OUTLINE OF A STUDY OF THE SELF. Robert M. Yerkes, A.M., Ph.D., and David W.
LaRue, A.M., Ph.D. Pp. 24. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1914.
EROS. Emil Lucka. Pp. xx and 379. G. P. Putnam & Sons. 1915. $1.75.
COLLECTED PAPERS OF MARGARET BANCROFT. Ware Brothers Company, Philadelphia, 1915.
EUGENICS: A SCIENCE AND AN IDEAL. Edgar Schuster. Pp. 263. Warwick & York, Inc. 40 cents.
LIFE AND WORK OF PESTALOZZI. J. A. Green. Pp. 393. Warwick & York, Inc. $1.40.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS OF TESTING INTELLIGENCE. Wm. Stern. Translated by Guy Montrose Whipple. Pp. 160. Warwick & York $1.25.
THE JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
ANGER AS A PRIMARY EMOTION, AND THE APPLICATION OF FREUDIAN MECHANISMS TO ITS PHENOMENA[*]
[*] Read at a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, New York City, May 5, 1915.
BY G. STANLEY HALL
THE exact sciences consist of a body of truth which all accept, and to which all experts strive to contribute. Philosophy, however, like religion, has always been broken into sects, schools or parties, and the body of truth which all accept in these fields is relatively far less, and the antagonistic views far greater. Normal psychology, which a few decades ago, started out to be scientific with the good old ideal of a body of truth semper ubique et ad omnibus, is already splitting into introspectionists, behaviorists, genetic, philosophical and other groups, while in the new Freudian movement, Adler and Jung are becoming sectaries, the former drawing upon himself the most impolitic and almost vituperative condemnation of the father of psychoanalysis. With this latter schism we are not here concerned, but we are deeply concerned with the more general relations between the psychologists of the normal and those of the abnormal; with a very few negligible exceptions psychoanalysis has hardly ever had a place on the program of our American Psychological Association, and the normal has had little representation in your meetings and publications. This I deem unfortunate for both, for unsatisfactory as this sadly needed rapprochement is on the continent, it is far more so here. That the normalists in this country so persistently ignore the unique opportunity to extend their purview into the psychopathological domain at the unique psychological moment that the development of Freudianism has offered, is to me a matter of sad disappointment and almost depression. In reading a plea for Freud in our association of normalists, I am a vox clamantis in deserto and can evoke no response, and even the incursions of psychoanalysis into the domain of biography, myth, religion and dreams, have not evoked a single attempt at appreciation or criticism worthy of mention by any American psychologist of the normal. I have sought in various ways the causes of this reticence, not to say ignorance. While I received various answers, the chief one was to the effect that the alleged hypertrophy of sex in its gross pathological forms, and the conviction of the kind and degree of sex consciousness found in the many hundreds of analyzed cases, are so unique and constitute the very essence of the neurotic and psychotic cases, and conscious and unconscious sex factors are slight or absent in most normal cases, that these patients and their doctors alike are sex-intoxicated, and that the Freudian psychology applies only to perverts and erotomania or other abnormal cases. To ascribe all this aversion to social or ethical repression is both shallow and banousic, for the real causes are both manifold and deeper. They are part of a complicated protest of normality, found in all and even in the resistance of subjects of analysis, which is really a factor which is basal for self-control of the varying good sides of which Freudians tell us nothing. The fact is that there are other things in the human psyche than sex, and its ramifications. Hunger, despite Jung, fear despite Sadger, and anger despite Freud, are just as primary, aboriginal and independent as sex, and we fly in the face of fact and psychic experience to derive them all from sex, although it is freely granted that in morbid cases each may take on predominant sex features. In what follows I can only very briefly hint at the way in which some of the Freudian mechanisms are applied to one of the emotions, viz., anger.
