The Depths of the Soul: Psycho-Analytical StudiesStekel, Wilhelm
Science
The Depths of the Soul: Psycho-Analytical Studies
Stekel, Wilhelm
Psychoanalysis
It is the dream of all great minds to revise these overvalued ideas.
Nietzsche’s life work was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so
engaged, he himself became the victim of an overvalued idea, and his
superman will forever remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of
Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas then only could we do
full justice to his rhapsodies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” For in no
other sphere is there such luxuriance of overvalued ideas as in the
ethical. All progress has been brought about by the suppression of the
natural impulses. All our education, using the word in its true sense,
consists in investing our instincts and impulses with don’ts. The sum
total of these inhibitions we call morality. Progress consists in
getting pleasure out of the inhibition, in converting the displeasure
of being inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for this goal
results in a kind of ethical burdening. One who has had the opportunity
to study neurotics will be amazed at the many agonizing conscious pangs
they suffer from owing to their ignorance of man’s true nature. These
times pant under the burden of morality as an overvalued idea. They
are in danger of asphyxiating under the ethical burden. A false and
hypocritical morality, by disseminating an unhealthy conception of our
dispositions (instincts), has turned our views on what constitutes sin
topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too evident. On the one hand,
we behold, as evidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities,
pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate jokes, which forcibly
intrude into life and art; on the other hand, as the natural reaction
to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and pseudo-scientific sexual
literature. And all because morality became a ruinously overvalued
idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Morality will always remain
the goal of noble souls, but only that kind of morality which
harmonizes with man’s nature. Where morality does violence to nature
it becomes natural, and brings about not ethical freedom but ethical
burdening.
But morality is not the only overvalued idea that turns the half of
mankind into fools. If we survey the chaos of modern social life we
shall easily find everywhere evidences of the endless disputes and
irritating conflicts caused by overvalued ideas. Scientists may prove
that the theory of races is no longer tenable, that the asserted
purity of races is a fable, etc. Notwithstanding all that, the German
Workurka and the Czech rustic are always at each other’s throats. Why
cite other examples? In racial, religious, national, and other discords
it is always an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious evolution
impossible. Verily, the whole world is an insane asylum because the
essential factor in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air
like infectious psychic germs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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