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EASY LESSONS 
 
 IN 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 by 
 
 ANDRE TRIDON 
 
 Author of "Psychoanalysis, Its History, Theory and Practice'''' 
 
 "Psychoanalysis and Behaviour ," "Psychoanalysis, 
 
 Sleep and Dreams" etc. 
 
 Member of the Society of Forensic Medicine of New York and 
 
 of the International Association for Individual 
 
 Psychology of Vienna, Austria. 
 
 BRENTANO'S 
 
 Publishers New York 
 
 - 
 

 Copyright, 1921, by 
 BRENTANO'S 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 to replace lost 
 
 , 2 : 929 
 
 PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 LC Control Number 
 
 tmp96 025772 
 
This book is respectfully 
 
 dedicated to 
 
 Dr. ALFRED ADLER 
 
 of Vienna, Austria 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 Introduction 
 
 Lesson I. The Psychoanalytic Viewpoint . i 
 
 Lesson II. Dreams and Their Meaning . . 10 
 
 Lesson III. The Mind and the Brain ... 19 
 
 Lesson IV. The Human Machine, Its Motor 
 
 and Its Brake 26 
 
 Lesson V. The Conscious and the Uncon- 
 scious . . . 34 
 
 Lesson VI. Complexes and Education ... 45 
 
 Lesson VII. The Hereditary Taint ... 57 
 
 Lesson VIII. The Neurosis 68 
 
 Lesson IX. The Flight from Reality and the 
 
 Regression 75 
 
 Lesson X. Pen Pictures of Neurotics ... 86 
 
 Lesson XI. Genius and Neurosis .... 101 
 
 Lesson XII. Sex and Ego 107 
 
 Lesson XIII. The Psychoanalytic Treatment 119 
 
 Lesson XIV. A Psychoanalytic Who's Who 129 
 
Introduction 
 
 This is essentially a primer of psychoanalysis. 
 It aims at presenting in simple language the es- 
 sentials of a science which has reached a high 
 degree of development and accuracy, but which 
 like every other science, has been evolving and 
 has not reached, nor will ever reach, the end of 
 its evolution. 
 
 As I will explain in the last chapter of this 
 book, there have been several tendencies mani- 
 festing themselves in psychoanalysis. 
 
 Freudians, Jungians and Adlerians do not al- 
 ways agree on minor points, altho they all agree 
 as to the psychoanalytic viewpoint. 
 
 Siding with any one group is futile and 
 causes one to exclude priceless material. The 
 three tendencies can easily be combined. If to 
 Freud's, Jung's and Adler's hypothesis we add 
 Kempf 's theory of the personality and clarify the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 mysteries of the unconscious by adopting Crile's 
 electrical view of life, we finally have a body of 
 doctrine based on solid scientific ground. 
 
 Many psychoanalysts, following the line of 
 least effort, have refused to deviate from the 
 path blazed by Freud, and they have created 
 among laymen the impression that the words 
 freudian and psychoanalytic were interchange- 
 able terms. This is the more regrettable as some 
 of the great pioneer's early and unavoidable ex- 
 aggerations, especially in regard to sexuality, 
 have appeared unacceptable to many scientists, 
 for, as Jung wrote me once, "they only suit a 
 certain kind of mentality. ,, 
 
 A purely "freudian" analysis stands in the 
 same relation to modern analysis as the Half 
 Moon stands to the Leviathan. The great liner 
 carries out Fulton's principle that a ship generat- 
 ing her own power is superior to one relying on 
 fickle winds, but modern ship builders, while re- 
 vering Fulton's memory, do not turn to his notes 
 for help when designing sea racers. 
 
 The following books are indispensable to stu- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 dents who wish to acquaint themselves more 
 closely with the various schools of psychoanalysis 
 and with the physiological and physical research 
 work which has enabled psychoanalysis to make 
 gigantic strides in recent years in the conquest 
 of neurotic ailments. 
 
 A. Adler. — The Neurotic Constitution. Moffat 
 Yard. 
 
 W. B. Cannon. — Bodily Changes in Pain, Hun- 
 ger, Fear and Rage. Appleton. 
 
 S. Freud. — Introduction to Psychoanalysis. 
 Boni and Liveright. 
 
 S. Freud. — Dream Psychology. McCann. 
 
 E. S. Jelliffe. — The Technique of Psycho- 
 analysis. Nervous and Mental Disease Mono- 
 graph Series. 
 
 C. J. Jung. — Analytical Psychology. Moffat 
 Yard. 
 
 E. J. Kempf. — The Autonomic Functions and 
 the Personality. Nervous and Mental Disease 
 Monograph Series. 
 
 J. Loeb. — Forced Movements, Tropisms and 
 Animal Conduct. Lippincott. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A. Tridon. — Psychoanalysis, its History, The- 
 ory and Practice. Huebsch. 
 
 A. Tridon. — Psychoanalysis and Behavior. 
 Knopf. 
 
 A. Tridon. — Psychoanalysis, Sleep and 
 Dreams. Knopf. 
 
 A. Tridon.— Psychoanalysis and Love. Bren- 
 tano. 
 
 October 15, 1921. 
 
 121 Madison Avenue, 
 
 New. York City. 
 
EASY LESSONS IN 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
EASY LESSONS IN 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 LESSON I 
 The Psychoanalytic Viewpoint 
 
 "I must have said it unconsciously." "I must 
 have done it unconsciously." This is usually 
 your lame excuse for doing or saying things 
 which were absolutely out of keeping with a cer- 
 tain situation. And after offering that explana- 
 tion you feel you should not be held to account 
 for some curious mistakes you made. 
 
 But the psychoanalyst will not let you go as 
 easily as that. If John, while making love to 
 Ethel, should call her Evelyn, Ethel, the psycho- 
 analyst says, would be perfectly justified in re- 
 senting the part Evelyn plays in John's thoughts. 
 Maybe John does not actually love Evelyn, but 
 
2 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Evelyn was "on his mind" when he made that 
 "incomprehensible mistake." 
 
 There are no "mistakes," the psychoanalyst 
 says. The things that "escape" us are the things 
 we unconsciously wish to say. And, on the other 
 hand, the things we cannot say, because appar- 
 ently we have "forgotten" them, or which we 
 vainly try to say, as when we are stammering, 
 are things we do not wish to say. 
 
 It is distressing, is it not? For years I laughed 
 at the theory. Now that I have mastered it, how- 
 ever, its application stares me in the face every 
 day of my life. 
 
 A few months ago I was invited to a dinner 
 at which I was to meet stodgy,, uninteresting 
 folks, strong on conventionalities. I entered the 
 date in my engagement book for the 25th and on 
 the morning of the 25th was asked over the 
 'phone what had kept me from the dinner the 
 night before. I had to humiliate myself before 
 my hostess and apologize for that rude breach 
 of etiquette. How could I have made such a mis- 
 take about the date? 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWPOINT 3 
 
 I had made that mistake because, while I really 
 intended to go to that dinner, something in me 
 held me back and did not wish to go. 
 
 A few weeks ago my wife and I stood per- 
 plexed in front of a house where we had gone 
 at about 10 o'clock in the evening, all dressed 
 up for a very gay party, quite the opposite of the 
 one I missed. Our hosts were out and the only 
 thing for us to do was to smile and go home, for 
 we had come 24 hours too soon. "Our uncon- 
 scious couldn't wait" and had "made a mistake" 
 which would have been flattering to our hosts. 
 
 How easily we forget to pay our bills ! How 
 hard it is for us to forget what others owe us ! 
 
 This is, roughly speaking, the import of the 
 new science, psychoanalysis, the psychology of 
 the wish. There are many systems of psychol- 
 ogy, some of them very ingenious indeed, but 
 their appeal is slight, except to sentimental schol- 
 ars who make a living by teaching them. 
 
 Platonism, Bergsonism or Hegelism are inter- 
 esting hypotheses, but neither a teacher nor a 
 banker nor a physician could apply them in the 
 
 
4 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 conduct of their business or profession. And 
 the world is tired of theories which cannot be put 
 into practice in the daily life of the average man. 
 
