VIII
From Dr. Jung.
18th February, 1913.
I cannot but agree with your observation that confusion reigns in psychoanalytic literature. Just at this moment different points of view are developing in the theoretical conception of the analytic results; not to mention many individual deviations. Over against Freud's almost purely causal conception, there has developed, apparently in absolute contradiction, Adler's purely final view, but in reality the latter is an essential complement of Freud's theory. I hold rather to a middle course, taking into account both standpoints. That discord still reigns round the ultimate questions of psychoanalysis need not surprise us when we consider the difficulty. The problem of the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis is bound up in particular with supremely difficult questions, so that it would indeed be astonishing if we had yet reached final certitude. Stekel's statement to which you refer is very characteristic. What he says about love for the doctor is obviously true, but it is a simple affirmation, and not a goal or plumb-line of the analytic therapy. If his statement were the goal, many cures, it is true, would be possible, but also many calamities might result which are avoidable. But the aim is so to educate the patient that he will get well for his own sake and by reason of his own determination, rather than to procure his doctor some sort of advantage; though of course it would be absurd from the therapeutic standpoint not to allow the patient to get better because in doing so he does the doctor a good turn also. It suffices if the patient knows it. But we must not prescribe for him which path he should take to recovery. Naturally it seems to me (from the psychoanalytic standpoint) an inadmissible use of suggestive influence if the patient is compelled to get better out of love for the doctor. And indeed such compulsion may sometimes take bitter revenge. The "you must and shall be saved" is no more to be commended in nerve-therapy than in any other department of life. It contradicts the principle of analytic treatment, which shuns all coercion and desires to let everything grow up from within. I do not, as you know, object to influencing by use of suggestion in general, but merely to a doubtful motivation. If the doctor demands that his patient shall get well from love of himself, the patient may easily reckon on reciprocal services and will without doubt try to extort them. I can but utter a warning against any such method. A far stronger motive for recovery—also a far healthier and ethically more valuable one—consists in the patient's thorough insight into the real state of affairs, the recognition of how things are now and how they ought to be. The man of any sort of worth will then discern that he can hardly sit down at ease in the quagmire of his neurosis.
With your rendering of what I said about the healing power of personality I cannot entirely agree. I wrote that the doctor's personality has a power for healing because the patient reads the doctor's personality: not that he produces a cure through love of the doctor. The doctor cannot prevent the patient's beginning to behave himself towards his conflicts just as the doctor himself behaves, for nothing is finer than a neurotic's intuition. But every strong transference serves this same purpose. If the doctor makes himself charming, he buys off from the patient a series of resistances which he should have overcome, and whose overcoming will certainly have to be gone through later on. Nothing is won by this technique; at most the beginning of the analysis is made easy for the patient (though this is not quite without its use in certain cases). To be able to crawl through a barbed wire fence without some enticing end in view testifies to an ascetic strength of will which you can expect neither from the ordinary person nor from the neurotic. Even the Christian religion, whose moral demands certainly reached a great height, thought it no scorn to represent the near approach of the Kingdom of Heaven as goal and reward of earthly pain. In my view, the doctor may well speak of the rewards which follow the toils of analysis. But he must not depict himself or his friendship, in hints or promises, as reward, if he is not seriously determined to keep his word.
In regard to your criticism of my outline-definition of the conception of psychoanalysis, it must be observed that the road over the steep mountain is the line of least resistance only when a ferocious bull waits for you in the pleasant valley-road. In other words, the line of least resistance is a compromise with all demands, and not with inertia alone. It is prejudice to think that the line of least resistance coincides with the path of inertia. (That's what we thought in the days when we dawdled over Latin exercises.) Inertia is only an immediate advantage and leads to consequences which produce the worst resistances; as a whole, it does not lie in the direction of least resistance. Life along the line of least resistance is not synonymous with a man's regardless pursuit of his own egoistic desires. He who lives thus soon painfully perceives that he is not moving along the line of least resistance, for he is also a social being, and not merely a bundle of egoistic instincts, as some people rather like to depict him. This is best seen among primitive men and herd-animals, who all have a richly developed social sense. Without it, indeed, the herd could not exist at all. Man as herd-animal has therefore by no manner of means to subject himself to laws enforced on him from without; he carries his social imperatives within himself, a priori, as an inborn necessity. As you see, I here put myself in decided opposition to certain views—I think quite unjustified—which have been put forth here and there inside the psychoanalytic movement.
