The Autobiography of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

• Éditeur: Read & Co. Books
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781447489757
• Sujet: Education
• Sous-sujet: Education Biographies

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V

I MUST interrupt my account of the internal growth of psycho-analysis and turn to its external history. What I have so far described of its discoveries has related for the most part to the results of my own work; but I have filled in my story with material from later dates and have not distinguished between my own contributions and those of my pupils and followers.

For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned, abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals. In my paper, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” I mentioned as an instance of the attitude adopted by psychiatric circles in Vienna a conversation with an assistant at the Clinic, who had written a book against my theories but had never read my Interpretation of Dreams. He had been told at the Clinic that it was not worth while. The man in question, who has since become a professor, has gone so far as to repudiate my report of the conversation and to throw doubts in general upon the accuracy of my recollection. I can only say that I stand by every word of the account I then gave.

As soon as I realized the inevitable nature of what I had come up against, my sensitiveness greatly diminished. Moreover my isolation gradually came to an end. To begin with, a small circle of pupils gathered round me in Vienna; and then, after 1906, came the news that the psychiatrists at Zurich, E. Bleuler, his assistant C. G. Jung, and others, were taking a lively interest in psycho-analysis. We got into personal touch with one another, and at Easter, 1908, the friends of the young science met at Salzburg, agreed upon the regular repetition of similar informal congresses and arranged for the publication of a journal which was edited by Jung and was given the title of Jahrbuch für psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Forschungen. It was brought out under the direction of Bleuler and myself and ceased publication at the beginning of the Great War. At the same time that the Swiss psychiatrists joined the movement, interest in psycho-analysis began to be aroused all over Germany; it became the subject of a large number of written comments as well as of lively discussions at scientific congresses. But its reception was nowhere friendly or even benevolently impartial. After the briefest acquaintance with psycho-analysis German science was united in rejecting it.

Even today it is of course impossible for me to foresee the final judgment of posterity upon the value of psycho-analysis for psychiatry, psychology and the mental sciences in general. But I fancy that, when the history of the phase we have lived through comes to be written, German science will not have cause to be proud of those who represented it. I am not thinking of the fact that they rejected psycho-analysis or of the decisive way in which they did so; both of these things were easily intelligible, they were only to be expected, and at any rate they threw no discredit upon the character of the opponents of analysis. But for the degree of arrogance which they displayed, for their conscienceless contempt of logic, and for the coarseness and bad taste of their attacks there could be no excuse. It may be said that it is childish of me to give free rein to such feelings as these now, after fifteen years have passed; nor would I do so unless I had something more to add. Years later, during the Great War, when a chorus of enemies were bringing against the German nation the charge of barbarism, a charge which sums up all that I have written above, it none the less hurt deeply to feel that my own experience would not allow me to contradict it.

One of my opponents boasted of silencing his patients as soon as they began to talk of anything sexual, and evidently thought that this technique gave him a right to judge the part played by sexuality in the neuroses. Apart from emotional resistances, which were so easily explicable by the psycho-analytical theory that it was impossible to be misled by them, it seemed to me that the main obstacle to agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded psycho-analysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which had gone into its making. Since in their opinion analysis had nothing to do with observation or experience, they believed that they themselves were justified in rejecting it without experience. Others again, who did not feel so strongly convinced of this, repeated in their resistance the classical manoeuvre of not looking through the microscope so as to avoid seeing what they had denied. It is remarkable, indeed, how incorrectly most people act when they are obliged to form a judgment of their own upon some new subject. I have heard for years from “benevolent” critics—and I am told the same thing even today—that psycho-analysis is right up to such-and-such a point but that there it begins to exaggerate and to generalize without justification. But I know that, while nothing is more difficult than to draw such a line, the critics had been completely ignorant of the whole subject only a few weeks or days earlier.

The result of the official anathema against psycho-analysis was that the analysts began to come closer together. At the second Congress, held at Nuremberg in 1910, they formed themselves, on the proposal of Ferenczi, into an “International Psycho-Analytical Association,” divided into a number of local societies but under a common president. The Association survived the Great War and still exists, consisting today of branch societies in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Great Britain, Holland, Russia and India, as well as two in the United States. I arranged that C. G. Jung should be appointed as the first president, which turned out later to have been a most unfortunate step. At the same time a second journal devoted to psychoanalysis was started, the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, edited by Adler and Stekel, and a little later a third, Imago, edited by two non-medical analysts, H. Sachs and O. Rank, and intended to deal with the application of analysis to the mental sciences. Soon afterwards Bleuler published a paper in defence of psycho-analysis.¹ Though it was a relief to find honesty and straightforward logic for once taking part in the dispute, yet I could not feel completely satisfied by Bleuler’s essay. He strove too eagerly after an appearance of impartiality; nor is it a matter of chance that it is to him that our science owes the valuable concept of ambivalence. In later papers Bleuler adopted such a critical attitude towards the theoretical structure of analysis, and rejected or threw doubts upon such essential parts of it, that I could not help asking myself in astonishment what could be left of it for him to admire. Yet not only has he subsequently uttered the strongest pleas in favor of “depth-psychology” but he based his comprehensive study of schizophrenia upon it. Nevertheless Bleuler did not for long remain a member of the International Psycho-Analytical Association; he resigned from it as a result of misunderstandings with Jung, and the Burghölzli² was lost to analysis.