Anger in most of its forms is the most dynamogenic of all the emotions. In paroxysms of rage with abandon we stop at nothing short of death and even mutilation. The Malay running amuck, Orlando Furioso, the epic of the wrath of Achilles, hell-fire, which is an expression of divine wrath, are some illustrations of its power. Savages work themselves into frenzied rage in order to fight their enemies. In many descriptions of its brutal aspects, which I have collected, children and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell, snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably every man might be caused to commit murder if provocation were sufficient, and that those of us who have never committed this crime owe it to circumstances and not to superior power of inhibition. Of course it may be associated with sex but probably no human experience is per se more diametrically opposite to sex. Some temperaments seem to crave, if not need, outbreaks of it at certain intervals, like a well-poised lady, so sweet-tempered that everybody imposed on her, till one day at the age of twenty-three she had her first ebullition of temper end went about to her college mates telling them plainly what she thought of them, and went home rested and happy, full of the peace that passeth understanding. Otto Heinze, and by implication Pfister, think nations that have too long or too assiduously cultivated peace must inevitably sooner or later relapse to the barbarisms of war to vent their instincts for combat, and Crile thinks anger most sthenic, while Cannon says it is the emotion into which most others tend to pass. It has of course been a mighty agent in evolution, for those who can summate all their energies in attack have survived. But few if any impulsions of man, certainly not sex, have suffered more intense, prolonged or manifold repressions. Courts and law have taken vengeance into their hands or tried to, and not only a large proportion of assaults, but other crimes, are still due to explosions of temper, and it may be a factor in nearly every court case. Society frowns on it, and Lord Chesterfield says the one sure and unfailing mark of a gentleman is that he never shows temper. Its manifestations are severely tabooed in home and school. Religion teaches us not to let the sun go down upon our wrath and even to turn the other cheek, so that we go through life chronically afraid that we shall break out, let ourselves go, or get thoroughly mad, so that the moment we begin to feel a rising tide of indignation or resentment (in the nomenclature of which our language is so very rich, Chamberlain having collected scores of English expressions of it), the censorship begins to check it. In many cases in our returns repression is so potent from long practice, that the sweetest smile, the kindest remarks or even deeds are used either to veil it to others, or to evict it from our own consciousness, or else as a self-inflicted penance for feeling it, while in some tender consciences its checked but persistent vestiges may become centers of morbid complexes and in yet other cases it burrows and proliferates more or less unconsciously, and finds secret and circuitous ways of indulgence which only psychoanalysis or a moral or religious confessional could trace.
I. Anger has many modes of Verschiebung, both instinctive and cultivated. One case in our returns carries a bit of wood in his vest-pocket and bites it when he begins to feel the aura of temper. Girls often play the piano loudly, and some think best of all. One plays a particular piece to divert anger, viz., the "Devil's Sonata." A man goes down cellar and saws wood, which he keeps for such occasions. A boy pounds a resonant eavespout. One throws a heavy stone against a white rock. Many go off by themselves and indulge in the luxury of expressions they want none to hear. Others take out their tantrum on the dog or cat or perhaps a younger child, or implicate some absent enemy, while others curse. A few wound themselves, and so on, till it almost seems, in view of this long list of vicariates, as if almost any attack, psychic or physical, might thus be intensified, and almost anything or person be made the object of passion. Be it remembered, too, that not a few look, do, think, feel their best under this impulsion.
II. Besides these modes of Abreagierung there are countless forms of sublimation. In anger a boy says: I will avenge myself on the bully who whipped me and whom I cannot or will not whip, by besting him in his studies, class-work, composition, or learn skilful stunts that he cannot do, dress, or behave better, use better language, keep better company, and thus find my triumph and revenge. A man rejected or scorned by a woman sometimes makes a great man of himself, with the motivation more or less developed to make her sorry or humiliated. Anger may prompt a man to go in to win his enemy's girl. A taunt or an insult sometimes spurs the victim of it to towering ambition to show the world and especially the abuser better, and to be able to despise him in return; and there are those who have been thus stung to attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy of success in the feeling that by attaining it they compensate for indignities they suffered in youth. In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal, and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.
