The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

mind as relaxed and blank as possible, and then to tell his physician everything that comes into it, following out the chain of association whithersoever it may lead him. If this be practised, it is found that association repeatedly leads the patient along certain roads of thought which are then suddenly barred by a resistance, a reluctance often so strong as to be a veritable compulsion to stop. Freud was the first to ascribe such resistances to their true source —in repressed shocks, memories and desires buried in the Unconscious. By encouraging the patient to go on or to start again, such resistances may be gradually broken down, and not only will abreaction be brought into play, but the patient will have had the rootcauses of his disorder made clear to himself, the hidden workings of his own personality laid bare. Analysis, at its best, results in ruthless self-knowledge which should automatically lead on to conscious self-discipline. Freud soon came to supplement free association by the analysis of the patient’s dreams. And in the subsequent quarter of a century various improvements, or at least elaborations of method and of the ideas behind the method, have been introduced.

In former ages dreams were considered to be of the utmost significance in life and simple people have always believed them to have a prophetic and warning quality. But the disposition of psychology up to the time of Freud was to belittle their importance. To him and his associates we owe our modern realization of their great symptomatic value. Essentially a dream is the appearance between sleeping and waking of an uncriticized and uncontrolled flood of associations. Repressed complexes get an opportunity in these unwary phases for more or less complete expression before the normal self is fully reconstituted and alert. They reveal themselves, albeit often disguised, distorted, and symbolized, to the trained observer.

The War brought home very forcibly the need for proper treatment of mind-disorders ; and in the last ten years there has been an extraordinary development of psychological methods for the treatment of sick minds. The main trends in that development have been the recognition that in psycho-analysis and the ideas behind it Freud had placed a new tool of the utmost value into the hands both of science and of medicine. His initiatives have been followed up with passionate zeal by a number of disciples and rivals. It is a manifestation of the vigour and richness of this new department of 812

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 7

inquiry that it should develop wide divergences of opinion and that the master should presently find himself under the searching criticism of his livelier followers. Heated controversies ensued and dissentient schools of psycho-analysis arose. The best-known of the seceders are Adler and Jung, who left the Freudian movement in 1911 and 1913 respectively.

Freud has consistently maintained that sex was the great motive force in all sub-

terranean conflicts of the mind. The civil-

ized human being has repressed and delayed the sexual impulse beyond any animal precedent in the interests of educational development and social peace. His social life and his sexual life are in necessary conflict. There Freud is borne out by contemporary anthropology (see Book 4g, Chap. 1). But Adler would replace the sex-impulse very largely in his interpretations by the will-to-power. And there he also has anthropological support. The human animal has not only a retarded adolescence but a lost independence. Self-assertion rather than sexual desire is for Adler the main suppression. But after all, sexual exercise is one main form of self-assertion. It is evident in his writings that Freud uses libido, his term for the sexual impulse, in a sense much wider than most of us would attach to the word sexual. The quarrel with Adler may be to a large extent terminological. Freud’s interpretation may be the juster for some races and types, and Adler’s for others. Freud admits that the bulk of his cases are drawn from prosperous Viennese Jews.

Jung, however, goes further. He has enlarged our notion of the Unconscious. He finds in it not merely our conflicts and repressed desires, but also the source of our inspirations and higher impulses, to make it, in the coarse, regrettable, but illuminating words of an anti-Freudian critic, a well-spring, not merely a cess-pool. That is to say in decent language Jung finds it much more than a dump of repressions. There is, he asserts, an Unconscious “already there.” That idea, as we shall see in a moment, is a very considerable extension of the Freudian Unconscious.

Let us define the conflicting views a little more exactly. The orthodox Freudian asserts that we all of us pass through a phase of infantile sexuality, in which every sensory gratification, be it suckling or tickling, is in essence sexual. ‘This is manifestly stretching the meaning of the word sexual. He claims also that we all normally acquire an ‘‘ @dipus