Official disapproval could not hinder the spread of psycho-analysis either in Germany or in other countries. I have elsewhere³ followed the stages of its growth and given the names of those who were its first representatives. In 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to the Clark University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was president, and to spend a week giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of that body’s foundation. Hall was justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had introduced psychoanalysis into his courses some years before; there was a touch of the “king-maker” about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them. We also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist, who in spite of his age was an enthusiastic supporter of psychoanalysis and threw the whole weight of a personality that was universally respected into the defence of the cultural value of analysis and the purity of its aims. He was an estimable man, in whom, as a reaction against a predisposition to obsessional neurosis, an ethical bias predominated; and the only thing in him that we could regret was his inclination to attach psycho-analysis to a particular philosophical system and to make it the servant of moral aims. Another event of this time which made a lasting impression upon me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

At that time I was only fifty-three, I felt young and healthy, and my short visit to the new world encouraged my self-respect in every way. In Europe I felt as though I were despised, but in America I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion; it had become a valuable part of reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it is extremely popular among the lay public and is recognized by a number of official psychiatrists as an important element in medical training. Unfortunately, however, it has suffered a great deal from being watered down. Moreover, many abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name, and there are few opportunities for any thorough training in technique or theory. In America, too, it has come in conflict with Behaviorism, a theory which is naïve enough to boast that it has put the whole problem of psychology completely out of court.

In Europe during the years 1911-1913 two secessionist movements from psycho-analysis took place, led by men who had previously played a considerable part in the young science, Alfred Adler and C. G. Jung. Both movements seemed most threatening and quickly obtained a large following. But their strength lay, not in their own content, but in the temptation which they offered of being freed from what were felt as the repellent findings of psycho-analysis without the necessity of rejecting its actual material. Jung attempted to give to the facts of analysis a fresh interpretation of an abstract, impersonal and non-historical character, and thus hoped to escape the need for recognizing the importance of infantile sexuality and of the Oedipus complex, as well as the necessity for any analysis of childhood. Adler seemed to depart still further from psycho-analysis; he entirely repudiated the importance of sexuality, traced back the formation both of character and of the neuroses solely to men’s desire for power and to their need to compensate for their constitutional inferiority, and threw all the psychological discoveries of psycho-analysis to the winds. But what he had rejected forced its way back into his closed system under other names; his “masculine protest” is nothing else than repression unjustifiably sexualized. The criticism with which the two heretics were met was a mild one; I only insisted that both Adler and Jung should cease to describe their theories as “psycho-analysis.” After a lapse of ten years it can be asserted that both of these attempts against psycho-analysis have blown over without doing any harm.

If a community is based upon agreement on a few cardinal points, it is obvious that people who have abandoned that common ground will cease to belong to it. Yet the secession of former pupils has often been brought up against me as a sign of my intolerance or has been regarded as evidence of some special fatality that hangs over me. It is a sufficient answer to point out that in contrast to those who have left me, like Jung, Adler, Stekel, and a few besides, there are a great number of men, like Abraham, Eitingon, Ferenczi, Rank, Jones, Brill, Sachs, Pfister, van Emden, Reik, and others, who have worked with me for some fifteen years in loyal collaboration and for the most part in uninterrupted friendship. I have only mentioned the oldest of my pupils, who have already made a distinguished name for themselves in the literature of psychoanalysis; if I have passed over others that is not to be taken as a slight, and indeed among those who are young and have joined me lately talents are to be found on which great hopes may be set. But I think I can say in my defence that an intolerant man, dominated by an arrogant belief in his own infallibility, would never have been able to maintain his hold upon so large a number of intelligent people, especially if he had at his command as few practical attractions as I had.

The Great War, which broke up so many other organizations, could do nothing against our “International.” The first meeting after the War took place in 1920, at The Hague, on neutral ground. It was moving to see how hospitably the Dutch welcomed the starving and impoverished subjects of the Central European states; and I believe this was the first occasion in a ruined world on which Englishmen and Germans sat at the same table for the friendly discussion of scientific interests. Both in Germany and in the countries of Western Europe the War had actually stimulated interest in psycho-analysis. The observation of war neuroses had at last opened the eyes of the medical profession to the importance of psychogenesis in neurotic disturbances, and some of our psychological conceptions, such as the “advantage of being ill” and the “flight into illness,” suddenly became popular. The last Congress before the German collapse, which was held at Budapest in 1918, was attended by official representatives of the allied governments of the Central European powers, and they agreed to the establishment of psycho-analytical stations for the treatment of war neuroses. But this point was never reached. Similarly, too, the comprehensive plans made by one of our leading members, Dr. Anton von Freund, for establishing in Budapest a center for analytic study and treatment, came to grief as a result of the political disorders of the time and of the premature death of their generou...