MOODY PERSONSA beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly, rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over mounds after a gilded butterfly....Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butterflywith his green net. Why did this scene excite me so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”It really was an “unconscious” thought, then, that transformed my mood fromdurintomoll. And the truth dawns on me that all our “incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things are not in order. Their consciousnessis split up into numerous emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask, but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and “sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe; commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon “nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their employment, and what not.In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!” But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of ourexcited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into grey shadows and disappears for ever.Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it. Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface, so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in motion.But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life. Awomanis suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance.Now she lives in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest affection—in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does love her husband, she is as happy with her finery and wealth as a child with a toy; she can assign no cause for her melancholy.Notwithstanding this, her depression was ofpsychicorigin. When we investigated carefully the experiences and excitements that ushered in one of these attacks it became clear that subterranean bridges led to secret (suppressed) desires. Quite often the immediate occasion was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor woman pass her in the street. Alone? No—with a young man, very happy, care-free, their arms affectionately intertwined. On another occasion she had been reading of a pair of lovers who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a subject, beyond all others, which she could not bear to hear. At the theatre she once sat in a box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked down into the orchestra and was seized with horror. That was a yawning abyss! What if her opera glass fell down there! Or if she losther balance and toppled over! A shudder passed through her. She put the opera glass aside and became greatly depressed.The mystery surrounding her melancholy was soon solved. Her husband, fifteen years her senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally. In secret she longs for a life rich in emotions, full of sin and perhaps also of vice. Nature probably intended her for a fast woman, not for an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies beckon her to the metropolis. She would rather lose her breath in an endless dance in the tight embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately down the main avenue. She loves her husband, but sometimes she hates him. He’s the obstacle. She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was very sick once; just then the wicked thought entered her mind: “If he died now I’d be rich and free!” The reaction was not long in coming. She saw herself as a dreadful sinner. Life had no more interest for her. Since then she has been suffering from periodical attacks of depression.What happened in this case in the wake of powerful repressions happens a little in all moody persons. An unconscious motive for the depression can always be demonstrated. In most instances it is secret reproaches that provoke the change in mood. In young people they are the sequel of exaggerated warnings about not injuring their health. Sins against religion and morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding to one’s impulses. But also the opposite!Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.A girl suffers from violent (psychically), apparently wholly unmotived crying spells. The last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether she had excited herself in some way. Had she any reason for being depressed? No! Was she sure? A trifling matter—“of no particular significance”—occurs to her. On one of the city bridges a very elegant, young gentleman had addressed her. Would she permit him to accompany her? Indignantly she repelled him. What did he think she was! But he persisted in his role; he painted in glowing colours the delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found the courage to exclaim: “If you do not leave me at once, I shall call a policeman!” Then, flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed home, ate her meal in silence and soon thereafter gave vent to an almost unending crying spell.And now I discover that her first attack of crying followed a similar occurrence. She was coming home from the country and had to travel at night. She asked the conductor to point out the ladies’ coupé. To her horror a tall, blonde lieutenant entered her coupé at the next station. She at once protested vigorously at the intrusion. The officer very politely offered his apologies, explaining that the train was full and that he would be quite satisfied with a modest corner. He would be greatly obliged to her for her kindness. But so anxious was she about hervirtue that she was proof against his entreaties. She appealed to the conductor and insisted on her rights. The spruce officer had to leave the coupé and for the rest of the night she was not molested. But the occurrence had so excited her that she could not fall asleep and she lay awake till dawn. The following day she had the first attack of depression and crying. She bewailed her cruel fate that compelled her to be virtuous while all the hidden voices within clamoured for a gay life. She did not find herself strong enough to conquer her ethical inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not strong enough to be really virtuous.I could cite many such examples. They all show convincingly that there are no “inexplicable” psychic depressions, that consciousness does not embrace all the psychic forces that govern and direct us.The classification of human beings into those that are free and those that are not was determined by a social or ethical canon. But in reality most human beings are the slaves of their unconscious complexes. Only he can be free who knows himself thoroughly, who has dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of the unconscious. Most persons are under the yoke of their “other self” who, with his biting whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures, compels them to leave the table of life and goads them into the arms of crime.The greatest happiness in life is to haveachieved one’s inner freedom. This thought is still expressed in an old aphorism. “Everyone may have his moods; but his moods must not have him.”Moody persons are the slaves of their past, masters of renunciation and assuredly bunglers in the art of life. Their only salvation is in learning the truth or in the art of transforming their depression into works of art. Most of the time they glide through life’s turbulence like dreamers. Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes about that life’s call is perceived but faintly by them. They are chasing butterflies in cemeteries....
A beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly, rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over mounds after a gilded butterfly....
Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?
How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butterflywith his green net. Why did this scene excite me so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.
Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”
It really was an “unconscious” thought, then, that transformed my mood fromdurintomoll. And the truth dawns on me that all our “incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things are not in order. Their consciousnessis split up into numerous emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask, but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and “sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe; commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon “nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their employment, and what not.
In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!” But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of ourexcited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into grey shadows and disappears for ever.
Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it. Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface, so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in motion.
But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life. Awomanis suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance.Now she lives in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest affection—in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does love her husband, she is as happy with her finery and wealth as a child with a toy; she can assign no cause for her melancholy.
Notwithstanding this, her depression was ofpsychicorigin. When we investigated carefully the experiences and excitements that ushered in one of these attacks it became clear that subterranean bridges led to secret (suppressed) desires. Quite often the immediate occasion was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor woman pass her in the street. Alone? No—with a young man, very happy, care-free, their arms affectionately intertwined. On another occasion she had been reading of a pair of lovers who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a subject, beyond all others, which she could not bear to hear. At the theatre she once sat in a box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked down into the orchestra and was seized with horror. That was a yawning abyss! What if her opera glass fell down there! Or if she losther balance and toppled over! A shudder passed through her. She put the opera glass aside and became greatly depressed.
The mystery surrounding her melancholy was soon solved. Her husband, fifteen years her senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally. In secret she longs for a life rich in emotions, full of sin and perhaps also of vice. Nature probably intended her for a fast woman, not for an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies beckon her to the metropolis. She would rather lose her breath in an endless dance in the tight embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately down the main avenue. She loves her husband, but sometimes she hates him. He’s the obstacle. She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was very sick once; just then the wicked thought entered her mind: “If he died now I’d be rich and free!” The reaction was not long in coming. She saw herself as a dreadful sinner. Life had no more interest for her. Since then she has been suffering from periodical attacks of depression.
What happened in this case in the wake of powerful repressions happens a little in all moody persons. An unconscious motive for the depression can always be demonstrated. In most instances it is secret reproaches that provoke the change in mood. In young people they are the sequel of exaggerated warnings about not injuring their health. Sins against religion and morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding to one’s impulses. But also the opposite!Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.
A girl suffers from violent (psychically), apparently wholly unmotived crying spells. The last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether she had excited herself in some way. Had she any reason for being depressed? No! Was she sure? A trifling matter—“of no particular significance”—occurs to her. On one of the city bridges a very elegant, young gentleman had addressed her. Would she permit him to accompany her? Indignantly she repelled him. What did he think she was! But he persisted in his role; he painted in glowing colours the delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found the courage to exclaim: “If you do not leave me at once, I shall call a policeman!” Then, flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed home, ate her meal in silence and soon thereafter gave vent to an almost unending crying spell.
