The Theory of Psychoanalysis

by C. G. Jung

It is a very suspicious circumstance that these patients frequently show a pronounced tendency to account for their illnesses by some long-past event, ingeniously withdrawing the attention of the physician from the present moment towards some false track in the past. This false track was the first one pursued by the psychoanalytic theory. To this false hypothesis we owe an insight into the understanding of the neurotic symptoms never before reached, an insight we should not have gained if the investigation had not chosen this path, really guided thither, however, by the misleading tendencies of the patient.

I think that only a man who regards world-happenings as a chain of more or less fortuitous contingencies, and therefore believes that the guiding hand of the reason-endowed pedagogue is permanently wanted, can ever imagine that this path, upon which the patient leads the physician, has been a wrong one, from which one ought to have warned men off with a sign-board. Besides the deeper insight into psychological determination, we owe to the so-called error the discovery of questions of immeasurable importance regarding the basis of psychic processes. It is for us to rejoice and be thankful that Freud had the courage to let himself be guided along this path. Not thus is the progress of science hindered, but rather through blind adherence to a provisional formulation, through the typical conservatism of authority, the vanity of learned men, their fear of making mistakes. This lack of the martyr’s courage is far more injurious to the credit and greatness of scientific knowledge than an honest error.

Retardation of the Emotional Development

But let us return to our own case. The following question arises: If the old trauma is not of etiological significance, then the cause of the manifest neurosis is probably to be found in the retardation of the emotional development. We must therefore disregard the patient’s assertion that her hysterical crises date from the fright from the shying horses, although this fright was in fact the beginning of her evident illness. This event only seems to be important, although it is not so in reality. This same formula is valid for all the so-called shocks. They only seem to be important because they are the starting-point of the external expression of an abnormal condition. As explained in detail, this abnormal condition is an anachronistic continuation of an infantile stage of libido-development. These patients still retain forms of the libido which they ought to have renounced long ago. It is impossible to give a list, as it were, of these forms, for they are of an extraordinary variety. The most common, which is scarcely ever absent, is the excessive activity of phantasies, characterized by an unconcerned exaggeration of subjective wishes. This exaggerated activity is always a sign of want of proper employment of the libido. The libido sticks fast to its use in phantasies, instead of being employed in a more rigorous adaptation to the real conditions of life.

Introversion

This state is called the state of introversion, the libido is used for the psychical inner world instead of being applied to the external world. A regular attendant symptom of this retardation in the emotional development is the so-called parent-complex. If the libido is not used entirely for the adaptation to reality, it is always more or less introverted. The material content of the psychic world is composed of reminiscences, giving it a vividness of activity which in reality long since ceased to pertain thereto. The consequence is, that these patients still live more or less in a world which in truth belongs to the past. They fight with difficulties which once played a part in their life, but which ought to have been obliterated long ago. They still grieve over matters, or rather they are still concerned with matters, which should have long ago lost their importance for them. They divert themselves, or distress themselves, with images which were once normally of importance for them but are of no significance at their later age.

The Complex of the Parents

Amongst those influences most important during childhood, the personalities of the parents play the most potent part. Even if the parents have long been dead, and might and should have lost all real importance, since the life-conditions of the patients are perhaps totally changed, yet these parents are still somehow present and as important as if they were still alive. Love and admiration, resistance, repugnance, hate and revolt, still cling to their figures, transfigured by affection and very often bearing little resemblance to the past reality. It was this fact which forced me to talk no longer of father and mother directly, but to employ instead the term “image” (imago) of mother or of father for these phantasies no longer deal with the real father and the real mother, but with the subjective, and very often completely altered creations of the imagination which prolong an existence only in the patient’s mind.

The complex of the parents’ images, that is to say, the sum of ideas connected with the parents, provides an important field of employment for the introverted libido. I must mention in passing that the complex has in itself but a shadowy existence in so far as it is not invested with libido. Following the usage that we arrived at in the “Diagnostische Associationsstudien,” the word “complex” is used for a system of ideas already invested with, and actuated by, libido. This system exists as a mere possibility, ready for application, if not invested with libido either temporarily or permanently.

The “Nucleus”-Complex.—At the time when the psychoanalytic theory was still under the dominance of the trauma conception and, in conformity with that view, inclined to look for the causa efficiens of the neurosis in the past, the parent-complex seemed to us to be the so-called root-complex—to employ Freud’s term—or nucleus-complex (“Kerncomplex”).