Carl Jung: In Memory of Sigmund Freud
The cultural history of the past fifty years is inseparably bound up with the name of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who has just died.
The Freudian outlook has affected practically every sphere of our contemporary thinking, except that of the exact sciences.
Wherever the human psyche plays a decisive role, this outlook has left its mark, above all in the broad field of psychopathology, then in psychology, philosophy, aesthetics, ethnology and—last but not least—the psychology
of religion.
Everything that man can say about the nature of the psyche, whether it be true or only apparently true, necessarily touches upon the foundations of all the humane sciences, even though the really decisive discoveries have been made within the sphere of medicine, which, as we know, cannot be counted among the “humanities.”
Freud was first and foremost a “nerve specialist” in the strictest sense of this word, and in every respect he always remained one.
By training he was no psychiatrist, no psychologist, and no philosopher.
In philosophy he lacked even the most rudimentary elements of education. He once assured me personally that it had never occurred to him to read Nietzsche.
This fact is of importance in understanding Freud’s peculiar views, which are distinguished by an apparently total lack of any philosophical premises.
His theories bear the unmistakable stamp of the doctor’s consulting-room.
His constant point of departure is the neurotically degenerate psyche, unfolding its secrets with a mixture of reluctance and ill-concealed enjoyment under the critical eye of the doctor.
But as the neurotic patient, besides having his individual sickness, is also an exponent of the local and contemporary mentality, a bridge exists from the start between the doctor’s view of his particular case and certain general assumptions.
The existence of this bridge enabled Freud to turn his intuition from the narrow confines of the consulting-room to the wide world of moral, philosophical, and religious ideas, which also, unhappily enough, proved themselves amenable to this critical investigation.
Freud owed his initial impetus to Charcot, his great teacher at the Salpetriere.
The first fundamental lesson he learnt there was the teaching about hypnotism and suggestion, and in 1888 he translated Bernheim’s book on the latter subject.
The other was Charcot’s discovery that hysterical symptoms were the consequence of certain ideas that had taken possession of the patient’s
“brain.”
Charcot’s pupil, Pierre Janet, elaborated this theory in his comprehensive work Nevroses et idees fixes and provided it with the necessary foundations.
Freud’s older colleague in Vienna, Joseph Breuer, furnished an illustrative case in support of this exceedingly important discovery (which, incidentally, had been made long before by many a family doctor),
building upon it a theory of which Freud said that it “coincides with the medieval view once we substitute a psychological formula for the ‘demon’ of priestly fantasy.”
The medieval theory of possession (toned down by Janet to “obsession”) was thus taken over by Breuer and Freud in a more positive form, the
evil spirit—to reverse the Faustian miracle—being transmogrified into a harmless “psychological formula.”
It is greatly to the credit of both investigators that they did not, like the rationalistic Janet, gloss over the significant analogy with possession, but
rather, following the medieval theory, hunted up the factor causing the possession in order, as it were, to exorcize the evil spirit.
Breuer was the first to discover that the pathogenic “ideas” were memories of certain events which he called “traumatic.”
This discovery carried forward the preliminary work done at the Salpetriere, and it laid the foundation of all Freud’s theories. As early as 1893 both men recognized the far-reaching practical importance of their findings.
They realized that the symptom-producing “ideas” were rooted in an affect.
This affect had the peculiarity of never really coming to the surface, so that it was never really conscious.
The task of the therapist was therefore to “abreact” the “blocked” affect.
This provisional formulation was certainly simple—too simple to do justice to the essence of the neuroses in general.
At this point Freud commenced his own independent researches.
It was first of all the question of the trauma that occupied him.
He soon found (or thought he had found) that the traumatic factors were unconscious because of their painfulness.
But they were painful because—according to his views at the time—they were one and all connected with the sphere of sex.
The theory of the sexual trauma was Freud’s first independent theory of hysteria.
Every specialist who has to do with the neuroses knows on the one hand how suggestible the patients are and, on the other, how unreliable are their reports.
The theory was therefore treading on slippery and treacherous ground.
As a result, Freud soon felt compelled to correct it more or less tacitly by attributing the traumatic factor to an abnormal development of infantile
fantasy.
The motive force of this luxuriant fantasy-activity he took to be an infantile sexuality, which nobody had liked to speak of before.
Cases of abnormal precocity of development had naturally long been known in the medical literature, but such had not been assumed to be the case in relatively normal children.
Freud did not commit this mistake either, nor did he envisage any concrete form of precocious development.
It was rather a question of his paraphrasing and interpreting more or less normal infantile occurrences in terms of sexuality.
This view unleashed a storm of indignation and disgust, first of all in
professional circles and then among the educated public.
Apart from the fact that every radically new idea invariably provokes the most violent resistance of the experts, Freud’s conception of the infant’s instinctual life was an encroachment upon the domain of general and normal psychology, since his observations from the psychology of neurosis were transferred to a territory which had never before been exposed to this kind of illumination. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 60-63
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