And now I discover that her first attack of crying followed a similar occurrence. She was coming home from the country and had to travel at night. She asked the conductor to point out the ladies’ coupé. To her horror a tall, blonde lieutenant entered her coupé at the next station. She at once protested vigorously at the intrusion. The officer very politely offered his apologies, explaining that the train was full and that he would be quite satisfied with a modest corner. He would be greatly obliged to her for her kindness. But so anxious was she about hervirtue that she was proof against his entreaties. She appealed to the conductor and insisted on her rights. The spruce officer had to leave the coupé and for the rest of the night she was not molested. But the occurrence had so excited her that she could not fall asleep and she lay awake till dawn. The following day she had the first attack of depression and crying. She bewailed her cruel fate that compelled her to be virtuous while all the hidden voices within clamoured for a gay life. She did not find herself strong enough to conquer her ethical inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not strong enough to be really virtuous.
I could cite many such examples. They all show convincingly that there are no “inexplicable” psychic depressions, that consciousness does not embrace all the psychic forces that govern and direct us.
The classification of human beings into those that are free and those that are not was determined by a social or ethical canon. But in reality most human beings are the slaves of their unconscious complexes. Only he can be free who knows himself thoroughly, who has dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of the unconscious. Most persons are under the yoke of their “other self” who, with his biting whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures, compels them to leave the table of life and goads them into the arms of crime.
The greatest happiness in life is to haveachieved one’s inner freedom. This thought is still expressed in an old aphorism. “Everyone may have his moods; but his moods must not have him.”
Moody persons are the slaves of their past, masters of renunciation and assuredly bunglers in the art of life. Their only salvation is in learning the truth or in the art of transforming their depression into works of art. Most of the time they glide through life’s turbulence like dreamers. Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes about that life’s call is perceived but faintly by them. They are chasing butterflies in cemeteries....
OVERVALUED IDEASIdeas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin. One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently worthless piece of paper....There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto neglected or even unknown idea and cause it tobe generally accepted or to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation to topple from their thrones?Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the “overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no emphasis.Coloured ideas are richly endowed with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above, and between them—owing to stimuli from within and without—the sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom. This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of modern psychotherapeutists.This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.A very old example—if one may so call it—of physiological insanity is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.” But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled precisely to define the conception of anovervalued idea. Like an example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.But as regards being in love it is quite a different matter. As to this the environment does not accept the exaggerated valuation of the emotions. Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing with one who is in love about common sense, religion, education, station, or politics will not affect him in the least. He is dominated solely by the love-complex. This alone determines the resonance of his thoughts and feelings. The attraction to the chosen object has attracted all the other affects to it, has placed all the impulses at the service of one overvalued idea. He loves life but only if he be together with his beloved; he is jealous, but only with reference to the love-object; he is interested only in such matters as are in some way related to that object. The fool who is being dominated by an overvalued idea acts exactly in the same way. The lunatic who imagines himself the king of the world, and in whom a childhood wish had overpoweringly established itself as a fact in his consciousness, has interest only for such things as find access to this wish; the victim of ideas of persecution discovers in the news items of the daily papers the important communication that his enemies are laying traps for him; the unfortunate love-sick youth who imagines that Princess X wants to give him her hand in marriagesees in all sorts of advertisements of love-hungry ladies secret communications from his princess.These poor fools bring everything they see and everything they feel into relationship with the overvalued idea which, projected outward in the shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears like a spiritual echo and blinds their eyes like a vision.A lover acts essentially like this. That is why the world says of a person in love that he makes himself ridiculous. A handkerchief or a glove, or anything belonging to the beloved, becomes a fetich which can evoke the most ecstatic emotions. Anything that can be associated with love is overvalued.Another question involuntarily presents itself. Is love, in the form known as “being in love,” the only overvalued idea with which a normal person may be afflicted? Are there any other forms of “physiological insanity”—if we may use the term coined by Lower and subsequently imitated by Moebius?The answer to these questions is not difficult. A backward look teaches us what unspeakable evils overvalued ideas have wrought in man’s history. For overvalued ideas are sources of great danger. They are richly endowed with emotions and consequently lend themselves to suggestion more readily than almost any other idea. Bleuler has proved that suggestion is nothing but the transference of an emotion. And such overvalued ideas can be hurled with great suggestive force among the multitude and change the individual—and even whole communities—into a fool. That is how the psychoses of whole nations have arisen. The tremendous power of overvalued ideas can be understood if one thinksof the crusades, the witchcraft persecutions, hysterical epidemics, the Dreyfus affair, anarchism, etc.It is a sad fact that none of us can be free from overvalued ideas. In this sense there is really no difference between fools and healthy persons. Everyone of us bears within himself a hidden quantity of neurosis and psychosis. What saves us from the insane asylum is perhaps only the circumstance that we hide our overvalued ideas or that so many persons share our folly and that the multitude accepts it as wisdom.There are innumerable aphorisms, the crystallised precipitations of thousands of years, experience, that express this truth. “Every man has his little crack, his dross and his sliver.” (In the German saying the overvalued idea is compared to a splinter in the brain. An excellentmetaphor!) “If you see a fool take hold of your own ears.” “You cannot name a wise man who was not guilty of some folly.” (The reader will find ample material on this subject in Dr. Moenkenmöller’s book on ‘mental disease and mental weakness in satire, proverb, and humour,’ published in 1907.) In other words: We all suffer from a false and subjective valuation of our ideas. We all drag overvalued ideas about with us.It is the dream of all great minds to revise these overvalued ideas. Nietzsche’s life work was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so engaged, he himself became the victim of an overvalued idea, and his superman will forever remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas then only could we do full justice to his rhapsodies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” For in no other sphere is there such luxuriance of overvalued ideas as in the ethical. All progress has been brought about by the suppression of the natural impulses. All our education, using the word in its true sense, consists in investing our instincts and impulses withdon’ts. The sum total of these inhibitions we call morality. Progress consists in getting pleasure out of the inhibition, in converting the displeasure of being inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for this goal results in a kind of ethical burdening. One who has had the opportunity to study neurotics will be amazed at the many agonizing conscious pangs they suffer from owing to their ignorance of man’s true nature. These times pant under the burden of morality as an overvalued idea. They are in danger of asphyxiating under the ethical burden. A false and hypocritical morality, by disseminating an unhealthy conception of our dispositions (instincts), has turned our views on what constitutes sin topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too evident. On the one hand, we behold, asevidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities, pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate jokes, which forcibly intrude into life and art; on the other hand, as the natural reaction to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and pseudo-scientific sexual literature. And all because morality became a ruinously overvalued idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Morality will always remain the goal of noble souls, but only that kind of morality which harmonizes with man’s nature. Where morality does violence to nature it becomes natural, and brings about not ethical freedom but ethical burdening.But morality is not the only overvalued idea that turns the half of mankind into fools. If we survey the chaos of modern social life we shall easily find everywhere evidences of the endless disputes and irritating conflicts caused by overvalued ideas. Scientists may prove that the theory of races is no longer tenable, that the asserted purity of races is a fable, etc. Notwithstanding all that, the German Workurka and theCzechrustic are always at each other’s throats. Why cite other examples? In racial, religious, national, and other discords it is always an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious evolution impossible. Verily, the whole world is an insane asylum because the essential factor in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air like infectious psychic germs.Will the world ever be better? From asurvey of the past we are justified only in being coldly sceptical and discouragingly dubious. A conflict of ideas will continue as long as there are dissensions between human beings. Ideas to wage a war forexistence. A few survive longer than others, are highly esteemed till their course is run and are discovered to have been overvalued. But as long as they have the mastery they change credulous men into foolish children.From this endless round there is no escape. And folly and wisdom lead the never-ending dance until the dark, wide open gates of the future swallow them.
