Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

by C. G. Jung

The girl, fortunately, had not been disposed to yield, but now she regretted it, since this idiot would unquestionably have been more obedient to her father than her good man had been.

Here, as in the foregoing case, it must be clearly understood that the patient is not at all weak-minded. Both possess normal intelligence, which unfortunately the blinkers of the infantile constellation prevent their using. That appears with quite remarkable clearness in this patient's life-story. The father's authority is never questioned! It makes not the least difference that he is a quarrelsome drunkard, the obvious cause of all the quarrels and disturbances; on the contrary, the lawful husband must give way to the bogey, and at last our patient even comes to regret that her father did not succeed in completely destroying her life's happiness. So now she sets about doing that herself through her neurosis, which compels in her the wish to die, that she may go to hell, whither, be it noted, the father has already betaken himself.

If we are ever disposed to see some demonic power at work controlling mortal destiny, surely we can see it here in these melancholy silent tragedies working themselves out slowly, torturingly, in the sick souls of our neurotics. Some, step by step, continually struggling against the unseen powers, do free themselves from the clutches of the demon who forces his unsuspecting victims from one savage mischance to another: others rise up and win to freedom, only to be dragged back later to the old paths, caught in the noose of the neurosis. You cannot even maintain that these unhappy people are neurotic or "degenerates." If we normal people examine our lives from the psychoanalytic standpoint, we too perceive how a mighty hand guides us insensibly to our destiny and not always is this hand a kindly one.[157] We often call it the hand of God or of the Devil, for the power of the infantile constellation has become mighty during the course of the centuries in affording support and proof to all the religions.

But all this does not go so far as to say that we must cast the blame of inherited sins upon our parents. A sensitive child whose intuition is only too quick in reflecting in his own soul all the excesses of his parents must lay the blame for his fate on his own characteristics. But, as our last case shows, this is not always so, for the parents can (and unfortunately only too often do) fortify the evil in the child's soul, preying upon the child's ignorance to make him the slave of their complexes. In our case this attempt on the part of the father is quite obvious. It is perfectly clear why he wanted to marry his daughter to this brutish creature: he wanted to keep her and make her his slave for ever. What he did is but a crass exaggeration of what is done by thousands of so-called respectable, educated people, who have their own share in this educational dust-heap of enforced discipline. The fathers who allow their children no independent possession of their own emotions, who fondle their daughters with ill-concealed eroticism and tyrannical passion, who keep their sons in leading-strings, force them into callings and finally marry them off "suitably," and the mothers who even in the cradle excite their children with unhealthy tenderness, later on make them into slavish puppets, and then at last, out of jealousy, destroy their children's love-life fundamentally, they all act not otherwise than this stupid and brutal boor.

It will be asked, wherein lies the parents' magic power to bind their children to themselves, as with iron fetters, often for the whole of their lives? The psychoanalyst knows that it is nothing but the sexuality on both sides.

We are always trying not to admit the child's sexuality. That view only comes from wilful ignorance, which happens to be very prevalent again just now.[158]

I have not given any real analysis of these cases. We therefore do not know what happened within the hearts of these puppets of fate when they were children. A profound insight into a child's mind as it grows and lives, hitherto unattainable, is given in Freud's contribution to the first half-yearly volume of Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische u. Psychopathologische Forschungen. If I venture, after Freud's masterly presentation, to offer another small contribution to the study of the child-mind it is because the psychoanalytic records of cases seem to me always valuable.

Case 4.—An eight year old boy, intelligent, rather delicate-looking, is brought to me by his mother, on account of enuresis. During the consultation the child always hangs on to his mother, a pretty, youthful woman. The parents' marriage is a happy one, but the father is strict, and the boy (the eldest child) is rather afraid of him. The mother compensates for the father's strictness by corresponding tenderness, to which the boy responds so much that he never gets away from his mother's apron-strings. He never plays with his schoolfellows, never goes alone into the street unless he has to go to school. He fears the boys' roughness and violence and plays thoughtful games at home or helps his mother with housework. He is extremely jealous of his father. He cannot bear it when the father shows tenderness to the mother.

I took the boy aside and asked him about his dreams.

He dreams very often of a black snake which wants to bite his face. Then he cries out, and his mother has to come from the next room to his bedside.