III. Anger has also its dreams and reveries. When wronged the imagination riots in fancied humiliation and even tortures of an enemy. An object of hate may be put through almost every conceivable series of degradation, ridicule, exposure and disgrace. He is seen by others for what our hate deems him to be. All disguises are stripped off. Children sometimes fancy a hated object of anger flogged until he is raw, abandoned by all his friends, an outcast, homeless, alone, in the dark, starving, exposed to wild animals, and far more often more prosaic fancies conceive him as whipped by a parent or stronger friend, or by the victim himself later. Very clever strategies are thought out in detail by which the weaker gets even with or vanquishes the stronger, and one who suffers a rankling sense of injustice can hardly help day-dreaming of some form of comeuppance for his foe, although it takes years to do it. In these reveries the injurer in the end almost always gives up and sues for mercy at the feet of his quondam victim. So weird and dramatic are these scenes often that to some minds we must call anger and hate the chief springs of the imagination. A pubescent girl who was deeply offended went off by herself and held an imaginary funeral of her enemy, hearing in fancy the disparaging remarks of the bystanders, and when it was all over and the reaction came, she made up with the object of her passion by being unusually sweet to her and even became solicitous about her health as fearing that her revery might come true. We all too remember Tolstoi's reminiscences when, having been flogged by his tutor, he slunk off to the attic, weeping and broken-hearted, and finally after a long brooding resolved to run away and become a soldier, and this he did in fancy, becoming corporal, lieutenant, captain, colonel. Finally came a great battle where he led a desperate charge that was crowned with victory, and when all was over and he stood tottering, leaning on his sword, bloody and with many a wound, and the great Czar of all the Russias approached, saluted him as saviour of his fatherland and told him to ask whatever he wanted and it was his, replied magnanimously that he had only done his duty and wanted no reward. All he asked was that his tutor might be brought up and his head cut off. Then the scene changed to other situations, each very different, florid with details, but motivated by ending in the discomfiture of the tutor. In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and the tutor got on better.
IV. Richardson has collected 882 cases of mild anger, introspected by graduate students of psychology, and finds not only over-determination, anger fetishes and occasionally anger in dreams with patent and latent aspects and about all the Freudian mechanisms, but what is more important, finds very much of the impulsion that makes us work and strive, attack and solve problems has an element of anger at its root. Life is a battle and for every real conquest man has had to summate and focus all his energies, so that anger is the acme of the manifestation of Schopenhauer's will to live, achieve and excel. Hiram Stanley rather absurdly described it as an epoch when primitive man first became angry and fought, overcoming the great quaternary carnivora and made himself the lord of creation. Plato said anger was the basis of the state, Ribot made it the establisher of justice in the world, and Bergson thinks society rests on anger at vice and crime, while Stekel thinks that temper qualities should henceforth be treated in every biography and explored in every case that is psychoanalyzed. Hill's experiments with pugilism, and Cannon's plea for athletics as a legitimate surrogate for war in place of James' moral substitute, Frank Howard's opinion that an impulse that Darwin finds as early as the sixth week and hardly any student of childhood later than the sixth month, and which should not be repressed but developed to its uttermost, although carefully directed to worthy objects, are all in point. Howard pleads for judicious scolding and flogging, to be, done in heat and not in cold blood, and says that there is enough anger in the world, were it only rightly directed, to sweep away all the evils in it. In all these phenomena there is no trace of sex or any of its symbols, and sadism can never explain but must be explained by it. My thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory.
In this very slight paper I am only trying to make the single point which I think fear and sympathy or the gregarious or social instinct would still better illustrate, although it would require more time, that the movement inaugurated by Freud opens up a far larger field than that of sex. The unconscious that introspectionists deny, (asserting that all phenomena ascribed to it are only plain neural mechanisms, and therefore outside the realm of psychology,) the feelings which introspection can confessedly never tell much about and concerning which our text-books in psychology still say so little: studies in these fields are marking a new epoch, and here the chief merit of Freudism is found.
THE NECESSITY OF METAPHYSICS
BY JAMES J. PUTNAM, M. D.
SOME years ago, at the Weimar Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, I read a paper on the importance of a knowledge of philosophy and metaphysics for psychoanalysts regarded as students of human life. Perhaps if I had had the experience and ability to contribute the results of some original analytic investigation on specific lines, I should not then have ventured into the philosophic field. Perhaps, indeed, if those conditions now obtained I should not be bringing forward similar arguments again, and if any one feels tempted to maintain that philosophic speculation is a camp of refuge for those who, in consequence of temperamental limitations and infantile fixations which ought to be overcome, draw back from the more robust study of emotional repressions on scientific lines, I should admit that the allegation contains an element of truth. But in spite of this, and in spite of the fact that there is some truth also in the statement that the effects-good and bad-of emotional repression make themselves felt, as a partial influence, in all the highest reaches of human endeavor, including art, literature, and religion;-in spite of these partial truths, philosophy and metaphysics are the only means through which the essential nature of many tendencies can be studied of which psychoanalysis describes only the transformations. And this being so it is perhaps reasonable that one paper should be read at an annual meeting such as this, where men assemble whose duty it is to study the human mind in all its aspects.