Ideas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin. One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently worthless piece of paper....
There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto neglected or even unknown idea and cause it tobe generally accepted or to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation to topple from their thrones?
Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the “overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no emphasis.Coloured ideas are richly endowed with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.
As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above, and between them—owing to stimuli from within and without—the sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom. This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of modern psychotherapeutists.
This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.
A very old example—if one may so call it—of physiological insanity is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.” But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled precisely to define the conception of anovervalued idea. Like an example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.
But as regards being in love it is quite a different matter. As to this the environment does not accept the exaggerated valuation of the emotions. Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing with one who is in love about common sense, religion, education, station, or politics will not affect him in the least. He is dominated solely by the love-complex. This alone determines the resonance of his thoughts and feelings. The attraction to the chosen object has attracted all the other affects to it, has placed all the impulses at the service of one overvalued idea. He loves life but only if he be together with his beloved; he is jealous, but only with reference to the love-object; he is interested only in such matters as are in some way related to that object. The fool who is being dominated by an overvalued idea acts exactly in the same way. The lunatic who imagines himself the king of the world, and in whom a childhood wish had overpoweringly established itself as a fact in his consciousness, has interest only for such things as find access to this wish; the victim of ideas of persecution discovers in the news items of the daily papers the important communication that his enemies are laying traps for him; the unfortunate love-sick youth who imagines that Princess X wants to give him her hand in marriagesees in all sorts of advertisements of love-hungry ladies secret communications from his princess.
These poor fools bring everything they see and everything they feel into relationship with the overvalued idea which, projected outward in the shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears like a spiritual echo and blinds their eyes like a vision.
A lover acts essentially like this. That is why the world says of a person in love that he makes himself ridiculous. A handkerchief or a glove, or anything belonging to the beloved, becomes a fetich which can evoke the most ecstatic emotions. Anything that can be associated with love is overvalued.
Another question involuntarily presents itself. Is love, in the form known as “being in love,” the only overvalued idea with which a normal person may be afflicted? Are there any other forms of “physiological insanity”—if we may use the term coined by Lower and subsequently imitated by Moebius?
The answer to these questions is not difficult. A backward look teaches us what unspeakable evils overvalued ideas have wrought in man’s history. For overvalued ideas are sources of great danger. They are richly endowed with emotions and consequently lend themselves to suggestion more readily than almost any other idea. Bleuler has proved that suggestion is nothing but the transference of an emotion. And such overvalued ideas can be hurled with great suggestive force among the multitude and change the individual—and even whole communities—into a fool. That is how the psychoses of whole nations have arisen. The tremendous power of overvalued ideas can be understood if one thinksof the crusades, the witchcraft persecutions, hysterical epidemics, the Dreyfus affair, anarchism, etc.
It is a sad fact that none of us can be free from overvalued ideas. In this sense there is really no difference between fools and healthy persons. Everyone of us bears within himself a hidden quantity of neurosis and psychosis. What saves us from the insane asylum is perhaps only the circumstance that we hide our overvalued ideas or that so many persons share our folly and that the multitude accepts it as wisdom.
There are innumerable aphorisms, the crystallised precipitations of thousands of years, experience, that express this truth. “Every man has his little crack, his dross and his sliver.” (In the German saying the overvalued idea is compared to a splinter in the brain. An excellentmetaphor!) “If you see a fool take hold of your own ears.” “You cannot name a wise man who was not guilty of some folly.” (The reader will find ample material on this subject in Dr. Moenkenmöller’s book on ‘mental disease and mental weakness in satire, proverb, and humour,’ published in 1907.) In other words: We all suffer from a false and subjective valuation of our ideas. We all drag overvalued ideas about with us.
It is the dream of all great minds to revise these overvalued ideas. Nietzsche’s life work was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so engaged, he himself became the victim of an overvalued idea, and his superman will forever remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas then only could we do full justice to his rhapsodies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” For in no other sphere is there such luxuriance of overvalued ideas as in the ethical. All progress has been brought about by the suppression of the natural impulses. All our education, using the word in its true sense, consists in investing our instincts and impulses withdon’ts. The sum total of these inhibitions we call morality. Progress consists in getting pleasure out of the inhibition, in converting the displeasure of being inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for this goal results in a kind of ethical burdening. One who has had the opportunity to study neurotics will be amazed at the many agonizing conscious pangs they suffer from owing to their ignorance of man’s true nature. These times pant under the burden of morality as an overvalued idea. They are in danger of asphyxiating under the ethical burden. A false and hypocritical morality, by disseminating an unhealthy conception of our dispositions (instincts), has turned our views on what constitutes sin topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too evident. On the one hand, we behold, asevidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities, pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate jokes, which forcibly intrude into life and art; on the other hand, as the natural reaction to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and pseudo-scientific sexual literature. And all because morality became a ruinously overvalued idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Morality will always remain the goal of noble souls, but only that kind of morality which harmonizes with man’s nature. Where morality does violence to nature it becomes natural, and brings about not ethical freedom but ethical burdening.
But morality is not the only overvalued idea that turns the half of mankind into fools. If we survey the chaos of modern social life we shall easily find everywhere evidences of the endless disputes and irritating conflicts caused by overvalued ideas. Scientists may prove that the theory of races is no longer tenable, that the asserted purity of races is a fable, etc. Notwithstanding all that, the German Workurka and theCzechrustic are always at each other’s throats. Why cite other examples? In racial, religious, national, and other discords it is always an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious evolution impossible. Verily, the whole world is an insane asylum because the essential factor in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air like infectious psychic germs.
Will the world ever be better? From asurvey of the past we are justified only in being coldly sceptical and discouragingly dubious. A conflict of ideas will continue as long as there are dissensions between human beings. Ideas to wage a war forexistence. A few survive longer than others, are highly esteemed till their course is run and are discovered to have been overvalued. But as long as they have the mastery they change credulous men into foolish children.
From this endless round there is no escape. And folly and wisdom lead the never-ending dance until the dark, wide open gates of the future swallow them.
