The Depths of the Soul: Psycho-Analytical StudiesStekel, Wilhelm
Science
The Depths of the Soul: Psycho-Analytical Studies
Stekel, Wilhelm
Psychoanalysis
Primitive people find their second world in religion. From their
primitive fears for the preservation of their lives they flee to their
gods, whom they love and fear, punish and reward. The same thing is
true of all those simple souls whom culture has not robbed of their
religious belief. To them religion is the second world which gives
them rich consolation and solace for the pains of the first world. In
his book “Seelenkunde,” Benedict attributes anarchism to an absence of
consolatory life-lies. He says: “Our free-thinking times have stopped
up this source and it is the duty of society to create a consoling
life-truth, otherwise that psychic inner life which hoards up bitter
hatred will not cease.”
The more highly developed a person’s mind is, the more complicated is
his second world. People often express surprise at the fact that so
many physicians devote themselves passionately to music or the other
fine arts. To me it seems very simple. All day long they see life in
its most disagreeable aspects. They see the innocent sufferings, the
frightful tortures which they cannot relieve. They look behind the
curtain of the “happy family”; they wade through all the repellant
and disgusting filthiness of this petty world, and they would have to
become dull and non-partisan animals did they not have their second
world.
There is first of all music, which is so dear to all of us because it
is an all-embracing mother which absorbs all the emotions of hatred,
anger, love, envy, fear, and despair, and fuses them all into one
great rhythm, into one great vibrating emotion of pleasure. On its
trembling waves the thoughts of the poor tortured human soul are borne
out into the darkness of uncomprehended eternity and the eternally
incomprehensible.
Then there is literature. We open a book and at once we are transported
into the second world of another ego, a world which in a few minutes
becomes our own. Happy poets, who have been endowed with the gift of
saying what they see, of giving form to what they dream, of freeing
themselves from their energies, of abreacting their secret sufferings
and of making others happy by opening up to them a second world!
Then there are the thousand and one forms of play; sports and in fact
everything that tears us away from our daily grind. What is the lottery
ticket to the poor wage-earner but an instalment on the pleasures of
the second world, or the purchased right of joyous hope?
There is the devotion to clubs and fraternal associations. The
henpecked husband flees wrathfully to his club where he can freely and
fearlessly launch all those fine argumentative speeches which he has to
suppress at home. Here he can rule, here he can play the role of the
independent master. For many thousands the club is nothing more than an
opportunity to work off their energies, to get rid of unused emotions
and to play that role which life in the first sphere has denied them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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