 When Freud,, on the other hand, after mak- 
 ing a slow, painstaking study of thousands of 
 dreams and after noting carefully the striking 
 relationship existing between the dreams of neu- 
 rotics and their ailments, formulated his wish 
 fulfilment theory, the world acquired at last a 
 decidedly practical system of psychological re- 
 search. 
 
 An inner force or urge, which Freud calls the 
 libido, is constantly striving to express itself thru 
 overt acts. The primitive brute which is in us 
 is trving to act as freely as the caveman of ten 
 thousand years ago did before civilisation placed 
 a restraint upon human actions. If that force can- 
 not e? ress itself normally, it will express itself 
 abnormally. If steam in a boiler does not find 
 a natural outlet thru a safety valve, the pressure 
 thus generated will explode the boiler and thereby 
 create an unnatural outlet. 
 
 When the desire for normal sexual gratifica- 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWPOINT 5 
 
 tion,, for instance, has been repressed long 
 enough, it attains its end in a way which is not ex- 
 actly abnormal but which is not absolutely natu- 
 ral either, thru erotic dreams. 
 
 Repressed cravings seeking gratification are 
 the cause of every nervous disturbance, be it ap- 
 parently mental or apparently physical or both 
 mental and physical. , 
 
 In order to understand clearly morbid psycho- 
 logical phenomena translating themselves at 
 times into physical symptoms, we must first de- 
 termine, thru many tests, what are the repressed 
 cravings responsible for them. 
 
 When we find that out we can then gradually 
 help the neurotic to see the actual motives fyack 
 iof his faulty actions, the unconscious reasons for 
 his morbid states or his morbid behavior. 
 
 We can also,, in the great majority oftq^ses, 
 suggest an acceptable safety valve for the pent- 
 up force which, if repressed any longer, would 
 probably disrupt the human boiler. 
 
 Without going into any more details of that 
 procedure, we may point out several simple and 
 
6 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 practical applications of the analytic point of 
 view in every-day psychology. 
 
 If a teacher notices, for instance, that a child 
 always forgets certain things, and if he remem- 
 bers that that child forgets them because he un- 
 consciously wishes to forget them, he may make 
 those reasons clear to the child; after which the 
 child can watch himself and stop forgetting. 
 
 If a banker notices that one of his tellers al- 
 ways makes a certain class of mistakes, he may, 
 according to the unconscious wish those mistakes 
 indicate, either dismiss the clerk as unreliable or 
 treat him as an unconsciously disturbed employee 
 and help him to become efficient. 
 
 If a physician convinces himself that a certain 
 nervous disorder is an asset to his patient, he may 
 gradually open the patient's eyes to that abnormal 
 wish fulfillment and make him healthy. 
 
 In other words, everything has a reason, even 
 if at times the reason is an unconscious, absurd 
 one; finding out the reasons for every form of 
 human behavior is the only practical way of know- 
 ing ourselves and others.. 
 
 Mhiiriir ' jT -■ --*--■ 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWPOINT 7 
 
 The observations of psychoanalysis have re- 
 stricted considerably the sphere of influence of 
 heredity, a superstitious belief in which has 
 wrecked many minds. Psychoanalysis has also 
 discarded the theory that a shock is responsible 
 for nervous disturbances. It has proved that neu- 
 rotic conduct is not the result of an accident any 
 more than it is due to a mysterious something we 
 have inherited,, but is an attitude adopted for ab- 
 surd reasons, after thousands of small incidents 
 of our life have forced us to deviate from the nor- 
 mal path. 
 
 By tracing many abnormalities in the adult to 
 repressions that took place in infancy and child- 
 hood, psychoanalysis throws a flood of light upon 
 the development of the child's soul. It has re- 
 vealed to us that the attitude of parents to chil- 
 dren is directly responsible for the children's hap- 
 piness or unhappiness, for their normality or ab- 
 normality in after life. It has proved that the 
 most poisonous element in life is fear and hence 
 that fear should be eliminated entirely from our 
 educational system. 
 
 / 
 
 1 
 
8 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Psychoanalysis has thousands of practical ap- 
 plications not only to human conduct and behavior 
 but to the interpretation of the products of the 
 human mind. It explains all the arts and all hu- 
 man progress as an attempted gratification of the 
 race's desires and dreams. The discontented who 
 cannot delight in the noises, colors and shapes of 
 an ugly world have given us beautiful music, 
 paintings and statues. Obsessed by a desire to 
 escape the limitations of human physiology, which 
 give rise to many dreams of flying, man has ac- 
 quired wings and now flies. 
 
 Psychoanalysis will some day reform our penal 
 system entirely and substitute treatment of of- 
 fenders for punishment. It has shown that 
 prison delusions (for instance, of the Peter 
 Ibbetson type) affect men sentenced to long terms, 
 defeat absolutely the aim of legislators and pre- 
 clude the possibility of the prisoner's reforming. 
 After 2000 years, psychology has finally real- 
 / ized the truth of Socrates' motto: "Know thy- 
 \ self." Therein resides all wisdom; there begins 
 the road to normal, healthy life. Socrates un- 
 
 l»'< i ' li im it h I n i V i ii 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEWPOINT 9 
 
 fortunately did not make his method sufficiently 
 clear or practical. Psychoanalysts have improved 
 upon it and have devised ways and means where- 
 by a wonderful apparatus for self study has been 
 placed in every one's hands* 
 
 A 
 
LESSON II 
 
 Dreams and Their Meaning 
 
 I stated in the first lesson that the psychoana- 
 lytic point of view was arrived at from a study of 
 dreams and of the relationship of a neurotic's 
 dreams to his ailment. 
 
 We must therefore master the psychoanalytic 
 theory of dreams before proceeding any further. 
 
 Mankind has always suspected that dreams had 
 a meaning, but it has also either exaggerated or 
 minimized that meaning. It considers dreams 
 either as foolish visions or as solemn warnings 
 from the gods. They are neither. They are very 
 important productions of the human mind and in 
 fifty years from now there will not be a physician 
 who, even when treating purely physical ailments, 
 will not make it his business to inquire about his 
 patient's dreams. 
 
 The statement made by the Viennese physician,, 
 
 10 
 
DREAMS AND THEIR MEANING n 
 
 Freud, some forty years ago, that we always do 
 in our dreams the things which we wanted to do 
 but could not do in our waking life, is being ac- 
 cepted by more and more scientists as an indis- 
 putable fact. 
 
 I know how indignant certain readers will feel 
 when reading this. Maybe a fond mother 
 dreamed that her beloved child was dead. An- 
 other dreamer may have fallen off a high tower 
 and another may have courted in his dreams a girl 
 who in reality is totally unattractive to him, and 
 yet I maintain that such examples as these do 
 not in the least invalidate the theory of wish ful- 
 fillment. 
 
 Another statement psychoanalysis makes is 
 that the dream is the guardian, not the disturber, 
 of our sleep, and that there never has been or can 
 be dreamless sleep, unless it be sleep induced by 
 narcotics, which is not sleep but "a mild form of 
 death." We dream all night, from the minute 
 we close our eyes to the time when we open them 
 again and those who imagine that they never 
 
12 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 dream are people who simply forget all their 
 dreams. 
 
 Our thinking during our sleeping hours is 
 pretty much like our thinking during our waking 
 states, with one difference, however. We visual- 
 ize all our thoughts during our sleep. All our 
 dreams are visions, which now and then include 
 some sensation of taste, smell, or hearing, but the 
 vision is the thing. 
 
 Dreams and movies are closely related. Movies 
 also visualize everything. They do not tell us 
 that the hero is saving the heroine's life. He is 
 shown rescuing her from death. That simplifies 
 things greatly, or rather compels the author of 
 movie scenarios to simplify his story so as to in- 
 clude only such parts of it which can be shown 
 on the screen. Delicate shades of meaning, subtle 
 changes of mood cannot very well be indicated by 
 movie action. 
 
 "Reel" life is not exactly "real" life. Dream 
 life is not exactly waking life either. Things in 
 dreams are simplified, as they are in the movies. 
 In dreams, we accomplish things very rapidly. 
 
DREAMS AND THEIR MEANING 13 
 
 We run or fly at terrific speed and nothing usually 
 impedes our progress. We are terribly strong 
 and always in tfie center of the stage. 
 