AFFECTIONATE PARENTSThe last few years the child has become the centre of interest. Funny as it may sound, it may almost be asserted that we had just rediscovered the child. Congresses are held, artists devote their talents to portraying the life of the child, expositions acquaint us with the many aspects of the advances that have been made in the new knowledge. Is it any wonder then that we have suddenly been made acquainted with the abuses of children? That we have shudderingly learned that there are children who are tortured by their own mothers? There were loud cries of horror. The fountain of humanity became a broad stream which must drive the mills of a new social organization in the interests of the defenceless child. Who would withhold his approval of this movement? Who would oppose it? For truly there is no sadder spectacle than a child tortured to death by its own parents. The whole instinct for race preservation cries out against it....But this theme may also be regarded from another angle, and I purpose showing from the point of view of the physician and the pedagog that the reverse of abuse, viz., excessive affection, has a dark side, that it, too, is capable ofruining a child’s life and condemning an innocent being to lifelong suffering.At a private gathering of physicians not long ago the subject of the last congress for the protection of children was discussed from its more serious as well as lighter aspects. A Viennese neurologist ventured the following remark: “I regard it as a great misfortune if a woman’s affection for her husband is expended upon her child. A misfortune for humanity, for, in this way, the number of nervous persons will be incalculably increased.”One is strongly inclined at first energetically to attack this opinion. What! A tender, affectionate bringing up will make a child neurotic? Who can prove that a happy childhood results in an unhappy life? Shall parents be afraid to show their children love? To hug them, kiss them, pet them? Is not nervousness rather the sequel to draconic sternness, tyrannical compulsion?Nonsense! Nonsense! I shall attempt to answer these obtrusive questions seriatim.But, first, one remarkable fact has to be postulated. Parents are really becoming more and more affectionate from year to year. Such fanatically affectionate parents as are quite common now were formerly the exception. To-day the parents’ thoughts all centre around the child: How to feed it, bring it up, dress it hygienically, harden it, how to instruct it in sexual matters.... A flood of books andmagazines scarcely suffices to meet the tremendous concern about these matters. Can this emanate solely from the fact that the pressing movement for emancipation of woman has displaced the woman’s interest from the man to the child? I think that herein the neurologist is in error. That cannot possibly be the sole cause.The cause for the hypertrophied love of the child is adduced from the consideration of those cases which even in former times offered instances of an exaggerated parental affection amounting to doting love. The over-indulged child was almost invariably an only child whom popular speech designates a “trembling joy.”It is to be regretted that most modern families are made up of such “trembling joys.” “Neo-Malthusianism” has infected the whole world. In consequence of the employment of innumerable and more or less generally employed anti-conceptives the birth rate is steadily declining. “Two-children families” is the rule, and families with many children—especially among the well-to-do—the exception. Even the vaunted fecundity of the Germans which is always being held up as a model to the French will soon be a thing of the past. In former decades 1,000 married women in Berlin gave birth to 220 children and from 1873 to 1877 the number even rose to 231. Since then the birth rate is declining from year to year, so that in 1907 1,000 women only had 111 children. In other large cities matters are even worse than in Berlinin this regard. But it would be decidedly wrong to infer that there is a diminution in the number of marriages. In Prussia the number of marriages from 1901 to 1904 was at the rate of 8 per 1,000, whereas in 1850 it was somewhat less, to wit: 7.8 per 1,000. Sociologists have detected in this state of affairs a great danger for the mental prospects of the race inasmuch as matters in this regard are much better in the country and, consequently, they say, the progeny of the farmer class will in a not remote period tremendously exceed the intelligent descendants of urban people in number. The country will get the best of the city and not vice versa. But we must not wander away from our subject. Let us take this fact for granted: The “two-children system” is the cause for the excessive parental affection we have described. But wherein is this dangerous?I shall not attempt here a detailed statement of the well-known dangers. We all know that coddled children very often become helpless, dependent persons, that they cannot find their place in life, and do not seem to be armed against adversity. It seems superfluous to dwell at greater length on this. Of greater significance is the phenomenon that the exaggerated affection lavished on the child creates a correspondingly large need for affection in it. A need for affection that is tempestuous in its demand for gratification. As long as these children are young so long is this demand fully satisfied. Theparents, and especially mothers, are so overjoyed at their children’s manifestations of love that out of their overflowing hearts they reward them by overwhelming them with caresses. Thus the measure of affectionate demonstrations rises instead of gradually sinking. And now the time comes for the child to go to school. And for the first time in its life it stands in the presence of the will of a stranger who demands neither petting nor love, only work done without grumbling. How easily this situation gives rise to conflict! The child thinks it is not loved by the teacher, it is terrified by a harsh word and begins to cry. School becomes odious to it; it learns unwillingly. It asks for another school and for other teachers. If its wish is gratified the same thing is soon repeated.Matters get much worse when these children grow up. They have an unquenchable craving for caresses. From them are developed the women who kill their husband’s love by their own immoderate love. Every day they want to be told that their husbands still love them. Daily—nay, hourly—they wish to be the recipients of sweets, loving words, private pet names and kisses without number. The men, on the other hand, who had been so coddled in their childhood, are only in the rarest instances satisfied with their wives; sooner or later they seek to compensate outside of the home for the insufficient affection shown by the wife; or they transfer this requirement upon the children whothus become seriously (though not congenitally) burdened. But even this is not the worst.The greatest dangers of excessive affection are known to only very few persons. They consist in a premature excitation of the erotic emotions. We are so prone to forget unpleasant experiences. Hence comes it that most adults have no recollection of their own youthful erotic experiences. Parents especially are very forgetful in this regard—so much so that their forgetfulness amounts almost to a pathological condition bordering on hysterical amnesia. Thence comes it that most mothers will take an oath on their daughters’ innocence and fathers on their sons’ purity. They talk themselves into the belief that their children are exceptions, that they are incredibly simple, still believe in the stork myth and other similar stupidities.That the sexual enlightenment of the child is an important problem and of far-reaching significance for its whole life is proved in numberless books and essays dealing with the subject. We are told that open scientific instruction should take the place of secret knowledge obtained from turbid channels. Very fine! But the world must not believe that the child’s first erotic knowledge is awakened as a result of such instruction. That is a widespread superstition. The sexual life of the child does not begin with puberty, the old books to the contrary notwithstanding, but with the day of its birth.On the occasion of a sad criminal trial inwhich children were charged with being prostitutes, public opinion was horrified at the wickedness of these poor creatures. And yet most of them were victims of their environment. Does any one really believe that such occurrences are rare exceptions? That is a myth. We talk ourselves into the belief that the little child that is still unable to speak is not receptive to erotic impressions. How do we know this? The brain of a child is like a photographic plate that greedily catches impressions, independently of whether they are intelligible or not, impressions whose influence may be operative throughout its life. As we know, there is a large group of investigators which traces all perverse manifestations of the sexual impulses back to a fixation of the earliest erotic experience. Erotic stimulation can subsequently be brought about only by way of an association with this early impression. This explanation certainly does seem to fit the curious phenomenon known as fetichism. In this way children’s experiences influence their whole life. In sexual matters human beings behave with incredible naïveté. They close their eyes and will not see. Frank Wedekind is perfectly right in deriding a world that has secrets even from itself. So infantile sexuality is a secret which every intelligent person knows.If parents only kept this in their mind’s eye! Then it would not happen that children ten years of age and older would be permitted tosleep in their parents’ bedrooms that the anxious father and mother might watch over the gentlest breath of their precious darlings. These parents do not want to consider the possibility that the children may in this way receive impressions which may prove very injurious to them. Many a case of obstinate insomnia in childhood or of nocturnal attacks of apprehension is explained in this way. I have repeatedly cured sleepless children by the simple remedy of ordering them to sleep in separate bedrooms.Let us assume then that all children are susceptible to erotic stimuli and that such stimulation may harm them. For the later a person’s conscious sexual life begins the greater the prospects of his becoming a healthy, mentally well-balanced individual. Among the factors capable of permanently arousing erotic emotions we must include excessive affection. Between the affections of one who loves and of a mother there are really no differences. Both kiss, caress, fondle, hug, embrace, pet, etc. That the excitement is transmitted to the same central organs is obvious.In this way the child receives its first erotic sensations from its nurse. Interpret it as we may the nurse, the attendant, the mother, the father are the child’s first love, the first erotic love, as our psychoanalysis has convincingly demonstrated. But this must not be interpreted to mean that I wish to condemn the affectionate management of children. On the contrary!A certain quantity of affection is, as a matter of fact, essential to the normal development of the individual. But the affection lavished on them must not be excessive. For if it is the child will be prematurely brought into a condition of erotic overstimulation. It grows older and begins to feel the power of education. To restrain and curb the force of the natural impulses powerful inhibitions are erected. As a reaction to the premature sexual stimulation there begins a remarkable process which may be designated as “sexual repression.” This repression may succeed so well that even the child forgets its early experiences or the repression does not succeed and the individual’s erotic requirements grow from year to year. In the latter case there develops in the child a serious psychic conflict between sexual longing and sexual renunciation and thus the soil in which a neurosis may grow is prepared. Perhaps the conflict is the neurosis.We shall mention only in passing that such exaggerated affection begets in many children the habit of securing for themselves a certain amount of pleasurable sensations by way of certain auto-erotic actions. It is not possible, nor necessary, to enter into a detailed discussion of these matters here. For most people know that our experiences in childhood influence our whole life. But it is a tragic commentary on human strivings that excessive parental love may bring sickness upon the child, that a happy present is replaced by an unhappy future, thatthe roses a mother strews in her child’s path only later show their thorns.We cannot say it too often: We fuss too much with our children. There is too much theory in this matter of bringing up children. We pay too much attention to our children. Let us leave them their peaceful childhood, their merry games, the wondrous product of their untiring phantasy. Let us clearly realize that with our excessive affection we give ourselves a great deal of pleasure but that at the same time we are doing the children a great injury. Let no one discourage mothers from being affectionate to their children, from expending loving attentions on them, from making their youth as pleasant as possible. But the parents’ affection should not expend itself mechanically. It should be a uniformly warm fire that only warms, kindles no fire, and bursts into a bright flame only on life’s great holidays.