I presume that just as, and just because men have minds AND bodies, an evolutional history in the ordinary sense and a mental history in a sense not commonly considered, so there will always be two, or perhaps three, parties among psychologists and men of science, and each one, in so far as it is limited in its vision, may be considered as abnormal, if one will. I decline, however, to admit that the temperamental peculiarities of one group are more in need either of justification or of rectification through psychoanalysis than those of the others. It is probably true that emotional tension often plays a larger part among persons who love a priori reasoning-the "tender-minded" of Dr. James-than it does in those who work through observation; but on the other hand exclusively empirical attitude has its limitations and its dangers. Philosophy and metaphysics deal more distinctively with essential function-that is with real existence,-while natural science and the genetic psychology (of which psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, is a branch) deal rather with appearances and with structure. Both are in need of investigation. The FORM which art, religion, and literature assume is determined by men's personal experiences and special cravings. The essential motive of art and religion is, however, the dim recognition by men of their relation to the creative spirit of the universe.
No one can doubt that function logically precedes structure; or if any one does doubt this, he need only observe his own experience and see how in every new acquisition of knowledge or of power there come, first, the thought, the idea, then the effort, next the habit, and finally the modification of cerebral mechanism, in which the effort and the habit become represented in relatively permanent and static form. In fact, the crux of the whole discussion between science and metaphysics turns on, or harks back to the discussion between function and structure; and it is the latter, in the sense in which I mean the word, that has had of late a too large share of our attention.
The enterprise on which we are all of us embarked,-whether we define it as an investigation, pure and simple, into human nature and human motives, or as a therapeutic attempt to relieve invalids of their symptoms,-is a larger one than it is commonly conceived of as being. Each physician and each investigator has, indeed, the right to say that for practical reasons he prefers to confine his attention to some single portion of one or the other of these tasks, be it never so small. But each one should regard himself as virtually under an obligation to recognize the respects in which this chosen task is incomplete. Every physicist is aware that there is some form of energy underlying, or rather expressing itself in, light and heat and gravitation. Physicists do not study this form of energy, not because they do not wish to but simply because they cannot do so by the only methods that they are allowed to use. But, as a reaction of defense, they sometimes assert that no one else can do so either, that this underlying energy cannot be explained. To say this is, however, in my judgment, to misappreciate what an explanation is.
To explain any matter is to discover the points of similarity, or virtual identity, between the matter studied and ourselves. But in order to do this thoroughly, or rather in order to do it with relation to the essential nature of some form of energy (the "Libido," for example, considered as an unpicturable force) one must first consider what we, the investigators, are, not at our less good, but at our best. It is with us, as given, with our best qualities regarded as defining in part the Q. E. D. of the experiment, that the investigation must begin. The nature of any and every form of real underlying energy or essence must be defined in terms of our sense of our own will and freedom. And this means that we must conceive and describe ourselves, and expect to conceive and to describe the powers that animate us, no longer as a system of forces subject to the so-called laws of nature (which are, in reality, not immutable) but as relatively free, creative agents; no longer as the product of the interplay of instincts, but as individuals possessed of real reason, real power of love and real self-consistent will. To claim to study the effects of the "Libido," to which we ascribe the vast powers with which we are familiar, yet fail to seek in it what would correspond to our own best attributes, would be to lay aside our duties as students of human nature. It would be to confine our attention to the "structure" of the mind, the form under which it manifests itself, without having studied the laws of its action under conditions which are more favorable to its development.
It must, now, have struck students of psychoanalytic literature that a marked tendency has been shown toward supplementing the study of structure,-that is, the detailed history of men's experiences and evolution, regarded as sequences of phenomena,-by the study of the function or creative energy for which the experiences stand. Silberer, whose work is endorsed by Freud, has gone to a considerable length in this direction; and the whole tendency of Freud's insistence on the relevancy, in the mental sphere, of the law of the conservation of energy has been a movement, though, I think, a narrow one, in this direction. More recently, Jung has emphasized the importance of this tendency, and has dwelt more strongly, as I think, than the facts warrant, on the supposed unwillingness of Freud to recognize its importance.