 On the other hand, the habits of our waking 
 life do not desert us entirely when we dream. 
 There is a good deal of hypocrisy in our daily 
 life,, things we cannot say or do, because they 
 do not exactly sound or look nice and which we 
 cover up with harmless formulae. In our dreams, 
 too, we manifest a good deal of hypocrisy and 
 when we lack the courage to say things outright, 
 we manage to say them thru symbols. 
 
 Symbols are curious things. Our language is 
 full of them and so are religious ritual and the 
 ceremonies of secret societies, and at times they 
 are very picturesque. When we wish to imply 
 that a man's head is full of absurd, chaotic ideas 
 we say in slang that there are "bats in his belfry." 
 Do you not see how in a dream a belfry could 
 symbolize a head, and bats, morbid, sinister and 
 absurd ideas ? 
 
 Our dreams are made up of symbolic actions 
 which are, however, easily deciphered, for sym- 
 
14 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 bols mean the same thing all over the world and 
 have always meant the same thing. A nightmare 
 is nothing but a dream so symbolical that we can- 
 not understand its meaning and the image it con- 
 jures up frightens us. As soon as a sufferer from 
 frequent nightmares, however, learns to interpret 
 them and understand their meaning, he ceases to 
 have them or to be frightened by them,. 
 
 Let us now revert to the dreams I mentioned 
 at the beginning of this article. A mother dreams 
 of the death of her child. Does it mean she 
 wishes the child to die? By no means. No more 
 so than she would wish her neighbor's child to die 
 when that youngster is disturbing the neighbor- 
 hood and she says : "I could kill that youngster." 
 "I could kill that youngster" simply means "I wish 
 that youngster would keep quiet." 
 
 Young mothers whose social activities have 
 been interrupted, if not entirely stopped, by 
 motherhood, very often have such horrible 
 dreams about their babies. Such dreams merely 
 remove by a simple, radical and movie-like meth- 
 od, the obstacles to their activity, freedom and en- 
 
DREAMS AND THEIR MEANING 15 
 
 joyment of social pleasures. Let no young woman 
 think she is a potential murderess or a heartless 
 brute because sjie dreams of her baby's death. 
 As soon as she realizes what those dreams mean,, 
 she will cease to have them. 
 
 One woman told Freud that she dreamt of 
 the funeral of her little nephew of whom she was 
 very fond. What kind of a wish fulfillment was 
 that ? Well, it turned out that at another nephew's 
 funeral she met a man with whom she fell in 
 love afterwards and who then abandoned her. 
 The dream brought her back to the occasion on 
 which she had first met the loved man. 
 
 We observe the same phenomenon in real life. 
 A man who has called a little too often on a 
 woman, and is short of excuses for calling once 
 more, may go to her house and ask everybody 
 about the umbrella he left there at the time of his 
 last visit. The umbrella will play a leading part 
 in his conversation. Everybody will be talking 
 about it. But the real object of his call (known 
 only to him and probably to her) is his desire to 
 see her. 
 
16 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 The dream acts like the crafty owner of the 
 umbrella. By devious ways, when direct ways 
 fail, it enables us to gratify all the cravings which 
 life in civilized communities compels us to repress. 
 
 Dream interpretation is not an idle pastime. It 
 reveals to us our attitude to every problem of 
 life, for we spend the night seeking solutions for 
 our problems. (This is why we are always ad- 
 vised "to sleep on it.") It reveals many cravings 
 which we could probably gratify in acceptable, 
 social ways; for example: A man who dreams 
 every night that he is exhibiting himself in pub- 
 lic should try to be an actor, a speaker, or a pub- 
 lic man of some kind. 
 
 Falling dreams are simply the way in which 
 our unconscious expresses the passage from the 
 free, unrestricted, simplified life we lead in 
 dreams to the life of social bondage we lead after 
 awakening. It is not the dream, which wakes 
 us up, but the awakening which produces the fall- 
 ing dream. Whoever has such dreams should 
 train himself to face his daily life with its tasks 
 
DREAMS AND THEIR MEANING 17 
 
 and accept them as unavoidable. After this, fall- 
 ing dreams will cease. 
 
 Dreams may' call our attention to some dis- 
 ease of which we are not conscious ; tooth dreams 
 often reveal a pus pocket, an abscess or an infec- 
 tion. 
 
 Dream interpretation is not very difficult, but 
 it requires a great deal of patience and accuracy. 
 Do not try to interpret one dream. Collect 
 dreams for several weeks before attempting to 
 solve their meanings. Never interpret anyone 
 else's dreams without the dreamer's help. For all 
 dreams contain allusions to the events of our daily 
 life, and the various details of one's dreams con- 
 jure up associations which only the dreamer can 
 understand. 
 
 One image which means something to you may 
 mean just the opposite to some other dreamer. 
 Psychoanalysis never ignores the fact that every 
 individual is different from every other individ- 
 ual, because the experiences which constitute his 
 unconscious thoughts are unavoidably different 
 from those of any other human being. 
 
18 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Dreams of the past, especially of infancy, are 
 not healthy, nor are dreams that frighten us, or 
 are so involved that we do not understand them. 
 Dreams of the present and the future, preferably 
 when pleasant and very obvious,, are good and 
 healthy. Remember, however, that we can watch 
 our unconscious thoughts as well as our conscious 
 thoughts and that watching our dreams makes 
 them become normal after a while. 
 
LESSON III 
 The Mind and the Brain 
 
 Nervous ailments are so commonly spoken of 
 as "mental diseases," "diseases of the mind," 
 "brain diseases," etc., that a consideration of the 
 words brain and mind is absolutely unavoidable 
 before we can discuss such ailments intelligently. 
 
 Dr. Crile's numberless experiments prove 
 conclusively that the life force, what Bergson 
 calls the vital urge, the something which is found 
 in a living organism and is not found in a dead 
 organism and produces the various activities 
 known as life, is merely an electric current. 
 
 According to this theory which is not new,, but 
 which had never before been presented as con- 
 vincingly, the brain is simply a complicated gen- 
 erator of electric current. 
 
 The brain, in other words, is an agglomeration 
 
 of tiny electric batteries, the brain cells, which 
 
 19 
 
20 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 are very much like the ordinary wet batteries fur- 
 nishing current for door bells. 
 
 The production of electric energy seems to be 
 the only function of the brain cells. The brain 
 cells do not occupy themselves with any other 
 task. 
 
 They do not grow and multiply as other cells of 
 the body do. 
 
 After we reach a certain age their number is 
 constant. When a brain cell is destroyed no other 
 cell takes its place. 
 
 Brain cells do not store up their own food, 
 sugar and fat, as other cells do, and therefore do 
 not protect themselves against starvation. 
 
 In fact they do not protect themselves against 
 anything, lack of oxygen, acidosis and other dan- 
 gerous chemical changes. 
 
 Nor do they try to protect the body. 
 
 They are extremely helpless and outside of 
 their specific functions, entirely useless. 
 
 The brain, in other words, can be compared 
 to an electric power house which produces enough 
 electricity to run all the activities of a small town. 
 
THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 21 
 
 The power house produces nothing besides elec- 
 tricity, not even its own fuel. The town must 
 house it,, protect it, feed it and tend it. Should 
 the dynamo be damaged all the activities of the 
 town would be slowed down. Should it be put 
 out of order, the life of the town would be sus- 
 pended. 
 
 The dynamo produces power. That power is 
 transmitted thru cables, wires, etc., runs trolley 
 cars, lights street lamps, turns a dentist's 
 drill, bakes bread, ventilates a cellar, puts a crimi- 
 nal to death, etc. But the dynamo does not con- 
 trol the final disposition made of the current it 
 generates. 
 
 On one and the same socket may be plugged 
 wires, one of which may save a life, the other 
 destroy life. 
 
 The same can be said of the brain. The brain 
 does not seem to "care" about what becomes of 
 the power it generates. If we cut two nerves 
 A and B, doing entirely different things and 
 splice them the wrong way, A to B and B to A, the 
 far end of A will do what it has always done, 
 
22 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 thanks to the power going down to the end of 
 B which is attached to the brain. B will do its 
 specific work, for instance, contracting a finger, 
 thanks to power coming thru the end of A at- 
 tached to the brain altho the function of A may be 
 to move a leg. 
 