The last few years the child has become the centre of interest. Funny as it may sound, it may almost be asserted that we had just rediscovered the child. Congresses are held, artists devote their talents to portraying the life of the child, expositions acquaint us with the many aspects of the advances that have been made in the new knowledge. Is it any wonder then that we have suddenly been made acquainted with the abuses of children? That we have shudderingly learned that there are children who are tortured by their own mothers? There were loud cries of horror. The fountain of humanity became a broad stream which must drive the mills of a new social organization in the interests of the defenceless child. Who would withhold his approval of this movement? Who would oppose it? For truly there is no sadder spectacle than a child tortured to death by its own parents. The whole instinct for race preservation cries out against it....
But this theme may also be regarded from another angle, and I purpose showing from the point of view of the physician and the pedagog that the reverse of abuse, viz., excessive affection, has a dark side, that it, too, is capable ofruining a child’s life and condemning an innocent being to lifelong suffering.
At a private gathering of physicians not long ago the subject of the last congress for the protection of children was discussed from its more serious as well as lighter aspects. A Viennese neurologist ventured the following remark: “I regard it as a great misfortune if a woman’s affection for her husband is expended upon her child. A misfortune for humanity, for, in this way, the number of nervous persons will be incalculably increased.”
One is strongly inclined at first energetically to attack this opinion. What! A tender, affectionate bringing up will make a child neurotic? Who can prove that a happy childhood results in an unhappy life? Shall parents be afraid to show their children love? To hug them, kiss them, pet them? Is not nervousness rather the sequel to draconic sternness, tyrannical compulsion?
Nonsense! Nonsense! I shall attempt to answer these obtrusive questions seriatim.
But, first, one remarkable fact has to be postulated. Parents are really becoming more and more affectionate from year to year. Such fanatically affectionate parents as are quite common now were formerly the exception. To-day the parents’ thoughts all centre around the child: How to feed it, bring it up, dress it hygienically, harden it, how to instruct it in sexual matters.... A flood of books andmagazines scarcely suffices to meet the tremendous concern about these matters. Can this emanate solely from the fact that the pressing movement for emancipation of woman has displaced the woman’s interest from the man to the child? I think that herein the neurologist is in error. That cannot possibly be the sole cause.
The cause for the hypertrophied love of the child is adduced from the consideration of those cases which even in former times offered instances of an exaggerated parental affection amounting to doting love. The over-indulged child was almost invariably an only child whom popular speech designates a “trembling joy.”
It is to be regretted that most modern families are made up of such “trembling joys.” “Neo-Malthusianism” has infected the whole world. In consequence of the employment of innumerable and more or less generally employed anti-conceptives the birth rate is steadily declining. “Two-children families” is the rule, and families with many children—especially among the well-to-do—the exception. Even the vaunted fecundity of the Germans which is always being held up as a model to the French will soon be a thing of the past. In former decades 1,000 married women in Berlin gave birth to 220 children and from 1873 to 1877 the number even rose to 231. Since then the birth rate is declining from year to year, so that in 1907 1,000 women only had 111 children. In other large cities matters are even worse than in Berlinin this regard. But it would be decidedly wrong to infer that there is a diminution in the number of marriages. In Prussia the number of marriages from 1901 to 1904 was at the rate of 8 per 1,000, whereas in 1850 it was somewhat less, to wit: 7.8 per 1,000. Sociologists have detected in this state of affairs a great danger for the mental prospects of the race inasmuch as matters in this regard are much better in the country and, consequently, they say, the progeny of the farmer class will in a not remote period tremendously exceed the intelligent descendants of urban people in number. The country will get the best of the city and not vice versa. But we must not wander away from our subject. Let us take this fact for granted: The “two-children system” is the cause for the excessive parental affection we have described. But wherein is this dangerous?
I shall not attempt here a detailed statement of the well-known dangers. We all know that coddled children very often become helpless, dependent persons, that they cannot find their place in life, and do not seem to be armed against adversity. It seems superfluous to dwell at greater length on this. Of greater significance is the phenomenon that the exaggerated affection lavished on the child creates a correspondingly large need for affection in it. A need for affection that is tempestuous in its demand for gratification. As long as these children are young so long is this demand fully satisfied. Theparents, and especially mothers, are so overjoyed at their children’s manifestations of love that out of their overflowing hearts they reward them by overwhelming them with caresses. Thus the measure of affectionate demonstrations rises instead of gradually sinking. And now the time comes for the child to go to school. And for the first time in its life it stands in the presence of the will of a stranger who demands neither petting nor love, only work done without grumbling. How easily this situation gives rise to conflict! The child thinks it is not loved by the teacher, it is terrified by a harsh word and begins to cry. School becomes odious to it; it learns unwillingly. It asks for another school and for other teachers. If its wish is gratified the same thing is soon repeated.
Matters get much worse when these children grow up. They have an unquenchable craving for caresses. From them are developed the women who kill their husband’s love by their own immoderate love. Every day they want to be told that their husbands still love them. Daily—nay, hourly—they wish to be the recipients of sweets, loving words, private pet names and kisses without number. The men, on the other hand, who had been so coddled in their childhood, are only in the rarest instances satisfied with their wives; sooner or later they seek to compensate outside of the home for the insufficient affection shown by the wife; or they transfer this requirement upon the children whothus become seriously (though not congenitally) burdened. But even this is not the worst.