So the line of least resistance does not signify eo ipso the avoidance of unpleasure so much as the just balancing of unpleasure and pleasure. Painful activity by itself leads to no result but exhaustion. Man must be able to take pleasure in his life, or the struggle of life has no reward. What direction the patient's future life should take is not ours to judge. We must not imagine we know better than his own nature—or we prove ourselves educators of the worst kind. Psychoanalysis is but a means of removing stones from the path, and in no way a method (as hypnotism often pretends to be) of putting anything into the patient which was not there before. So we renounce any attempt to give a direction, and occupy ourselves only with setting in proper relief all that analysis brings into the light of day, in order that the patient may see clearly, and be in a position to draw the appropriate conclusions. Anything that he has not himself won, he does not in the long run believe in; and all that he has received from authority keeps him still infantile. He must rather be put in such a position as will enable him to take control of his own life. It is the art of the psychoanalyst to follow the patient's apparently mistaken paths without prejudice, and thus to discover his strayed and separated sheep. Working on a system, according to a preconceived scheme, we spoil the best results of the analysis. So I hold fast to the maxim you quote from me: "Every interference on the part of the analyst is a gross mistake in technique. So-called chance is the law and the order of psychoanalysis."
You surely recognise that the schoolmaster-view never releases us from the attempt to correct Nature and the desire to force upon her our limited "truths." In nerve-therapy we get so many wonderful experiences—unforeseen and impossible to foresee—that surely we ought to dismiss all hope of being infallibly able to point out the right path. The roundabout way and even the wrong way are necessary. If you deny this you must also deny that the errors in the history of the whole world have been necessary. That indeed were a world-conception fit for a schoolmaster. For psychoanalysis this view suits not at all.
The question as to how much the analyst involuntarily suggests to the patient is a very ticklish one. Undoubtedly that has a much more important place than psychoanalysts have till now admitted. Experience has convinced us that the patient rapidly avails himself of the ideas won through the analysis, and of whatever comes to light through the shaping of the dreams. You may obtain all manner of such impressions from Stekel's book: "Die Sprache des Traumes" ("The Language of the Dream"). I had once a most instructive experience: a very intelligent lady had from the beginning extreme transference phantasies which appeared in well-recognised erotic forms. Nevertheless she entirely declined to admit their existence. Of course she was betrayed by the dreams in which my own person was hidden behind some other figure, and often difficult to unveil. A long series of such dreams forced me at last to say: "So you see it is always like that, and the person of whom one has really dreamt is replaced and hidden by some one else in the manifest dream." Till then the patient had obstinately contested this point. But this time she could no longer evade it, and had to admit my rule—but only that she might play me a trick. Next day she brought me a dream in which she and I appeared in a manifest lascivious situation. I was naturally perplexed and thought of my rule. Her first association to the dream was the malicious question: "It's always true, isn't it, that the person of whom one is really dreaming is replaced by some one else in the manifest dream-content?"
Clearly, she had made use of her experience to find a protective formula by means of which she secured the open expression of her phantasies in an apparently innocent way.
This example aptly shows how patients avail themselves of insight gained during analysis; they use it symbolically. You get caught in your own net if you give credence to the idea of unalterable, permanent symbols. That has already happened to more than one psychoanalyst. It is therefore fallacious to try to prove any particular theory from the dreams arising in the course of analysis. For this purpose the only conclusive dreams are those derived from demonstrably uninfluenced persons. In such cases one would only have to exclude the possibility of telepathic thought-reading. But if you concede this possibility you will have to subject very many things to a rigorous re-examination and, among others, many judicial verdicts.
But although we must do full justice to the force of suggestion, we must not overrate it. The patient is no empty sack into which you may stuff whatever you like; on the contrary, he brings his own predetermined contents which strive obstinately against suggestion and always obtrude themselves afresh. Through analytic "suggestions," only the outward form is determined, never the content—this is always being freshly impressed upon my notice. The form is the unlimited, the ever-changing; but the content is fixed, and only to be assailed slowly and with great difficulty. Were it not so, suggestion-therapy would be in every respect the most effective, profitable, and easiest therapy,—a real panacea. That, alas! it is not, as every honourable hypnotist will freely admit.
To return to your question as to how far it is conceivable that patients may deceive the doctor by making use—perhaps involuntarily—of his expressions: this is indeed a very serious problem. The analyst must exercise all possible care and practise unsparing self-criticism if he would avoid, as far as possible, being led into error by patients' dreams. It may be admitted that they almost always use modes of expression in their dreams learnt in analysis—some more, some less. Interpretations of earlier symbols will themselves be used again as fresh symbols in later dreams. It happens not seldom, for instance, that sexual situations which appear in symbolic form in the earlier dreams, will appear "undisguised" in later ones, and here again they are the symbolic expression of ideas of another character capable of further analysis. The not infrequent dream of incestuous cohabitation is by no means an "undisguised" content, but a dream as freshly symbolic and capable of analysis as all others. You surely only reach the paradoxical view that such a dream is "undisguised" if you are pledged to the sexual theory of neurosis.
That the patient may mislead the doctor for a longer or shorter time by means of deliberate deception and misrepresentation is possible; just as occasionally happens in all other departments of medicine. Therewith the patient injures himself most, since he has to pay for every deception or suppression, with aggravated or additional symptoms. Deceptions are so obviously disadvantageous to himself that in the end he can scarcely avoid the definite relinquishment of such a course.
The technique of analysis we can best postpone for oral discussion.