 As Crile says: "If we could attach the optic 
 nerve to the ear and the auditory nerve to the 
 eye, we could see the thunder and hear the light- 
 ning." 
 
 Locating the mind, soul, intelligence, will 
 power, or what not in the brain, is a very unsci- 
 entific procedure, prompted probably as Kempf 
 suggests by a desire to keep the "higher" func- 
 tions of the individual as far as possible above 
 the "lower" and "sinful" regions of the body. 
 
 The fact that the most important sense or- 
 gan, the organ of sight and several other impor- 
 tant organs, those of hearing, taste and smell,, 
 are located in the armor of bone and flesh which 
 covers the brain, has caused people to confer upon 
 the brain a dignity which really belongs to the 
 head. 
 
THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 23 
 
 Furthermore the enormous network of nerves 
 supplying with power all the organs located in 
 the skull and which is naturally the source of 
 many aches, slight or severe, has misled us into 
 the belief that "headaches," "pressure in the head" 
 and other uncomfortable sensations experienced 
 above the shoulders are in some mysterious way 
 connected with the brain, caused by it or affect it. 
 
 "Brain-splitting noises," "my brain is ex- 
 hausted," "my brain has been affected or dulled 
 by alcohol, or tobacco or onanism," are pictur- 
 esque but absolutely inaccurate, if not meaning- 
 less expressions. 
 
 They are dangerous expressions, however, be- 
 cause they generate fears leading at times to grave 
 disorders. Coupled with a superstitious belief 
 Jn the fateful power of heredity, stories of "dis- 
 ordered" brains have wrecked entire families. 
 
 A mother who commits suicide may cause all 
 her children to do likewise or to end their days 
 in insane asylums, if the poor deluded fools admit 
 readily that they have "inherited" their mother's 
 
24 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 "diseased brain" and hence must, be "mentally ab- 
 normal." 
 
 The day when we make people realize that the 
 brain is a more or less blind, deaf and dumb dy- 
 namo, just as the kidney and liver are blind, deaf 
 and dumb garbage reducing plants, and the heart 
 a blind, deaf and dumb blood pump, and that the 
 specific impulses to do specific things come from 
 elsewhere, we shall reduce considerably the num- 
 ber of people who believe themselves victims of 
 "brain-disease" and act accordingly. 
 
 Of course,, certain injuries to the brain cause 
 mental disturbances. Damage inflicted upon the 
 switchboard of a large hotel may cause a crossing 
 of wires and other disturbances in the system of 
 communications of such an establishment. 
 
 In certain cases, neither medical help nor psy- 
 chotherapy would avail. A flesh wound heals. 
 A brain wound does not heal. 
 
 If the part of the brain which supplies power 
 to one leg has been destroyed, let us say by a 
 bullet, nothing will ever enable that leg to move 
 naturally again. 
 
THE MIND AND THE BRAIN 25 
 
 On the other hand, mere injury to the brain 
 does not necessarily result in neurosis or insan- 
 ity unless the neurosis or insanity existed before 
 the injury was inflicted. 
 
 Osnato has shown that only those syphilitics 
 who, before contracting that disease, were neu- 
 rotic, ever become insane afterward, merging in 
 what is known as paresis or softening of the 
 brain. 
 
 Many soldiers have been shot thru the brain 
 and yet have not shown any impairment of their 
 faculties. 
 
 No one has to become insane unless he un- 
 consciously wishes to do so. 
 
LESSON IV 
 
 iThe Human Machine, Its Motor and Its 
 Brake 
 
 Electricity generated in the brain cells is car- 
 ried to every part of the body along wires known 
 as nerves. 
 
 There are two kinds of nerves in the body. 
 One system of nerves, designated as the sensori- 
 motor system, corresponds very closely to the 
 switchboard in use in hotels or apartment houses. 
 It brings information and sends out directions. 
 I am in my room and the switchboard operator an- 
 nounces that Mr. Brown is calling on me. 
 
 According to my feelings toward Mr. Brown I 
 will send word that I am out or that he may 
 come up. 
 
 Likewise the sensory nerves carry information 
 
 to the central nervous system that the radiator 
 
 my finger is touching, is cold or too hot. If it is 
 
 26 
 
HUMAN MACHINE: MOTOR, BRAKE 27 
 too hot, an order is sent along a motor nerve 
 to remove my finger. 
 
 From the point of view of psychology, that sys- 
 tem of nerves is not very interesting. A man 
 could have all his sensory nerves and almost all 
 his motor nerves cut, for instance, become blind, 
 deaf, dumb, unable to taste or smell, to move his 
 limbs, his head, his eyes, etc., and yet remain alive 
 and continue to think. 
 
 There is another nervous system, however, 
 upon whose activities all normal and abnormal 
 psychological phenomena depend. 
 
 It is called the autonomic nervous system. It 
 functions as a motor and a brake for the internal 
 organs or viscera, glands, heart, lung, stomach, 
 liver, intestines, bladder, kidney, pancreas, ad- 
 renals, etc., and also for the pupil of the eye, the 
 genitals, the rectum,, etc. 
 
 I stated that it was a motor and a brake, for 
 one division of that nervous system, the end di- 
 vision (whose nerves start from the brain and 
 the sacral region) acts as a motor, the middle di- 
 
28 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 vision (whose nerves originate in the thoracic 
 and lumbar section) acts as a brake. 
 
 For instance, the end division causes the stom- 
 ach to contract and to churn food which is moved 
 toward the intestines; the middle division stops 
 the contractions of the stomach or causes the 
 stomach to empty itself by moving the food 
 toward the mouth, producing nausea and vomit- 
 ing, etc. 
 
 The frontispiece map illustrates the work- 
 ings of the autonomic system. The nerves which 
 activate the internal organs and promote what 
 we might call the normal life are represented by 
 a double black line. Those which stop or modify 
 the life activities are represented by red lines. 
 It goes without saying that this map greatly sim- 
 plifies the appearance of the autonomic system. 
 The connections between the brain or the spinal 
 cord and the various organs are in reality infi- 
 nitely more complicated. Nor have I taken any 
 pains to respect the actual positions or size of the 
 various organs which are represented on the 
 right-hand side of the map. 
 
HUMAN MACHINE: MOTOR, BRAKE 29 
 
 We can see by that map how the two divisions 
 are constantly at cross purposes, balancing each 
 other, as it were. 
 
 The black, or life nerves, contract the pupil, en- 
 abling us to see very distinctly, much as a photog- 
 rapher who wishes to take a very detailed pic- 
 ture uses as small a diaphragm opening as pos- 
 sible. 
 
 The red, or safety nerves will, in case of dan- 
 ger, dilate the pupil, enabling us to admit more 
 light and enlarging also our field of vision, that 
 is, enabling us to see farther up and down, right 
 and left, altho at the expense of accuracy. 
 
 The life nerves cause the heart to beat slowly, 
 hence, to pump the blood out of the veins and into 
 the arteries with great force and thoroness, with- 
 out developing exhaustion. 
 
 The red nerves cause the heart, when danger is 
 present or expected, to beat very fast, throwing 
 as much oxygenated blood as possible into the 
 limbs which must take to flight or fight. 
 
 The life nerves cause the stomach to do its 
 work energetically. 
 
30 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 The red nerves, in danger, stop at once the di- 
 gestive process and do not allow energy needed 
 for fight or flight to be used for purposes of di- 
 gestion or assimilation. (A simile from life: 
 If a fire breaks out in a house at dinner time, we 
 abandon the meal and either run away or fight 
 the fire.) 
 
 The life nerves produce in the genital region 
 the excitement which leads to the sexual act. 
 
 The red nerves, in danger, allay that excitement 
 and make the sexual act impossible or difficult. 
 
 (Another simile from life: If a fire breaks out 
 while we are courting a woman, all affectionate 
 display will at once cease and our only thought, 
 in this case as in the other, will be for flight or 
 for extinguishing the fire.) 
 
 The black nerves contract the bladder open- 
 ing and the rectum in order that we may pass 
 feces or urine only when convenient. 
 