The greatest dangers of excessive affection are known to only very few persons. They consist in a premature excitation of the erotic emotions. We are so prone to forget unpleasant experiences. Hence comes it that most adults have no recollection of their own youthful erotic experiences. Parents especially are very forgetful in this regard—so much so that their forgetfulness amounts almost to a pathological condition bordering on hysterical amnesia. Thence comes it that most mothers will take an oath on their daughters’ innocence and fathers on their sons’ purity. They talk themselves into the belief that their children are exceptions, that they are incredibly simple, still believe in the stork myth and other similar stupidities.
That the sexual enlightenment of the child is an important problem and of far-reaching significance for its whole life is proved in numberless books and essays dealing with the subject. We are told that open scientific instruction should take the place of secret knowledge obtained from turbid channels. Very fine! But the world must not believe that the child’s first erotic knowledge is awakened as a result of such instruction. That is a widespread superstition. The sexual life of the child does not begin with puberty, the old books to the contrary notwithstanding, but with the day of its birth.
On the occasion of a sad criminal trial inwhich children were charged with being prostitutes, public opinion was horrified at the wickedness of these poor creatures. And yet most of them were victims of their environment. Does any one really believe that such occurrences are rare exceptions? That is a myth. We talk ourselves into the belief that the little child that is still unable to speak is not receptive to erotic impressions. How do we know this? The brain of a child is like a photographic plate that greedily catches impressions, independently of whether they are intelligible or not, impressions whose influence may be operative throughout its life. As we know, there is a large group of investigators which traces all perverse manifestations of the sexual impulses back to a fixation of the earliest erotic experience. Erotic stimulation can subsequently be brought about only by way of an association with this early impression. This explanation certainly does seem to fit the curious phenomenon known as fetichism. In this way children’s experiences influence their whole life. In sexual matters human beings behave with incredible naïveté. They close their eyes and will not see. Frank Wedekind is perfectly right in deriding a world that has secrets even from itself. So infantile sexuality is a secret which every intelligent person knows.
If parents only kept this in their mind’s eye! Then it would not happen that children ten years of age and older would be permitted tosleep in their parents’ bedrooms that the anxious father and mother might watch over the gentlest breath of their precious darlings. These parents do not want to consider the possibility that the children may in this way receive impressions which may prove very injurious to them. Many a case of obstinate insomnia in childhood or of nocturnal attacks of apprehension is explained in this way. I have repeatedly cured sleepless children by the simple remedy of ordering them to sleep in separate bedrooms.
Let us assume then that all children are susceptible to erotic stimuli and that such stimulation may harm them. For the later a person’s conscious sexual life begins the greater the prospects of his becoming a healthy, mentally well-balanced individual. Among the factors capable of permanently arousing erotic emotions we must include excessive affection. Between the affections of one who loves and of a mother there are really no differences. Both kiss, caress, fondle, hug, embrace, pet, etc. That the excitement is transmitted to the same central organs is obvious.
In this way the child receives its first erotic sensations from its nurse. Interpret it as we may the nurse, the attendant, the mother, the father are the child’s first love, the first erotic love, as our psychoanalysis has convincingly demonstrated. But this must not be interpreted to mean that I wish to condemn the affectionate management of children. On the contrary!A certain quantity of affection is, as a matter of fact, essential to the normal development of the individual. But the affection lavished on them must not be excessive. For if it is the child will be prematurely brought into a condition of erotic overstimulation. It grows older and begins to feel the power of education. To restrain and curb the force of the natural impulses powerful inhibitions are erected. As a reaction to the premature sexual stimulation there begins a remarkable process which may be designated as “sexual repression.” This repression may succeed so well that even the child forgets its early experiences or the repression does not succeed and the individual’s erotic requirements grow from year to year. In the latter case there develops in the child a serious psychic conflict between sexual longing and sexual renunciation and thus the soil in which a neurosis may grow is prepared. Perhaps the conflict is the neurosis.
We shall mention only in passing that such exaggerated affection begets in many children the habit of securing for themselves a certain amount of pleasurable sensations by way of certain auto-erotic actions. It is not possible, nor necessary, to enter into a detailed discussion of these matters here. For most people know that our experiences in childhood influence our whole life. But it is a tragic commentary on human strivings that excessive parental love may bring sickness upon the child, that a happy present is replaced by an unhappy future, thatthe roses a mother strews in her child’s path only later show their thorns.
We cannot say it too often: We fuss too much with our children. There is too much theory in this matter of bringing up children. We pay too much attention to our children. Let us leave them their peaceful childhood, their merry games, the wondrous product of their untiring phantasy. Let us clearly realize that with our excessive affection we give ourselves a great deal of pleasure but that at the same time we are doing the children a great injury. Let no one discourage mothers from being affectionate to their children, from expending loving attentions on them, from making their youth as pleasant as possible. But the parents’ affection should not expend itself mechanically. It should be a uniformly warm fire that only warms, kindles no fire, and bursts into a bright flame only on life’s great holidays.
WHY THEY QUARRELWhen a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no thunder-storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as self-evident, but to myself I think: they are lying. When two friends assure me that they have never quarrelled I think the same thing. I know that they have not been telling the truth. That is, they are liars without the consciousness of lying. They are firmly convinced that they were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them, and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. We do not quaff the lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. No, we sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses.There are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worthwhile if it runs along smoothly. These are the everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their dreams. They project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon all their daily experiences. That is why they so often appear to be overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement isincomprehensibleto us. For it is a fact that they fly into rages about trivial matters. But it is this very intensity of emotion that shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper source than appears on the surface.It has struck many observers that the external provocation to quarrelling is often very trivial. Of course we frequently hear a man or his wife declare that they would gladly avoid a quarrel if it were possible to do so. Either one says something that seems to be quite innocent, and yet it will be the occasion for a heated altercation, a great domestic scene with all its unpleasant consequences.This is due to the fact that most persons do not distinguish between cause and provocation. The provocation to a quarrel is easily found if hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a deeper cause, acting as a driving power, sets the wheels of passion in motion.A somewhat careful investigation of every quarrel easily brings the conviction that it isinvariably the secret, unconscious emotions that bring about the conflict of opinions. Where this deep resonance of the unconscious is lacking we playfully pass over differences. Unfortunately there are probably no two human beings whose souls vibrate so harmoniously that there never occurs a discord. This phenomenon is altogether too deeply rooted in human nature for an exception ever to occur. And paradoxical as it may sound, it is lovers who love each other most who cause each other the greatest pain. The great intensity which their emotions attain is due only to the fact they have repressed a series of experiences and feelings. They are blind to the faults of the beloved because they do not wish to see these faults. But the suppressed forces have not yet lost their power over the soul. These bring about the quarrel, and are capable, even if only for a few seconds, to transform love into hatred.But a few practical examples will do more to make this subject clear than all our theoretical explanations. Mr. N. S., a pious, upright man, asserts that his present ailment dates from a quarrel that had been frightfully upsetting him for months. He had inherited from his father a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also succeeded him in his position. One day his brother came to him and stormily demanded the return of the books. But inasmuch as he was the older he felt himself entitled to be the sole heir. A violent quarrel ensued, during whichhe exclaimed: “I’ll die before I give up any of these books!” After the quarrel he became very neurotic. He tortures himself with self-reproaches; he is convinced that with that