Further Remarks on the Etiology of Neurosis
The more we penetrate into the heart of infantile development, the more we receive the impression that as little can be found there of etiological significance, as in the infantile shock. Even with the acutest ferreting into history, we shall never discover why people living on German soil had just such a fate, and why the Gauls another. The further we get away, in analytical investigations from the epoch of the manifest neurosis, the less can we expect to find the real motive of the neurosis, since the dynamic disproportions grow fainter and fainter the further we go back into the past. In constructing our theory so as to deduce the neurosis from causes in the distant past, we are first and foremost obeying the impulse of our patients to withdraw themselves as far as possible from the critical present. The pathogenic conflict exists only in the present moment. It is just as if a nation wanted to regard its miserable political conditions at the actual moment as due to the past; as if the Germany of the 19th century had attributed its political dismemberment and incapacity to its suppression by the Romans, instead of having sought the actual sources of her difficulties in the present. Only in the actual present are the effective causes, and only here are the possibilities of removing them.