IX
From Dr. Loÿ.
23rd February, 1913.
From your letter of 16th February I want first to single out the end, where you so admirably assign to its proper place the power of suggestion in psychoanalysis: "The patient is no empty sack, into which you can cram what you will; he brings his own predetermined content with him, with which one has always to reckon afresh." With this I fully agree, my own experience confirms it. And you add: "This content remains untouched by involuntary analytical suggestion, but its form is altered, proteus-fashion, beyond measure." So it becomes a matter of a sort of "mimicry" by which the patient seeks to escape the analyst, who is driving him into a corner and therefore for the moment seems to him an enemy. Until at last, through the joint work of patient and analyst—the former spontaneously yielding up his psychic content, the latter only interpreting and explaining—the analysis succeeds in bringing so much light into the darkness of the patient's psyche that he can see the true relationships and, without any preconceived plan of the analyst's, can himself draw the right conclusions and apply them to his future life. This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? It is not we who must arbitrarily seek to determine how matters stand for the patient and what will benefit him; his own nature decides. In other words, we must assume the rôle of the accoucheur who can bring out into the light of day a child already alive, but who must avoid a series of mistakes if the child is to remain able to live and the mother is not to be injured. All this is very clear to me, since it is only the application to the psychoanalytic method of a general principle which should have universal validity: never do violence to Nature. Hence I also see that the psychoanalyst must follow his patient's apparently "wrong roads" if the patient is ever to arrive at his own convictions and be freed once and for all from infantile reliance on authority. We ourselves as individuals have learnt or can only learn by making mistakes how to avoid them for the future, and mankind as a whole has created the conditions of its present and future stages of development quite as much by frequent travel along wrong paths as along the right road. Have not many neurotics—I do not know if you will agree, but I think so—become ill partly for the very reason that their infantile faith in authority has fallen to pieces? Now they stand before the wreckage of their faith, weeping over it, in dire distress because they cannot find a substitute which shall show them clearly whither their life's course should now turn. So they remain stuck fast betwixt infancy which they must unwillingly renounce, and the serious duties of the present and future (the moral conflict). I see, particularly in such cases, you are right in saying it is a mistake to seek to replace the lost faith in authority by another similar faith, certain to be useful only so long as the belief lasts. This applies to the deliberate use of suggestion in psychoanalysis, and the building upon the transference to the doctor as the object of the analytic therapy. I am no longer in doubt about your maxim: "Every interference on the analyst's part is a gross mistake in technique. So-called chance is the law and the order of psychoanalysis." Further, I am entirely in agreement with you when you say that altruism necessarily must be innate in man considered as a herd-animal. The contrary would be the thing to be wondered at.
I should be much disposed to agree that not the egoistic, but the altruistic instincts are primary. Love and trust of the child for the mother who feeds it, nurses, cherishes and pets it,—love of the man for his wife, regarded as the going out towards another's personality,—love for offspring, care for it,—love for kinsfolk, etc. The egoistic instincts owe their origin to the desire for exclusive possession of all that surrounds love, the desire to possess the mother exclusively, in opposition to the father and the brothers and sisters, the desire to have a woman for himself alone, the desire to possess exclusively ornaments, clothing, etc. But perhaps you will say I am paradoxical and that the instincts, egoistic or altruistic, arise together in the heart of man, and that every instinct is ambivalent in nature. But I have to ask if the feelings and instincts are really ambivalent? Are they exactly bipolar? Are the qualities of all emotions altogether comparable? Is love really the opposite of hate?
However that may be, in any case it is well that man bears the social law within himself, as an inborn imperative; otherwise our civilised humanity would fare badly, having to subject themselves to laws imposed on them from outside only: they would be impervious to the inheritance of the earlier religious faiths, and would soon fall into complete anarchy. Man would then have to ask himself whether it would not be better to maintain by force an extreme belief in religious authority such as prevailed in the Middle Ages. For the benefits of civilisation, which strove to grant every individual as much outward freedom as was consistent with the freedom of others, would be well worth the sacrifice of free research. But the age of this use of force against nature is past, civilised man has left this wrong track behind, not arbitrarily, but obeying an inner necessity, and we may look joyfully towards the future. Mankind, advancing in knowledge, will find its way across the ruins of faith in authority to the moral autonomy of the individual.