Thus we must regard the human psyche. Only on one side is the mind a Has Been, and as such subordinate to the causal principle. On the other side the mind is a Becoming that can only be grasped synthetically or constructively. The causal standpoint asks how it is this actual mind has become what it appears to-day? The constructive standpoint asks how a bridge can be built from this actual psyche to its own future?
Just as the causal method finally reaches the general principles of human psychology by the analysis and reduction of individual events, so does the constructive standpoint reach aims that are general by the synthesis of individual tendencies. The mind is a point of passage and thus necessarily determined from two sides. On the one side it offers a picture of the precipitate of the past, and on the other side a picture of the germinating knowledge of all that is to come, in so far as the psyche creates its own future.
What has been is, on the one hand, the result and apex of all that was—as such it appears to the causal standpoint; on the other hand, it is an expression of all that is to be. The future is only apparently like the past, but in its essence always new and unique, (the causal standpoint would like to invert this sentence) thus the actual formula is incomplete, germlike so to say, in relation to what is to be.
To get any conception of this expression of what is to be we are forced to apply a constructive interest to it. I almost felt myself tempted to say, "a scientific interest." But modern science is identical with the causal principle. So long as we consider the actual mind causally, that is scientifically, we elude the mind as a Becoming. This other side of the psyche can never be grasped by the exclusive use of the causal principle, but only by means of the constructive standpoint. The causal standpoint reduces things to their elements, the constructive standpoint elaborates them into something higher and more complicated. This latter standpoint is necessarily a speculative one.
Constructive understanding is, however, differentiated from scholastic speculation because it imposes no general validity, but only subjective validity. When the speculative philosopher believes he has comprehended the world once for all by his System, he deceives himself; he has only comprehended himself and then naïvely projected that view upon the world. In reaction against this, the scientific method of the modern world has almost put an end to speculation and gone to the other extreme. It would create an "objective" psychology. In opposition to such efforts, the stress which Freud has placed upon individual psychology is of immortal merit. The extraordinary importance of the subjective in the development of the objective mental process was thus first brought adequately into prominence.
Subjective speculation lays no claim to universal validity, it is identical with constructive understanding. It is a subjective creation, which, looked at externally, easily seems to be a so-called infantile phantasy, or at least an unmistakable derivative of it; from an objective standpoint it must be judged as such, in so far as objective is regarded as identical with scientific or causal. Looked at from within, however, constructive understanding means redemption.
"Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering and easiness of living."[210]
Starting from these considerations as to the psychology of those mental patients to whom the Schreber case belongs, we must, from the "objective-scientific" standpoint, reduce the structural phantasy of the patient to its simple and most generally valid elements. This Freud had done. But that is only half of the work to be done. The other half is the constructive understanding of Schreber's system. The question is: What end, what freedom, did the patient hope to achieve by the creation of his system?
The scientific thinker of to-day will regard this question as inappropriate. The psychiatrist will certainly smile at it, for he is thoroughly assured of the universal validity of his causalism, he knows the psyche merely as something that is made, descendent, reactive. Not uncommonly there lurks the unconscious prejudice that the psyche is a brain-secretion.