 In great danger, as for instance, when young, 
 untrained soldiers go into battle, the red nerves 
 may empty both bladder and intestine, thereby 
 protecting them against the greater injury they 
 
HUMAN MACHINE: MOTOR, BRAKE 31 
 
 might sustain if receiving a wound while they 
 are distended. 
 
 In danger, the red nerves allow large quanti- 
 ties of sugar (which is the body's fuel, burnt up 
 in the brain) to flow suddenly into the blood 
 stream, thus increasing the amount of energy 
 available in an emergency. 
 
 They also allow the secretion of the adrenal 
 glands, known as adrenin or adrenalin to flow 
 freely, stiffening the muscles for fight or flight 
 and making the blood clot more quickly, which 
 closes wounds and saves the injured individual 
 from bleeding to death. 
 
 The red nerves constitute, as we see, a re- 
 markable emergency system and safety device. 
 They prevent energy from being used in places 
 where it is not needed. 
 
 We do not know exactly at the present time 
 how this is done. Dr. Crile himself has refused 
 to state whether energy flows from the brain into 
 the black nerves and is at times switched out of 
 the internal organs by the red nerves, or whether 
 positive electricity flows in the black nerves and 
 
32 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 negative electricity in the red nerves. Either 
 hypothesis has merits and it is too early for us 
 to decide which of them is the most scientific. 
 
 Leaving aside, however, such technical details 
 which are not of vital interest to the layman, we 
 can retain the first figure of speech, considering 
 the black nerves as the motor of the inner organs 
 and the red nerves as the brake. 
 
 In the perfectly normal human being, then, the 
 black nerves should control all the functions of 
 the body, the red nerves acting in emergencies 
 only. 
 
 In other words, and to employ a clear simile: 
 the motor of an automobile should be allowed 
 free play except when turning corners, in crowded 
 thoro fares,, going down a steep incline, or when 
 a collision appears unavoidable. Then, and then 
 only should the brake be applied. 
 
 In the hands of an inexperienced driver or of 
 a "nervous" person who sees danger where there 
 is none, or who recklessly rushes into danger and 
 then jams the brakes, the brakes are being ap- 
 plied in and out of season. 
 
HUMAN MACHINE: MOTOR, BRAKE 33 
 
 The occupants of the machine are given un- 
 pleasant jolts and grow "nervous," the body of 
 the machine shakes, the machinery is., after a 
 few weeks of such handling, thrown out of gear. 
 And then, again, when the- steering gear has been 
 forced loose by too much jolting, when the cylin- 
 ders pound, when the brakes are insecure and 
 rattling sounds are heard, even a cold-blooded, 
 experienced driver would also feel "nervous." 
 
 Likewise when the human machine has been 
 handled carelessly in childhood, being started 
 and stopped suddenly and without visible reason, 
 the human brakes may contract the habit of set- 
 ting themselves in and out of season, to save the 
 organism from imaginary dangers. 
 
 Every stoppage of the engine in the human 
 organism being due to anxiety, fear or anger, is 
 interpreted in after life as anxiety, fear or anger. 
 
 If the process goes on long enough, we may 
 face a neurotic condition which may remain very 
 mild but which, on the other hand, may lead into 
 violent "manic" outbursts or "depressive" suicidal 
 moods. 
 
LESSON V 
 
 The Conscious and the Unconscious 
 
 I said in the preceding lesson that a nervous 
 driver was likely to render a car quite unsafe thru 
 rough handling, after which the unsafe car 
 would make any driver "nervous," this nervous- 
 ness leading to more misuse of the car and pos- 
 sibly to accidents. 
 
 Fear applies the brakes and every time the 
 brakes are applied too suddenly the passengers in 
 the car experience uneasiness and fear. This is 
 a vicious circle which finds its absolute replica in 
 the human organism. 
 
 Fear stops our digestion but if our digestion 
 is stopped some time without apparent cause we 
 experience a more or less concealed fear, an 
 imaginary fear, which, in its turn, will derange 
 some more our digestive processes. 
 
 Fear makes our heart throb and dilates our 
 
 34 
 
THE CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS 35 
 
 pupil, but if something we know nothing about 
 causes us to have violent palpitations, we will ex- 
 perience a curipus uneasiness and express fear 
 in our countenance. 
 
 Indigestion makes us grouchy, but grouchiness 
 promotes indigestion, and so forth. 
 
 In other words, we cannot scientifically divide 
 up human phenomena into physical phenomena, 
 on the one hand and mental phenomena on the 
 other hand. Everything human is at one and the 
 same time mental, physical and chemical. 
 
 Nor should we try to solve the problem as to 
 whether emotions precede or follow physical phe- 
 nomena. What came first, the chicken or the 
 
 egg? 
 
 Remembering this at every step we shall then 
 inquire into the nature of the mysterious thing 
 designated by psychologists as the "unconscious." 
 
 A man is delivering a lecture before you. You 
 are conscious of him, that is, you see and hear 
 him, you are conscious of his appearance, of his 
 voice,, of his gestures, of the platform on which 
 he stands, of the desk in front of him, etc 
 
36 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 You leave the lecture hall and other interests 
 absorb your attention. Three months later you 
 have forgotten the lecturer. 
 
 Yet if some one mentions him to you, he will 
 "come back" to you at once. 
 
 The question is: "Where was he before he 
 came back?" 
 
 Answer : "He was in your unconscious." 
 
 The size, color, shape,, sound, etc., of that lec- 
 turer made an impression on a number of 
 your nerves. If that impression was very pleas- 
 ant, if he was a fine speaker, a good-looking man, 
 if his voice was harmonious,, etc., you will prob- 
 ably recall easily his name and appearance as well 
 as the subject he spoke on that day because you 
 have no reason for forgetting that occasion. 
 (Demosthenes died several centuries ago, but the 
 world has not forgotten him. ) 
 
 On the other hand, if he was a dull, uninterest- 
 ing bore, unprepossessing and cursed with an un- 
 pleasant voice, you will after a few months,, per- 
 haps a few days or hours forget him and only vio- 
 lent efforts on your part would "bring him back" 
 
THE CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS 37 
 
 to your memory, because you have every reason 
 to wish to forget that occasion. 
 
 The first occasion was pleasurable, hence the 
 life nerves (see map, frontispiece), which trans- 
 mit power to all sorts of pleasure-seeking-end 
 activities, will respond with emotions similar to 
 those experienced on the day of the lecture and 
 which, being pleasurable, were beneficial to the 
 organization and cause no fear. 
 
 The dull lecture being unenjoyable, if not pain- 
 ful, the red nerves will express fear at a repetition 
 of that experience and prevent it from reproduc- 
 ing itself in any way. 
 
 The pleasure-pain, memory- forget fulness coin- 
 cidence is one which students of psychoanalysis 
 should always bear in mind,, incredible as it 
 sounds at first. 
 
 If there is something you did once and of 
 which you were and are proud, it will take little 
 effort on your part to bring it back to memory. 
 If you did something shameful, if some one hu- 
 miliated you, if you encountered a defeat, you 
 will not care to remember it and will probably 
 
38 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 succeed in forgetting it consciously. As Nietszche 
 put it: " 'I have done that' my memory says. 'I 
 couldn't have done such a thing' my pride retorts. 
 In the end my memory yields." 
 
 In other words, your nerves have stored up or 
 registered impressions, each one of them prob- 
 ably a slight physical and chemical modification, 
 some of which can only be recalled with great dif- 
 ficulty, if at all, some of which come back easily. 
 
 Those records of impressions constitute our 
 unconscious. 
 
 Let us now compare our conscious life with 
 our unconscious life. Our conscious states are 
 fleeting. They are like a swift running river 
 pouring itself out into a subterranean lake which 
 it never seems to fill. Our conscious states are 
 constantly becoming unconscious. Pleasure and 
 pain, fear, desire, hate,, accumulate in our uncon- 
 scious and seem to die out. We think they die but 
 none of them does. Psychological tests will bring 
 back to us memories harking back sometimes to 
 the very first days of our life. 
 
