I have not undertaken this analysis, for which the author owes me but little thanks, for the pleasure of revealing private and intimate matters, with the accompanying embarrassment of publicity, but because I wished to show the secret of the individual as one common to all.
CHAPTER II
[57]. A very beautiful example of this is found in C. A. Bernoulli: “Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Freundschaft,” 1908 (Pt. I, p. 72). This author depicts Nietzsche’s behavior in Basle society: “Once at a dinner he said to the young lady at his side, ‘I dreamed a short time ago that the skin of my hand, which lay before me on the table, suddenly became like glass, shiny and transparent, through which I saw distinctly the bones and the tissues and the play of the muscles. All at once I saw a toad sitting on my hand and at the same time I felt an irresistible compulsion to swallow the beast. I overcame my terrible aversion and gulped it down.’ The young lady laughed. ‘And do you laugh at that?’ Nietzsche asked, his deep eyes fixed on his companion, half questioning, half sorrowful. The young lady knew intuitively that she did not wholly understand that an oracle had spoken to her in the form of an allegory and that Nietzsche had revealed to her a glimpse into the dark abyss of his inner self.” On page 166 Bernoulli continues as follows: “One can perhaps see, behind that harmless pleasure of faultless exactness in dress, a dread of contamination arising from some mysterious and tormenting disgust.”
Nietzsche went to Basle when he was very young; he was then just at the age when other young people are contemplating marriage. Seated next to a young woman, he tells her that something terrible and disgusting is taking place in his transparent hand, something which he must take completely into his body. We know what illness caused the premature ending of Nietzsche’s life. It was precisely this which he would tell the young lady, and her laughter was indeed discordant.
[58]. A whole series of psychoanalytic experiences could easily be produced here to illustrate this statement.
[59]. Ferenczi: “Introjektion und Übertragung,” Jahrbuch, Pt. I (1912).
CHAPTER III
[60]. The choice of words and comparisons is always significant. A psychology of travels and the unconscious forces co-operating with them is yet to be written.
[61]. This mental disturbance had until recently the very unfortunate designation, Dementia Praecox, given by Kraepelin. It is extremely unfortunate that this malady should have been discovered by the psychiatrists, for its apparently bad prognosis is due to this circumstance. Dementia praecox is synonymous with therapeutic hopelessness. How would hysteria appear if judged from the standpoint of psychiatry! The psychiatrist naturally sees in the institutions only the worst cases of dementia praecox, and as a consequence of his therapeutic helplessness he must be a pessimist. How deplorable would tuberculosis appear if the physician of an asylum for the incurable described the nosology of this disease! Just as little as the chronic cases of hysteria, which gradually degenerate in insane asylums, are characteristic of real hysteria, just so little are the cases of dementia praecox in asylums characteristic of those early forms so frequent in general practice, and which Janet has described under the name of Psychasthenia. These cases fall under Bleuler’s description of Schizophrenia, a name which connotes a psychological fact, and might easily be compared with similar facts in hysteria. The term which I use in my private work for these conditions is Introversion Neurosis, by which, in my opinion, the most important characteristic of the condition is given, namely, the predominance of introversion over transference, which latter is the characteristic feature of hysteria.
In my “Psychology of Dementia Praecox” I have not made any study of the relationship of the Psychasthenia of Janet. Subsequent experience with Dementia Praecox, and particularly the study of Psychasthenia in Paris, have demonstrated to me the essential relationship of Janet’s group with the Introversion Neuroses (the Schizophrenia of Bleuler).