Behind the experiences of childhood, for example, lie the temperamental trends of childhood, and it is these with which we really need to get acquainted; for these trends, if not the whole causes and equivalents of the experiences which are recounted to us by our patients, constitute the conditions without which the latter would not have been what they became.
But Jung himself, strangely enough, in both of his carefully prepared arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically" with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, even though not in name.
The skilled observer, scrutinizing the motives and peering into the history of the person whose traits and trends he is called on to investigate, must see, in imagination, not only a vast host of acts, but also a vast network of intersecting lines of energy of which the casual observer, and even the intimate friend, may be wholly unaware. We call these lines of energy by many special names,-"Libido" or "Urlibido," first of all, then love and hate and jealousy, and so on.
What are these lines of energy, and how can we study them to the best purpose? Obviously they are incomplete editions of the love and reason and will the laws of which we can study to best advantage in ourselves and in men where they are displayed in their best, that is, in their most constructive form. To make such studies is to recognize metaphysics, but instead of doing of doing this tacitly and implicitly we should do it openly and explicitly.
The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed.
The psychologist should sympathize deeply with the anatomist and the physiologist and the student of cerebral pathology, but equally deeply with the philosopher and the metaphysician who study the implications, present although hidden, that point to the bonds between the individual and the universe. To fail to recognize that these bonds exist,-as is done when the attempt is made to study human beings as if they were really and exclusively the product of their historic past conceived of in an organic sense,-would be to try to build one-half of an arch and expect it to endure. The truth is, we do not, in my opinion, genuinely believe that a human is nothing but the product of his organic past, or the product of his experience.
We believe, by implication, in our metaphysical selves and our corresponding obligations, more strongly than we have taught ourselves to recognize. But to this fact we make ourselves blind through a species of repression, just as many a child, confident of its parents' affection, assumes, for his own temporary purposes, the right to accuse them of hostile intentions which they do not entertain.
We forget, or repress, the fact that the mind of man cannot be made subject to the laws of physics, and yet we proceed to deal with the phenomena dependent on the working of the mind of man as if these laws actually did prevail.
The misleading effects of this tendency are clearly seen where it is a question of the conclusions to be drawn from the researches, admirable in themselves, made under the influence of the genetic method.
The notion seems to prevail that we should prepare ourselves for the formation of just ideas with regard to the mode in which the higher faculties of men come into existence by wiping the slate clean to the extent of assuming that we have before us no data except some few acts or thoughts that are definable in the simplest possible terms, and then watching what happens as the situation becomes more complicated. But one is apt to forget, in doing this, that there is one thing which we cannot wipe off the slate,-namely, ourselves, not taken in the Bergsonian sense alone, but as fully fledged persons, possessed of the very qualities for which we undertake to search, yet without the possession of which the search could not begin. This does not, of course, militate against the value of these genetic researches in one sense. The study of evolutional sequences is still, and forever will be, of enormous value. But it does not teach us nearly as much of the nature of real creativeness as we can learn through the introspection of ourselves in the fullest sense; and I maintain that psychoanalysts are persons who could do this to advantage.
Is not the notion that through the careful watching of the sequences of the evolutionary process, as if from without, we can get an adequate idea of the forces that really are at work, exactly the delusion by which the skillful juggler tries to deceive his audience when he directs their attention to the shifting objects that he manipulates, and away from his own swiftly moving hands?
My contention is that there are other means of studying the force which we call "Libido" besides that of noting its effects. The justification for this statement is that the force itself is identical, in the last analysis, with that which we feel within ourselves and know as reason, as imagination, and as will, conscious of themselves, and capable of giving to us, directly or indirectly, the only evidence we could ever hope to get, for the existence of real creativeness, spontaneity and freedom.
Every work of art, worthy of the name, gives evidence of the action not alone of a part of a man, but of the whole man; not only of his repressed emotions, but of his intelligence and insight, and of relationships existing between his life and all the other forms of life with which his own is interwoven.
Unity must prevail throughout all nature. Either we are,-altogether, and through and through, our best as well as our less good,-nothing but the expression of repressed cravings, in the sense that they or the conflicts based on them constitute the final causa vera of all progress; or else the best that is in us and also our repressed cravings are alike due to the action of a form of energy which is virtually greater than either one of them, inasmuch as it has the capacity of developing into something greater than either.