 I repeat, the memories we can recall easily are 
 
THE CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS 39 
 
 those of events which affected us pleasantly. If 
 they were unpleasant or even humiliating, and 
 yet we recall them easily, it is because we have de- 
 rived some superiority from the unpleasantness 
 or the humiliation they bring back to us. 
 
 It may have been humiliating once to be 
 whipped by a brutal teacher, but if I succeeded, at 
 the time or later, in establishing my moral su- 
 periority to the brutal teacher (for instance, if 
 innocent of wrong-doing), I may recall the whip- 
 ping with a certain pleasure. 
 
 "Buried" memories have a curious effect on 
 us. We meet a man who to all appearances is 
 harmless. Yet there is "something" we do not 
 like about him. We feel uncomfortable in his 
 presence. 
 
 Experience has proved that he suggests some 
 one else whose memory is "buried" in our uncon- 
 scious and "refuses" to come to consciousness, or 
 rather, which our safety nerves do not allow to 
 come to consciousness because it would bring with 
 itself the memory of some fear, pain or humilia- 
 tion. 
 
40 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 We suddenly experience without any "reason" 
 a profound depression, a desire to weep, etc. 
 Something again has suggested an association 
 between the present moment and a past incident 
 which we do not care to bring up to consciousness. 
 
 Those unconscious associations are called com- 
 plexes. 
 
 How do they come to establish themselves in 
 our organism? 
 
 To make that process clear I must tell my 
 readers of interesting laboratory experiments 
 performed on dogs. 
 
 One experimenter prepared surgically a dog's 
 stomach in such a way that secretions which 
 flowed from the walls of that organ would run 
 out of the body and into a test tube where they 
 could be observed and measured. 
 
 As soon as the dog was given steak to eat, gas- 
 tric juice began to flow into the test tube. 
 
 For several days, whenever the dog was fed, 
 a bell was rung, the ringing being stopped only 
 when the dog finished his meal. 
 
 In other words, while the dog was seeing a 
 
THE CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS 41 
 
 piece of meat, smelling it, chewing it and swal- 
 lowing it, his ear perceived one and the same 
 sound. All the £ime gastric juice was flowing 
 from his stomach into the test tube. Of course, 
 the sound of the bell had absolutely nothing to do 
 originally with the flow of gastric secretion which 
 was caused by the sight, smell, taste, etc., of the 
 meat. On a certain day, however,, no meat was 
 given to the dog but the bell was rung in his ears, 
 and behold, gastric juice began to fill the test 
 tube as tho the dog had been eating meat. 
 
 That fact that the sight, smell, etc., of meat 
 was always accompanied by the sound of a bell 
 gave the dog the impression that a bell sound 
 was also one of the attributes of meat. 
 
 The dog, of course,, never thought about it, 
 but that impression recorded itself on his nerves 
 and remained there. 
 
 This is what we call an association. For the 
 rest of his life, which like that of every laboratory 
 dog was useful but short, poor Fido must have 
 been just as cheered or teased by the sound of a 
 bell as he was by the sight of juicy steak. Steak 
 
42 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 and bell were unconsciously associated in his 
 "mind." 
 
 Let us now suppose that instead of being served 
 steak Fido had been whipped while a bell was 
 ringing. The mere sound of a bell would have, 
 later on, sufficed to throw him into a panic. Sup- 
 pose also that a whipping and a steak had been 
 associated too long in Fido's life. He would have 
 developed a complete distaste for steak. 
 
 Let us go further and instead of a dog con- 
 sider a human being, especially a very young one, 
 a child between five and ten,, at the most impres- 
 sionable age. 
 
 Let us suppose that on several occasions, or on 
 one critical occasion, the child was whipped while 
 a bell was ringing. 
 
 The child, humiliated and hurt, more humil- 
 iated than hurt, in fact, will make no effort to 
 remember that distasteful incident. 
 
 Not only will he not try to remember it but he 
 will do his best to forget it. The more humiliat- 
 ing the experience was the deeper he will bury 
 it or rather, the deeper it will bury itself in 
 
THE CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS 43 
 
 his unconscious. Then some day, maybe ten or 
 twenty years later, he may develop some disturb- 
 ance, one of the, symptoms of which will be a 
 morbid restlessness caused by the sound of bells. 
 Bells may make him worried, fidgety. A design 
 representing a bell may annoy or frighten him. 
 When asked to form a sentence containing the 
 word bell he may be at a loss to find something 
 to say. 1 
 
 He is affected with a bell complex. Complexes 
 are then forgotten memories of unpleasant ex- 
 periences which disturb our thinking. They are 
 like bullets buried in the flesh, no one knows 
 where, but which now and then cause sharp pains 
 whose origin is a puzzle. 
 
 When thru psychological tests we succeed in 
 bringing up to the surface of our consciousness 
 those buried memories, we easily break up the 
 unconscious associations which disturb us. When 
 
 1 Dr. H. Laveson mentions in the Medical Record for May 21, 
 1921, a woman who was morbidly afraid of church towers. It 
 came out that years before a church bell had been ringing con- 
 tinuously while her mother was undergoing a surgical operation 
 followed by her death. The "forgotten" incident could only be 
 recalled under hypnosis. 
 
44 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 our thinking processes seem disturbed and no ob- 
 vious reason can be assigned to that disturbance, 
 we may conclude that one or several complexes 
 are responsible for it. The task of psychoanaly- 
 sis is to find out where the bullet is and then to 
 extract it. 
 
LESSON VI 
 Complexes and Education 
 
 A study of the associations and complexes 
 which create disturbances in our thinking proc- 
 esses leads us back invariably to our childhood 
 years. The formative period of the human or- 
 ganism, is naturally the one in which our nerves 
 become trained to react,, almost automatically, 
 unconsciously to certain stimuli. 
 
 After all, education simply means this : we are 
 trained to react with desire to what we are told 
 is "good," with fear to what we are told is "bad." 
 
 In many cases, however, we forget the causes 
 of our likes and dislikes, and, moved by uncon- 
 scious motives, that is, by forgotten associations, 
 we act in irrational, morbid ways. 
 
 One of the cases treated by Freud illustrates 
 well the influence certain "traumas" or wounds 
 
 45 
 
 / 
 
46 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 inflicted on us in childhood may have on our be- 
 havior in later life. 
 
 A patient of his, a girl of 22, suffering from 
 hysteria, was unable, during her crises, to drink 
 out of a glass or cup. In those days they used 
 hypnotism in the treatment of such cases,, a pro- 
 cedure which has been entirely abandoned. 
 Under hypnotism the girl used to mutter many 
 disconnected sentences, in which the words "gov- 
 erness," "dog" and "cup" seemed to recur 
 with curious frequency. Freud made her repeat 
 them over and over again until she gradually be- 
 gan to build a consistent story which I will sum 
 up as follows : 
 
 When a little girl, the patient was taken care 
 of by a brutal governess of whom she was greatly 
 afraid. One day the woman allowed her pet dog, 
 a repulsive little animal, to lap milk out of the 
 child's cup and then, without cleaning the cup, 
 compelled the child to drink out of it. The child 
 was profoundly disgusted,, but fear of the stern 
 governess caused her to repress her feelings and 
 obey. 
 
COMPLEXES AND EDUCATION 47 
 
 And years later, when she began to have hys- 
 terical fits, the fear and disgust which she had 
 once succeeded in, repressing, came to the surface 
 and she was unable to drink out of a glass or 
 cup. 
 
 It is not always cruel treatment on the part of 
 parents, governesses, etc., which upsets a child's 
 mental balance. 
 
 One of the saddest things revealed by the psy- 
 choanalytic examination of neurotics is that very 
 often the best and most affectionate parents, are 
 those who are likely to breed mentally unbalanced 
 sons and daughters. 
 
 Affectionate parents must be on their guard 
 constantly not to be too affectionate. The little 
 boy generally favors his mother and the little girl 
 her father, and this is perfectly natural. Human 
 beings must feel keenly the attraction of the op- 
 posite sex, and when they are perfectly normal, 
 they feel it at a very early age. 
 
 On the other hand, if a mother allows her boy 
 to become too attached to her, if a father allows 
 his little girl to idolize him too much, this exag- 
 
48 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 gerated affection will be a terrible handicap in 
 later life. Freud has gone as far as saying that 
 this sort of over-attachment is the actual center 
 of disturbance in every neurosis. 
 
