This digression on the psychoanalytic method has seemed to me to be unavoidable. I was obliged to give you an account of the method and its position in methodology, by reason of all the extensive misunderstandings which are constantly attempting to discredit it. I do not doubt that there are superficial and improper interpretations of the method. But an intelligent critic ought never to allow this to be a reproach to the method itself, any more than a bad surgeon should be urged as an objection to the common validity of surgery. I do not doubt that some inaccurate descriptions and conceptions of the psychoanalytic method have arisen on the part of the psychoanalytic school itself. But this is due to the fact that, because of their education in natural science it is difficult for medical men to attain a full grasp of historical or philological method, although they instinctively handle it rightly.
The method I have described to you, in this general way, is the method that I adopt and for which I assume the scientific responsibility.
In my opinion it is absolutely reprehensible and unscientific to question about dreams, or to try to interpret them directly. This is not a methodological, but an arbitrary proceeding, which is its own punishment, for it is as unproductive as every false method.
If I have made the attempt to demonstrate to you the principle of the psychoanalytic school by dream-analysis, it is because the dream is one of the clearest instances of those contents of the conscious, whose basis eludes any plain and direct understanding. When anyone knocks in a nail with a hammer, to hang something up, we can understand every detail of the action. But it is otherwise with the act of baptism, where every phase is problematic. We call these actions, of which the meaning and the aim is not directly evident, symbolic actions or symbols. On the basis of this reasoning, we call a dream symbolic, as a dream is a psychological formation, of which the origin, meaning and aim are obscure, inasmuch as it represents one of the purest products of unconscious constellation. As Freud strikingly says: “The dream is the via regia to the unconscious.” Besides the dream, we can note many effects of unconscious constellation. We have in the association-experiments a means for establishing exactly the influence of the unconscious. We find those effects in the disturbances of the experiment which I have called the “indicators of the complex.” The task which the association-experiment gives to the person experimented upon is so extraordinarily easy and simple that even children can accomplish it without difficulty. It is, therefore, very remarkable that so many disturbances of an intentional action should be noted in this experiment. The only reasons or causes of these disturbances which can usually be shown, are the partly conscious, partly not-conscious constellations, caused by the so-called complexes. In the greater number of these disturbances, we can without difficulty establish the relation to images of emotional complexes. We often need the psychoanalytic method to explain these relations, that is, we have to ask the person experimented upon or the patient, what associations he can give to the disturbed reactions. We thus gain the historical matter which serves as a basis for our judgment. The intelligent objection has already been made that the person experimented upon could say what he liked, in other words, any nonsense. This objection is made, I believe, in the unconscious supposition that the historian who collects the matter for his monograph is an idiot, incapable of distinguishing real parallels from apparent ones and true documents from crude falsifications. The professional man has means at his disposal by which clumsy mistakes can be avoided with certainty, and the slighter ones very probably. The mistrust of our opponents is here really delightful. For anyone who understands psychoanalytic work it is a well-known fact that it is not so very difficult to see where there is coherence, and where there is none. Moreover, in the first place these fraudulent declarations are very significant of the person experimented upon, and secondly, in general rather easily to be recognized as fraudulent.
In association-experiments, we are able to recognize the very intense effects produced by the unconscious in what are called complex-interventions. These mistakes made in the association-experiment are nothing but the prototypes of the mistakes made in everyday life, which are for the greater part to be considered as interventions. Freud brought together such material in his book, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.”
These include the so-called symptomatic actions, which from another point of view might equally as well be called “symbolic actions,” and the real failures to carry out actions, such as forgetting, slips of the tongue, etc. All these phenomena are the effect of unconscious constellations and therefore so many entrance-gates into the domain of the unconscious. When such errors are cumulative, they are designated as neurosis, which, from this aspect, looks like a defective action and therefore the effect of unconscious constellations or complex-interventions.
The association-experiment is thus not directly a means to unlock the unconscious, but rather a technique for obtaining a good selection of defective reactions, which can then be used by psychoanalysis. At least, this is its most reliable form of application at the present time. I may, however, mention that it is possible that it may furnish other especially valuable facts which would grant us some direct glimpses, but I do not consider this problem sufficiently ripe to speak about. Investigations in this direction are going on.
I hope that, through my explanation of our method, you may have gained somewhat more confidence in its scientific character, so that you will be by this time more inclined to agree that the phantasies which have been hitherto discovered by means of psychoanalytic work are not merely arbitrary suppositions and illusions of psychoanalysts. Perhaps you are even inclined to listen patiently to what those products of unconscious phantasies can tell us.
CHAPTER VII
The Content of the Unconscious
The phantasies of adults are, in so far as they are conscious, of great diversity and strongly individual. It is therefore nearly impossible to give a general description of them. But it is very different when we enter by means of analysis into the world of his unconscious phantasies. The diversities of the phantasies are indeed very great, but we do not find those individual peculiarities which we find in the conscious self. We meet here with more typical material which is not infrequently repeated in a similar form in different people. Constantly recurring, for instance, are ideas which are variations of the thoughts we encounter in religion and mythology. This fact is so convincing that we say we have discovered in these phantasies the same mechanisms which once created mythological and religious ideas. I should have to enter very much into detail in order to give you adequate examples. I must refer you for these problems to my work, “Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.” I will only mention that, for instance, the central symbol of Christianity—self-sacrifice—plays an important part in the phantasies of the unconscious. The Viennese School describes this phenomenon by the ambiguous term castration-complex. This paradoxical use of the term follows from the particular attitude of this school toward the question of unconscious sexuality. I have given special attention to the problem in the book I have just mentioned; I must here restrict myself to this incidental reference and hasten to say something about the origin of the unconscious phantasy.