This is the agency which we should preeminently study and it is best studied under conditions when, instead of being obviously subject to repression, it is most free from repression. That is, it is best studied as it appears in the thoughts and conduct of the best men, at their best, their most constructive moments.
We cannot use our power of reason to deny our reason; for in so doing we affirm the very thing which we deny. Nor are we under the necessity of using our reason to affirm our reason, since that is the datum without which we cannot undertake our task.
If this view is sound, what practical conclusions can we draw from it? I wish to insist on this question because it was distinctly and positively with the practical end in mind that I ventured to write this paper, and I suggest the following as a few of these conclusions.
(I) We should not speak of the "Libido," in whatever sense this word is taken, as if it were a fixed quantity, like so much heat, or so much fluid, that is, as representing so much mesaurable force. One current notion which has played a very useful part in psychoanalytic work, yet is misleading in its tendency, is that the "Libido" may be likened to a river which if it cannot find an outlet through its normal channel is bound to overflow its banks and perhaps furrow out a new path. This conception is based on this same law of the conservation of energy to which reference has been made. If, however, I am right in my contention that the "Libido" is only one manifestation of an energy,- greater than simply "vital,"-which can be studied to the best purpose only among men whose powers have been cultivated to the best advantage, then it will be seen that this conception of "Libido" as a force of definite amount is not justifiable by the facts.
One does not find that love or reason is subject to this quantitative law. On the contrary, the persons whom most of us recognize as of the highest type do not love any given individual less because their love takes in another. The bond of love holds not only three, but an indefinite number.
The same statement may be made with regard to reason and to will. The power and quantity of them are not exhausted but are increased by use.
I maintain, then, that although the "Libido," in so far as it is regarded as an instinct, does not stand on the same footing with the reason and disinterested love of a person of high cultivation and large views, neither does it stand on the same footing with the physical energy that manifests itself in light and heat and gravitation.
When we come to deal with man and any of his attributes, or as we find them at any age, we ought to look upon him, in my estimation, as animated in some measure by his self-foreshadowing best. And whether it is dreams with which we have to do, or neurotic conflicts, or wilfulness, or regression, we shall learn to see, more and more, as we become accustomed to look for evidences thereof, the signs of this sort of promise, just as we might hope to learn to find, more and more, through the inspection of a lot of seeds of different plants, the evidences which would enable us to see the different outcomes which each one is destined to achieve, even though, at first, they all looked just alike.
(2) The next point has reference to "sublimation." This outcome of individual evolution, as defined by Freud, has a strictly social, not an ethical, meaning. Jung also, in the interesting paper referred to, in his description of the rational aims of psychoanalysis, makes sublimation (though he does not there use the word) the equivalent of a subjective sense of well being, combined with the maximum of biologic effectiveness.
"Die Psychoanalyse soll eine biologische Methode sein, welche das hoechste subjektive Wohlbefinden mit der wertwollsten biologischen Leistung zu vereinigen sucht."
But in my opinion, while it may be true that the psychoanalyst may often have reason to be thankful if he can claim a therapeutic outcome of this sort, the logical goal of a psychoanalytic treatment is not covered by the securing of a relative freedom from subjective distress, even when combined with the satisfactory fulfillment of one's biologic mission. A man has higher destinies than this, and the sense of incompleteness felt by the neurotic patient, which was emphasized by Janet and is recognized by us all, must be more or less painfully felt by every man whose conscience does not assure him that he is really working for an end greater than that here specified. The logical end of a psychoanalytic treatment is the recovery of a full sense of one's highest destiny and origin and of the bearings and meanings of one's life.
On similar grounds I think that the conflicts to which all men find themselves subjected, must be considered, in the last analysis, as conflicts of an ethical description. For it is only in ethical terms that one can define one's relation to the universe regarded as a whole, just as it is only in ethical terms that a man could describe his sense of obligation to support the dignity of fine family traditions or the ideals represented by a team or a social group of which he felt reason to be proud. I realize that a man's sense of pride of his family, his team, or his country may be a symptom of narcistic self-adulation; but like all such signs and symbols-the symbol of the church tower, for example-this is a case where two opposing meanings meet.