exclamation he had been guilty of an act of impiety; he is very unhappy and finds no rest, no peace, either at home or in his office.Many persons may be satisfied with the superficial explanation offered by the patient himself that he is an ardent bibliophile and collector of ancient manuscripts. But the physician who treats sick souls must not be so easily satisfied.We know that every collector is an unconscious Don Juan who has transferred his passion from an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. But we also know that the passion with which the collected objects are loved emanates from the erotic domain. And what did our psychoanalysis of the above case bring out? Remarkably enough a rivalry between the two brothers which went back all the way to their youth. The older one had the privileges of the first-born and was a good-for-nothing. The younger one was a pattern of what a child ought to be. From their childhood they had been rivals for the affection of their parents, and more especially of the mother. We encounter here the so-called “Oedipus motive,” a son’s love for his mother—a motive whose instinctive force and urge are still too imperfectly appreciated. The two had been rivals, the older one being jealous of the parents’ preference for theyounger one, and the younger jealous of the older one’s privileges. In this we have the first of the deeper motives for the quarrel. Further investigation brought a second and a third motive to light. The older had, very naturally, married first, and repeatedly boasted in the presence of his younger and unmarried brother of his wife’s charms and virtues. In fact, he had even led him into his wife’s bedroom that he might see for himself what a treasure he possessed. (You see the motives of such stories as “Gyges and his Ring” and “King Candaules” occurring even nowadays.) At that moment a great passion for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger brother’s breast. Here we have then a second cause for dissension. But other factors are also involved. Our pious young man married a beautiful woman and would have been happy if he had not been the victim of a jealous passion. Jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge of one’s inferiority. He thought he noticed that his older brother was too devoted to his wife. And during an excursion into the country they had been in the woods a little too long, as he thought, and it occurred to him—and here we have the fourth motive—to tempt his sister-in-law. He is a Don Juan who runs after every petticoat and wants to drain life in large draughts. N. S. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to turn his sinful cravings to good account for the success of his business and to bad account as far as his health was concerned. The brother whomhe despised openly he envied in secret. But we could mention still other motives for their quarrel if Mrs. Grundy considerations did not bar the way....Unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many quarrels, one might almost say behind most quarrels. We have already hinted that dissensions between brothers or sisters are due to rivalry. But even in the quarrels between parents and children we may frequently enough demonstrate the identical undertone for the disharmony. The infant son sees in his father a rival for the mother’s favour. The reverse also occurs, though not so frequently. I was once the witness to a violent quarrel between a father and his son. The father had, as it seemed to me, not the slightest cause for grievance against the son, and yet a little trifle led to a violent altercation that ended in a tragic scene. At the height of the row the father screamed to his wife: “You are to blame for it all! You robbed me of my son’s love!”Naturally one would think that this lava stream belched forth in a great burst of passion from a volcano would contain the truth in its torrid current. And so it does, but in a disguised form. The true reproach should have been directed at the son, and should have been: “You have robbed me of my wife’s love!”We see in this a “transference” of a painful emotion from one person upon another. Such transferences or “displacements” are extremelycommon in everyday life, and it is only with their aid that we can account for the many domestic conflicts. A man will rarely admit that he erred in the choice of a wife. The feeling of hatred that his wife engenders in him he transfers upon others. Upon whom? The answer is obvious. Upon her next of kin. Most frequently upon her mother, the most immediate cause of her existence. This is the secret meaning of the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing and inexhaustible and perpetual theme for wits.So that, for example, if we hear a young woman complain that she cannot bear her husband’s family but that she loves him beyond bounds we may with perfect safety translate this in the language of the unconscious thus: “I would not care a rap about my husband’s family if I did not have to love my husband.”The rows with servants, well-known daily occurrences, become intelligible only if we know the law of transference. An unfaithful wife, who had been betrayed and deserted by her lover, suddenly began to watch her servant girls suspiciously, and to strike them on the slightest provocations. The woman had for years employed “help” without having had more than the customary quarrels with them. After a short sojourn with her husband the rage of the abandoned woman, who would have loved to give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true southern fashion, was transferred upon her servants. And exactly like this the resentmentof many a housewife is discharged through these more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is brought about the phenomenon so common in modern large cities which may be designated as “servant-girl neurosis.”Obviously the deeper motives slumber in the unconscious, and if they ever become conscious they are looked upon as sinfulness and bad temper. Freud has become the founder of a wholly new psychology by virtue of his discovery of the laws of repression and of transference—a psychology which will be indispensable to the criminologist of the future. What is nowadays brought to light in our halls of justice as the psychological bases for conflicts is generally only superficial psychology.This is strikingly illustrated by one of the saddest of legal proceedings of last year. I mean the trial for murder in the Murri-Boumartini case, in consequence of which an innocent victim—so I am convinced—the Countess Linda Boumartini is languishing in prison. Her brother Tullio, who had murdered his brother-in-law, was accused of an illicit relationship with his sister, for otherwise the murder would have been inexplicable. One who has carefully read Linda’s memoirs and her letters, which are now before the public, as well as the confessions of the imprisoned Tullio, will be sure to laugh at the accusation, which unquestionably owed its origin to a clerical plot. What may have really happened is that unconscious brotherlylove which deep down under consciousness in all likelihood takesitsorigin from the sexual but whose flowers appear on the surface of consciousness as the loftiest manifestations of ethical feeling. It was brotherly love, the primal motive which Wagner immortalised in his “Valkyrie,” that forced the dagger into Tullio Murri’s hand. He saw his sister suffer and go to pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his brother-in-law. What lay hidden behind his pure fraternal love may never have entered his consciousness.Oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blindness! What we see of the motives of great conflicts is usually only the surface. Even in the case of the little domestic quarrels, the irritating frictions of everyday life, the vessel of knowledge sails only over the easily excited ripples. But what gives these waters their black aspect is the deep bed over which they lie. Down there, at the bottom of the sea which represents our soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed monsters—our instincts and desires—emanating from the beginnings of man’s history. When they bestir their coarse bodies the sea too trembles and is slightly set in motion. And we stupid human beings think it is the surface wind that has begot the waves.
When a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no thunder-storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as self-evident, but to myself I think: they are lying. When two friends assure me that they have never quarrelled I think the same thing. I know that they have not been telling the truth. That is, they are liars without the consciousness of lying. They are firmly convinced that they were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them, and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. We do not quaff the lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. No, we sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses.
There are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worthwhile if it runs along smoothly. These are the everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their dreams. They project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon all their daily experiences. That is why they so often appear to be overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement isincomprehensibleto us. For it is a fact that they fly into rages about trivial matters. But it is this very intensity of emotion that shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper source than appears on the surface.
It has struck many observers that the external provocation to quarrelling is often very trivial. Of course we frequently hear a man or his wife declare that they would gladly avoid a quarrel if it were possible to do so. Either one says something that seems to be quite innocent, and yet it will be the occasion for a heated altercation, a great domestic scene with all its unpleasant consequences.
This is due to the fact that most persons do not distinguish between cause and provocation. The provocation to a quarrel is easily found if hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a deeper cause, acting as a driving power, sets the wheels of passion in motion.
