The history of the psychoanalytic movementFreud, Sigmund
History
The history of the psychoanalytic movement
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis -- History
fate of his watch and to the speculative remark with which he closed it:
“And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and
gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell
him.”
I will encroach upon the realm of parables and will assume that in a
certain society there lived a parvenu who boasted of descent from a very
noble family not locally known. But it so happened that it was proved to
him that his parents were living somewhere in the neighborhood and were
very simple people, indeed. Only one way out remained to him and he
seized upon it. He could no longer deny his parents, but he asserted
that they were very aristocratic by origin but much come down in the
world, and secured for them at some obliging office a document showing
their descent. It seems to me that the Swiss workers had been obliged to
act in a similar manner. If ethics and religion could not be sexualized,
but must be regarded as something “higher” from the very beginning, and
as their origin from the family and Œdipus complexes seemed undeniable,
then there was only one way out; namely, that these complexes
themselves, from the beginning, could not have the significance which
they appeared to express, but must have that higher “anagogic” sense (to
use Silberer’s nomenclature) with which they adapt themselves for proper
use in the abstract streams of thought of ethics and religious
mysticism.
I am quite prepared to be told once more that I have misunderstood the
contents and object of the theory of the New Zürich School, but here
wish to protest against being held responsible for those contradictions
to my theories that have arisen as a result of the publications of this
school. The burden of responsibility rests on them, not on me. In no
other way can I make comprehensible to myself the ensemble of Jung’s
innovations or grasp them in their associations. All the changes which
Jung has perpetrated upon psychoanalysis originated in the intention of
setting aside all that is objectionable in the family complexes, in
order that these objectionable features may not be found again in
religion and ethics. The sexual libido was replaced by an abstract idea,
of which it may be said that it remained equally mysterious and
incomprehensible alike to fools and to the wise. The Œdipus complex, we
are told, has only a “symbolical” sense, the mother therein representing
the unattainable which must be renounced in the interests of cultural
development. The father who is killed in the Œdipus myth represents the
“inner” father from whose influence we must free ourselves in order to
become independent. No doubt other portions of the material of sexual
conceptions will, in time, receive similarly new interpretations. In
place of the conflict between erotic strivings adverse to the ego and
the self-assertion, we are given the conflict between the “life-task”
and the “psychic laziness.” The neurotic guilty conscience corresponds
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