dred 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 (circ. 250 b.c.) the fore­run­ner of Coper­ni­cus, or even to the ten­ta­tive ori­gins of astron­omy 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 ape­like 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 sci­en­tific progress that we have every reason to look for­ward 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 cannot 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. 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 back­ground. 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 con­struc­tions 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 scat­tered dis­cov­er­ies fall into place and he obtains an under­stand­ing 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 one 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 sat­is­fac­tory 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 foun­da­tion 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 pas­sion­ate dis­par­age­ments of sci­ence? In spite of its present 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 reli­gious 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 sci­en­tific 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 trust­wor­thy 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 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 atti­tude, 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 who says that all Cre­tans are liars. But I am not desirous, nor am I capa­ble, of going deeper into this. I will merely remark that the anar­chis­tic theory only retains 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 indif­fer­ence 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 them­selves would strongly repu­di­ate such prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions 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 depart­ments 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 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 influ­ence 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 for­ma­tion 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 con­sti­tu­tional aggres­sive­ness and also the degree of cohe­sion within the horde, and mate­rial fac­tors, such as the pos­ses­sion 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 gun­pow­der and fire-arms over­threw chivalry and the dom­i­na­tion 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 con­vinc­ing, but at least the first links in the chain of argu­ment 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.¹ Nor must the threat of sub­marines be for­got­ten in this con­nec­tion.

I am almost ashamed of treat­ing a theme of such impor­tance and com­plex­ity in such a slight and inad­e­quate manner, and I am also aware that I have not said any­thing 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 strug­gle 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 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 reac­tions. A whole col­lec­tion of cor­re­la­tions and causal sequences were thus dis­cov­ered, which had hith­erto been almost com­pletely dis­re­garded. But it cannot be assumed that eco­nomic motives are the only ones which deter­mine the behav­iour of men in soci­ety. The unques­tion­able fact that dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als, races and nations behave dif­fer­ently under the same eco­nomic con­di­tions, in itself proves that the eco­nomic factor cannot be the sole deter­mi­nant. It is quite impos­si­ble to under­stand 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 forget 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 of itself having an effect upon the other fac­tors. It dis­places 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 rev­o­lu­tion­ary inter­fer­ence, instead of leav­ing the change to the course of his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment. The­o­ret­i­cal Marx­ism, as put into effect in Rus­sian Bol­she­vism, has acquired the energy, the com­pre­hen­sive­ness and the exclu­sive­ness 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 ban upon thought, which is as inex­orable as was for­merly that of reli­gion. All crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the Marx­ist theory is for­bid­den; doubts of its valid­ity are as vin­dic­tively pun­ished as heresy once was by the Catholic Church. The works of Marx, as the source of rev­e­la­tion, have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran, although they are no freer from con­tra­dic­tions and obscu­ri­ties 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 essen­tial 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 out­side, 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 com­pen­sate its believ­ers for the suf­fer­ings and depri­va­tions of the present life, by promis­ing them a better life here­after, 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 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 defeated. 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, imper­vi­ous 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 insti­tute 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 sal­va­tion solely from a stead­fast adher­ence to Chris­tian piety, 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 fanat­i­cal belief of the other side give us any hint of how 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 pos­si­ble 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 Gen­tle­men—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 Welf­tan­schau­ung 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 every­thing 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 limits itself to truth, and rejects illu­sions. Those of our fellow-men who are dis­sat­is­fied with this state of things and 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.