V.
From Dr. Loÿ.
9th February, 1913.
The selfsame passion for truth possesses us both when we think of pure research, and the same desire to cure when we are considering therapy. For the scientist, as for the doctor, we desire the fullest freedom in all directions, fullest freedom to select and use the methods which promise the best fulfilment of their ends at any moment. Here we are at one; but there remains a postulate we must establish to the satisfaction of others if we want recognition for our views.
First and foremost there is a question that must be answered, an old question asked already in the Gospels: What is Truth? I think clear definitions of fundamental ideas are most necessary. How shall we contrive a working definition of the conception "Truth"? Perhaps an allegory may help us.
Imagine a gigantic prism extending in front of the sun, so that its rays are broken up, but suppose man entirely ignorant of this fact. I exclude the invisible, chemical and ultra-violet rays. Men who live in a blue-lit region will say: "The sun sends forth blue light only." They are right and yet they are wrong: from their standpoint they are capable of perceiving only a fragment of truth. And so too with the inhabitants of the red, yellow, and in-between regions. And they will all scourge and slay one another to force their belief in their fragment upon the others—till, grown wiser through travelling in each others' regions, they come to the harmonious agreement that the sun sends out light of varying colours. That comprehends more truth, but it is not yet the Truth. Only when the giant lens shall have recombined the split-up rays, and when the invisible, chemical and heat rays have given proof of their own specific effects, will a view more in accordance with the facts be able to arise, and men will perceive that the sun emits white light which is split up by the prism into differing rays with different peculiarities, which rays can be recombined by the lens into one mass of white light.
This example shows sufficiently well that the road to Truth leads through far-reaching and comparative observations, the results of which must be controlled by the help of freely chosen experiments, until well-grounded hypotheses and theories can be put forward; but these hypotheses and theories will fall to the ground as soon as a single new observation or experiment contradicts them.
The way is difficult, and in the end all man ever attains to is relative truth. But such relative truth suffices for the time being, if it serves to explain the most important actual concatenations of the past, to light up present problems, to predict those of the future, so that we are then in a position to achieve adaptation through our knowledge. But absolute truth could be accessible only to omniscience, aware of all possible concatenations and combinations; that is not possible, for the concatenations and their combinations are infinite. Accordingly, we shall never know more than an approximate truth. Should new relationships be discovered, new combinations built up, then the picture changes, and with it the entire possibilities in knowledge and power. To what revolutions in daily life does not every new scientific discovery lead: how absurdly little was the beginning of our first ideas of electricity, how inconceivably great the results! Time and again it is necessary to repeat this commonplace, because one sees how life is always made bitter for the innovators in every scientific field, and now is it being made especially so for the disciples of the psychoanalytic school. Of course, every one admits the truth of this platitude so long as it is a matter of "academic" discussion, but only so long; just as soon as a concrete case has to be considered, sympathies and antipathies rush into the foreground and darken judgment. And therefore the scientist must fight tirelessly, appealing to logic and honour, for freedom of research in every field, and must not permit authority, of no matter what political or religious tinge, to advance reasons of opportunism to destroy or restrict this freedom; opportunist reasons may be and are in place elsewhere, not here. Finally we must completely disavow that maxim of the Middle Ages: "Philosophia ancilla Theologiæ," and no less, too, the war-cries of the university class-rooms with their partisanship of one or other religious or political party. All fanaticism is the enemy of science, which must above all things be independent.
And when we turn from the search for Truth back once more to therapeutics, we see immediately that here too we are in agreement. In practice expediency must rule: the doctor from the yellow region must adapt himself to the sick in the yellow region, as must the doctor in the blue region, to his patients; both have the same object in view. And the doctor who lives in the white light of the sun must take into consideration the past experiences of his patients from the yellow or blue region, in spite of, or perhaps rather because of, his own wider knowledge. In such cases the way to healing will be long and difficult, may indeed lead more easily into a cul-de-sac, than in cases where he has to do with patients who, like himself, have already come to a knowledge of the white sunlight, or, one might say, when his patient-material has "already sorted itself out." With such sorted-out material the psychoanalyst can employ psychoanalysis exclusively; and may deem himself happy in that he need not "play the augur." Now, what are these psychoanalytic methods? If I understand you aright, from beginning to end it is a question of dealing directly and openly with the basic forces of the human soul, so that the analysed person, be he sick or sound or in some stage between—for health and sickness flow over by imperceptible degrees into one another—shall gradually have his eyes opened to the drama that is being acted within him. He has to come to an understanding of the development of the hostile automatisms of his personality, and by means of this understanding he must gradually learn to free himself from them; he must learn, too, how to employ and strengthen the favourable automatisms. He must learn to make his self-knowledge real, and of practical use, to control his soul's workings so that a balance may be established between the spheres of emotion and reason. And what share in all this has the physician's suggestion? I can scarcely believe that suggestion can be altogether avoided till the patient feels himself really free. Such freedom, it goes without saying, is the main thing to strive for, and it must be active. The sick man who simply obeys a suggestion, obeys it only just so long as the "transference to the doctor" remains potent.
But if he wishes to be able to adjust himself to all circumstances he must have fortified himself "from within." He should no longer need the crutches of faith, but be capable of encountering all theoretical and practical problems squarely, and of solving them by himself. That is surely your view? Or have I not understood correctly?
I next ask, must not every single case be treated differently, of course within the limits of the psychoanalytic method? For if every case is a case by itself, it must indeed demand individual treatment.
"Il n'y a pas de maladies, il n'y a que des malades," said a French doctor whose name escapes me. But on broad lines, what course, from a technical point of view, does analysis take, and what deviations occur most frequently? That I would gladly learn from you. I take for granted that all "augurs' tricks," darkened rooms, masquerading, chloroform, are out of the question.
Psychoanalysis—purged so far as is humanly possible from suggestive influence—appears to have an essential difference from Dubois' psychotherapy. With Dubois, from the beginning conversation about the past is forbidden, and "the moral reasons for recovery" placed in the forefront; whilst psychoanalysis uses the subconscious material from the patient's past as well as present, for present self-understanding. Another difference lies in the conception of morality: morals are above all "relative." But what essential forms shall they assume at those moments when one can hardly avoid suggestion? You will say, the occasion must decide. Agreed, as regards older people, or adults, who have to live in an unenlightened milieu. But if one is dealing with children, the seed of the future, is it not a sacred duty to enlighten them as to the shaky foundations of the so-called "moral" conceptions of the past, which have only a dogmatic basis; is it not a duty to educate them into full freedom by courageously unveiling Truth? I ask this not so much with regard to the analysing doctor as to the teacher. May not the creation of free schools be looked for as one task for the psychoanalyst?