 The victims of what analysts call a "fixation" 
 on one of the parents will never be independent 
 as long as they live and will always run back to 
 father or mother figuratively, in emergencies. 
 
 They may never marry or if they do, they may 
 make impossible life partners because in no other 
 human being do they find the readily offered love 
 and devotion, the disinterested advice, and self- 
 sacrifice they found in their parents. No wife, 
 however ideal she may be, can replace the mother 
 in every respect nor should she be expected to 
 do so. 
 
 A situation often arises in which the male child 
 over-attached to his mother, more or less uncon- 
 sciously considers his father as a rival and hates 
 him, the female child nursing the same feelings 
 against her mother. This is what is known as the 
 Oedipus complex and Electra complex. Oedi- 
 pus,, King of Thebes, married his mother and 
 
COMPLEXES AND EDUCATION 49 
 
 killed his father without knowing at the time who 
 they were. Electra made her brother Orestes 
 kill their mother ,Clytemnestra. 
 
 When the affections of the child have centered 
 too completely on the parent of the same sex we 
 often observe cases of perversion, men being at- 
 tracted to men and women to women. 
 
 The pervert is not a criminal nor a vicious per- 
 son. He is the victim of his wrong training and 
 in many cases his trouble can be removed by 
 proper treatment, not by punishment. 
 
 This brings us to the second of childhood prob- 
 lems, one which very few parents are willing to 
 face and to solve properly. 
 
 When, how and by whom shall children be told 
 the truth about sexual matters? 
 
 More and more psychologists are coming to the 
 conclusion that children should be told the entire 
 truth as soon as they begin to question their 
 parents on the subject. If it were possible to 
 keep their minds absolutely pure, and if children 
 could be so carefully watched and supervised that 
 no improper influence would ever be allowed to 
 
50 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 exert itself on them, the problem would not be 
 so complicated. But the dilemma is this: either 
 the proper person or the improper person will en- 
 lighten our children on matters of reproduction. 
 
 Shall we see to it that the proper person does 
 it or shall we trust to blind chance? If I do not 
 tell my children the truth, they will learn a near- 
 truth, if not a romantic lie, imparted to them by 
 schoolmates. 
 
 Near truths or romantic lies have a great de- 
 fect. They do not satisfy the child's mind and 
 only cause him to dream too much of forbidden 
 subjects and to see solely the pleasant, attractive 
 and indecent side of the question. 
 
 Truth stops our imagination. A chemical 
 formula does not lend itself to day dreaming, 
 nor does an historical fact stated soberly by a 
 conscientious historian. 
 
 Children whose minds have been poisoned by 
 half-truths on such a tremendous subject have 
 been known to develop obsessions and fears which 
 later in life make them unable to lead a normal 
 life as husbands or wives, as they too often create 
 
COMPLEXES AND EDUCATION 51 
 
 impotence in men, frigidity in women. Some of 
 
 them, as a consequence of their ignorance, fall 
 
 into many traps and blight their health or their 
 
 » 
 future. 
 
 There is something also which parents must 
 not lose sight of. If they tell lies, such as the 
 stork story, they will in time be found out by their 
 children. Children have primitive ways of rea- 
 soning. Father lied to me once, hence father is 
 a liar. 
 
 The picturesque urchin whose foul mouth deals 
 out tabooed information acquires in the child's 
 mind a prestige to which his reticent father could 
 never aspire. The urchin knows, father either 
 does not know, or does not dare to speak, or does 
 not know how to give out the information at his 
 command, or is generally untruthful. Whatever 
 conclusion the baffled child reaches is disastrous. 
 
 The school is evidently not the place in which 
 sexual information can be imparted to children. 
 Such enlightenment must be strictly individual. 
 Either the parents or the family physician and 
 
52 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 no one else, at least at the present day, should be 
 entrusted with that delicate task. 
 
 Parents or a physician, however, can present 
 matters of sex to the child in a way which is 
 neither romantic, nor untruthful nor indecent. 
 They can point out the profound aspects of the 
 problem, the great questions of life and its origin, 
 and especially the dangers connected with the sex- 
 ual life, dangers which are generally glossed over 
 by the unripe and ignorant children who enlighten 
 other children. 
 
 Another great problem the child has to solve 
 is : What is right ? 
 
 The definition of right and wrong for the av- 
 erage child is: "What father and mother do is 
 right; what they do not do is wrong." 
 
 The result is that a child is painfully upset 
 and often fatally injured mentally when his 
 father and mother quarrel. The necessity of de- 
 ciding in his little mind which .of his parents is 
 right and which is wrong, often leaves him so 
 confused that he grows up to be a weak-spined 
 
 ^ 
 
COMPLEXES AND EDUCATION 53 
 
 man, who is never able to make up his own mind 
 and, in many cases, is lacking in will power. 
 
 What is will power after all but the capacity 
 to make a quick choice in an emergency. 
 
 What is a child to do when a row starts at the 
 breakfast table and both parents prove tc each 
 other that they are absolutely wrong-. Mother's 
 tears may affect the child so that he begins to hate 
 his father. But at the dinner table the battle 
 starts afresh, and father, goaded beyond endur- 
 ance, may disregard the child's presence and tell 
 mother a few unvarnished truths about her con- 
 duct or disposition. 
 
 The child is left bereft of all personal stand- 
 ards because he has lost faith in father and 
 mother alike. He knows that whatever he may 
 do in the future would never be considered from 
 the same point of view by both parents. 
 
 Father would criticise him to spite mother, 
 and mother would praise him to defend her po- 
 sition to father. But neither father's criticisms 
 nor mother's praise would appear very valuable 
 
54 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 to him after he had learned to discount their ac- 
 tual worth. 
 
 When the child raised in such environment 
 reaches man's estate he will find that the making 
 of decisions is a terrible strain upon his mind. 
 Mother would have done this, he will say to him- 
 self, but father always said she was crazy. Father 
 would have done this but then mother always said 
 that father was a brute. His red nerves apply 
 the brakes whenever his motor starts, regardless 
 of the direction he wishes to take. The result is 
 inaction, nervousness, unhappiness,, sometimes a 
 split in the personality, a part of his personality 
 seeking one goal, the other part another goal. 
 
 The perfectly normal child is one who up to 
 the time of puberty has imitated both parents 
 without showing too much partiality for either 
 (which means that the parents had harmonized 
 well enough not to create a conflict in the child's 
 mind). Such a child would not be obsessed or 
 tortured by misinformation about sex problems 
 because they had been explained to him in a dig- 
 nified way. At puberty, the normal child would 
 
COMPLEXES AND EDUCATION 55 
 
 imitate the parent of the same sex without show- 
 ing any hostility to the parent of the opposite sex. 
 Finally, the normal child should while being at- 
 tached to his parents be able to imitate people 
 outside of the family circle, to acquire valuable 
 traits not found within it and then to build up a 
 consistent though many-sided and attractive per- 
 sonality. 
 
 I may mention in closing that the indifferent 
 parent may be as dangerous to the child's men- 
 tal health as the over-affectionate one. The child 
 whom no parent has praised and petted,, for in- 
 stance, the orphan who has been entrusted to some 
 institution, whose keepers, however kind they 
 may be, cannot lavish on a hundred children the 
 affection and care parents would lavish on every 
 child separately, is likely to suffer from a sense 
 of inferiority which is difficult to remove in later 
 life. Such a child does not know he is important 
 because no one made him feel his importance. 
 The result is a stunting of his emotional life. 
 
 Psychoanalysis has confirmed what we knew, 
 that unless a child is brought up in a harmonious 
 
56 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 home by a father and mother who neither neg- 
 lect him nor show him too much affection, the 
 seed may be sown for many mental disturbances. 
 Not every bad home produces bad results but 
 every neurotic is the result of bad home condi- 
 tions. 
 
Lesson vii 
 
 The Hereditary Taint 
 
 What was said in the preceding lesson on the 
 influence which early childhood impressions wield 
 on us in later life should enable my readers to 
 cast out one of the worst devils which torture 
 men's minds : the fear of the hereditary taint. 
 