A somewhat careful investigation of every quarrel easily brings the conviction that it isinvariably the secret, unconscious emotions that bring about the conflict of opinions. Where this deep resonance of the unconscious is lacking we playfully pass over differences. Unfortunately there are probably no two human beings whose souls vibrate so harmoniously that there never occurs a discord. This phenomenon is altogether too deeply rooted in human nature for an exception ever to occur. And paradoxical as it may sound, it is lovers who love each other most who cause each other the greatest pain. The great intensity which their emotions attain is due only to the fact they have repressed a series of experiences and feelings. They are blind to the faults of the beloved because they do not wish to see these faults. But the suppressed forces have not yet lost their power over the soul. These bring about the quarrel, and are capable, even if only for a few seconds, to transform love into hatred.
But a few practical examples will do more to make this subject clear than all our theoretical explanations. Mr. N. S., a pious, upright man, asserts that his present ailment dates from a quarrel that had been frightfully upsetting him for months. He had inherited from his father a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also succeeded him in his position. One day his brother came to him and stormily demanded the return of the books. But inasmuch as he was the older he felt himself entitled to be the sole heir. A violent quarrel ensued, during whichhe exclaimed: “I’ll die before I give up any of these books!” After the quarrel he became very neurotic. He tortures himself with self-reproaches; he is convinced that with that exclamation he had been guilty of an act of impiety; he is very unhappy and finds no rest, no peace, either at home or in his office.
Many persons may be satisfied with the superficial explanation offered by the patient himself that he is an ardent bibliophile and collector of ancient manuscripts. But the physician who treats sick souls must not be so easily satisfied.
We know that every collector is an unconscious Don Juan who has transferred his passion from an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. But we also know that the passion with which the collected objects are loved emanates from the erotic domain. And what did our psychoanalysis of the above case bring out? Remarkably enough a rivalry between the two brothers which went back all the way to their youth. The older one had the privileges of the first-born and was a good-for-nothing. The younger one was a pattern of what a child ought to be. From their childhood they had been rivals for the affection of their parents, and more especially of the mother. We encounter here the so-called “Oedipus motive,” a son’s love for his mother—a motive whose instinctive force and urge are still too imperfectly appreciated. The two had been rivals, the older one being jealous of the parents’ preference for theyounger one, and the younger jealous of the older one’s privileges. In this we have the first of the deeper motives for the quarrel. Further investigation brought a second and a third motive to light. The older had, very naturally, married first, and repeatedly boasted in the presence of his younger and unmarried brother of his wife’s charms and virtues. In fact, he had even led him into his wife’s bedroom that he might see for himself what a treasure he possessed. (You see the motives of such stories as “Gyges and his Ring” and “King Candaules” occurring even nowadays.) At that moment a great passion for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger brother’s breast. Here we have then a second cause for dissension. But other factors are also involved. Our pious young man married a beautiful woman and would have been happy if he had not been the victim of a jealous passion. Jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge of one’s inferiority. He thought he noticed that his older brother was too devoted to his wife. And during an excursion into the country they had been in the woods a little too long, as he thought, and it occurred to him—and here we have the fourth motive—to tempt his sister-in-law. He is a Don Juan who runs after every petticoat and wants to drain life in large draughts. N. S. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to turn his sinful cravings to good account for the success of his business and to bad account as far as his health was concerned. The brother whomhe despised openly he envied in secret. But we could mention still other motives for their quarrel if Mrs. Grundy considerations did not bar the way....
Unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many quarrels, one might almost say behind most quarrels. We have already hinted that dissensions between brothers or sisters are due to rivalry. But even in the quarrels between parents and children we may frequently enough demonstrate the identical undertone for the disharmony. The infant son sees in his father a rival for the mother’s favour. The reverse also occurs, though not so frequently. I was once the witness to a violent quarrel between a father and his son. The father had, as it seemed to me, not the slightest cause for grievance against the son, and yet a little trifle led to a violent altercation that ended in a tragic scene. At the height of the row the father screamed to his wife: “You are to blame for it all! You robbed me of my son’s love!”
Naturally one would think that this lava stream belched forth in a great burst of passion from a volcano would contain the truth in its torrid current. And so it does, but in a disguised form. The true reproach should have been directed at the son, and should have been: “You have robbed me of my wife’s love!”
We see in this a “transference” of a painful emotion from one person upon another. Such transferences or “displacements” are extremelycommon in everyday life, and it is only with their aid that we can account for the many domestic conflicts. A man will rarely admit that he erred in the choice of a wife. The feeling of hatred that his wife engenders in him he transfers upon others. Upon whom? The answer is obvious. Upon her next of kin. Most frequently upon her mother, the most immediate cause of her existence. This is the secret meaning of the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing and inexhaustible and perpetual theme for wits.
So that, for example, if we hear a young woman complain that she cannot bear her husband’s family but that she loves him beyond bounds we may with perfect safety translate this in the language of the unconscious thus: “I would not care a rap about my husband’s family if I did not have to love my husband.”
The rows with servants, well-known daily occurrences, become intelligible only if we know the law of transference. An unfaithful wife, who had been betrayed and deserted by her lover, suddenly began to watch her servant girls suspiciously, and to strike them on the slightest provocations. The woman had for years employed “help” without having had more than the customary quarrels with them. After a short sojourn with her husband the rage of the abandoned woman, who would have loved to give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true southern fashion, was transferred upon her servants. And exactly like this the resentmentof many a housewife is discharged through these more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is brought about the phenomenon so common in modern large cities which may be designated as “servant-girl neurosis.”
Obviously the deeper motives slumber in the unconscious, and if they ever become conscious they are looked upon as sinfulness and bad temper. Freud has become the founder of a wholly new psychology by virtue of his discovery of the laws of repression and of transference—a psychology which will be indispensable to the criminologist of the future. What is nowadays brought to light in our halls of justice as the psychological bases for conflicts is generally only superficial psychology.
This is strikingly illustrated by one of the saddest of legal proceedings of last year. I mean the trial for murder in the Murri-Boumartini case, in consequence of which an innocent victim—so I am convinced—the Countess Linda Boumartini is languishing in prison. Her brother Tullio, who had murdered his brother-in-law, was accused of an illicit relationship with his sister, for otherwise the murder would have been inexplicable. One who has carefully read Linda’s memoirs and her letters, which are now before the public, as well as the confessions of the imprisoned Tullio, will be sure to laugh at the accusation, which unquestionably owed its origin to a clerical plot. What may have really happened is that unconscious brotherlylove which deep down under consciousness in all likelihood takesitsorigin from the sexual but whose flowers appear on the surface of consciousness as the loftiest manifestations of ethical feeling. It was brotherly love, the primal motive which Wagner immortalised in his “Valkyrie,” that forced the dagger into Tullio Murri’s hand. He saw his sister suffer and go to pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his brother-in-law. What lay hidden behind his pure fraternal love may never have entered his consciousness.
Oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blindness! What we see of the motives of great conflicts is usually only the surface. Even in the case of the little domestic quarrels, the irritating frictions of everyday life, the vessel of knowledge sails only over the easily excited ripples. But what gives these waters their black aspect is the deep bed over which they lie. Down there, at the bottom of the sea which represents our soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed monsters—our instincts and desires—emanating from the beginnings of man’s history. When they bestir their coarse bodies the sea too trembles and is slightly set in motion. And we stupid human beings think it is the surface wind that has begot the waves.