 I must repeat one statement I made in the les- 
 son on the mind and the brain : the brain is simply 
 a power plant generating electricity. What some 
 people call our mind,, our intellect, etc., and what I 
 prefer to call our personality is not located there, 
 however. 
 
 Our personality is made up of the millions of 
 impressions, big and small, painful and pleasant, 
 ephemeral and lasting, which have left a record, 
 minute as it may be, on our nervous system. 
 
 Hence our personality was not bequeathed to 
 us at birth but has grown with the years. There 
 
 57 
 
58 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 are parts of it which will not be changed easily. 
 Parts of it,, on the other hand, which consist in 
 the ways in which we think and express our 
 thoughts, can constantly be modified and im- 
 proved by self-study. 
 
 The hand of the dead only weighs heavily on 
 us when we are not conscious of it. Like all 
 ghosts, it vanishes into thin air as soon as we 
 turn the searchlight on it. 
 
 Was your father queer? Did one of your 
 uncles act strangely in the last years of his life, 
 or did one of your cousins die in an insane asy- 
 lum? If so, stop worrying about the possibility 
 of your becoming like them some day. 
 
 Physical heredity is a fact which cannot be de- 
 nied. It follows very definite lines, and Mendel's 
 experiments have shown that when we cross two 
 strains of animals or plants we can foretell with 
 mathematical accuracy how many of the offspring 
 will present the characters of each strain. Each 
 species, in other words, remains true to its type, 
 but this is as far as heredity goes. We are given 
 a body like that of our ancestors, but the fate of 
 
THE HEREDITARY TAINT 59 
 
 that body is pretty much entirely left in our own 
 hands. 
 
 Physical traits and peculiarities are not "neces- 
 sarily" hereditary. You look like your father 
 or mother, but there is no earthly reason why you 
 should have your father's bent back or your 
 mother's weak stomach. If your father had gone 
 daily to a gymnasium instead of sitting at home 
 and groaning, if your mother had been more care- 
 ful about her diet and her temper, both would 
 have been healthy specimens. 
 
 If you decide that you are doomed to live with 
 a convex back and a miserable digestion, because 
 your parents had them,, you will in all probability 
 manage to acquire them in due time, especially 
 if you follow the same line of irrational conduct 
 and make no effort to escape what you call your 
 fate. 
 
 Decide to be an athlete, adopt a rational diet, 
 avoid excesses, develop your body and mind in 
 every direction and you will foil "heredity" very 
 easily. 
 
 Mental heredity is a thousand times less dan- 
 
60 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 gerous than physical heredity. There is an ele- 
 ment in human life which is infinitely more potent 
 and yet more easily controlled than heredity, and 
 which psychoanalysts have observed at work in 
 every case — imitation. 
 
 We are what we are because we once imitated 
 someone who was then as we are now. Little 
 girls, in order to become women, imitate their 
 mothers, little boys become men by imitating their 
 fathers. Little girls who are motherless have a 
 tendency to grow up rather too mannish unless 
 some other woman serves as a worthy model. 
 Fatherless boys are likewise apt to become effem- 
 inate. 
 
 Smile and the world smiles with you. Yawn 
 and everybody in the room will start yawning. 
 If the baby apparently refuses to pass water, turn 
 on a faucet in the bath tub and the child will soon 
 be the victim of imitation. 
 
 Imitation, we must remember, proceeds along 
 the line of least effort. A tendency to follow that 
 line is normal and human. In the neurosis that 
 tendency is always greatly exaggerated. 
 
THE HEREDITARY TAINT 61 
 
 Experiments made on animals illustrate the 
 power of imitation very strikingly. Passenger 
 pigeons never mate with any other birds, but if 
 you let a ring dove hatch the eggs of a passenger 
 pigeon, the young birds issuing out of those eggs 
 will not mate with birds of their own species, but 
 with ring doves only. Instinct, blood and hered- 
 ity are in that case and in a thousand other simi- 
 lar cases absolutely overthrown by imitation, 
 habit, training — call it what you like. 
 
 Certain fish kept in an aquarium, imitate after 
 a time the color or pattern of their environment, 
 turning blue, green or red, showing on their scale 
 a checkerboard design,, etc. 
 
 The trouble is that we do not always imitate 
 the best in our environment, but often the worst. 
 There are several reasons for this. The worst 
 is more easily imitated. It requires less effort to 
 be bad than to be good, to be imperfect than to 
 be perfect. Also the worst is often more amusing 
 and picturesque than the best. Take children to 
 the circus, and let them see on the one hand 
 beautiful female riders, splendid male athletes 
 
62 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 and, on the other hand, grotesque clowns or hide- 
 ous, deformed freaks. Which will amuse them 
 most? The freaks and clowns,, of course. 
 
 A little boy I know walked for two weeks like 
 Charlie Chaplin after watching the movie head- 
 liner for half an hour. 
 
 A neurotic father will not "beget" neurotic 
 children, but his children will imitate him in pref- 
 erence to their normal mother, who, being normal, 
 is not "funny" and does not appeal to their imag- 
 ination. 
 
 A mother who tyrannizes over her household 
 by means of her sick headaches is likely to bring 
 up girls suffering from the same complaint, not 
 because headaches are hereditary, but because her 
 daughters, unconsciously aware of the power 
 which those headaches give to their mother, will 
 manage to repeat the performance on their own 
 account. 
 
 Suggestion often works with deadly power. A 
 man who believes himself "burdened" with a bad 
 heredity may be greatly weakened by that absurd 
 belief which is unfortunately shared by many old- 
 
THE HEREDITARY TAINT 63 
 
 fashioned physicians. He may "let go" in a crisis,, 
 commit a theft or a crime because his father or 
 grandfather established such a precedent and be- 
 cause he "knows" there is no use struggling 
 against such "odds." 
 
 The precedent, by the way, may not be more 
 than a legend perpetuated by inaccurate, silly or 
 gossipy relatives. Your grandfather may have 
 once, in a fit of anger, manhandled one of your 
 grandmother's relatives. The incident retold by 
 her side of the family is entered into the family 
 records as evidence of his criminal tendencies. A 
 man of morose disposition very often sees his 
 trouble diagnosed by amateur psychiatrists in his 
 family circle as "melancholia." The stupid parent 
 who vents his anger on his offspring by making 
 brilliant remarks such as "you are as crazy as 
 your father (or mother) was" may start a train 
 of thought which is very dangerous. 
 
 I personally know three brothers brought 
 up by an unusually unintelligent mother, who had 
 themselves committed to an insane asylum on 
 several occasions when they lost their money or 
 
64 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 their jobs. None of them was actually insane, 
 altho they kept on repeating that they were bound 
 "to go crazy like their father." 
 
 I personally investigated the father's "crazi- 
 ness" and found that before his death, which oc- 
 curred many years ago, he had had several fits of 
 blues, justified by serious slumps in his business. 
 He never showed any insane trait, however, at any 
 time. He and his wife, on the other hand, never 
 had lived very harmoniously and his fits of de- 
 pression were described by her in a rather un- 
 sympathetic fashion as "crazy fits." 
 
 Men and women have been known to reproduce 
 the behavior even of grandparents they have 
 never seen. Investigation has shown in many 
 cases, and would probably show in all cases, that 
 the parents were responsible for that phenome- 
 non, as they believed in "genius" or "vice" or 
 "character" skipping a generation and had con- 
 stantly described their parents to their offspring. 
 
 Inbreeding is another cause for worry which 
 some people are likely to seize upon in order to 
 torture themselves and drive themselves into in- 
 
THE HEREDITARY TAINT 65 
 
 sanity. "My father and mother were first cou- 
 sins, hence I will sooner or later lose my mind." 
 
 They should remember that the most wonderful 
 specimens of blooded animals, horses,, bulls, etc., 
 have been produced by inbreeding. They should 
 remember that the marvelous Greek civilization 
 of the fifth century B. C. was due to the inbreed- 
 ing of a handful of Athenians who produced 
 about fifteen of the world's greatest thinkers, ar- 
 tists, dramatists, etc. And the downfall of Hel- 
 lenism was not due to any weakening of the strain, 
 but to the invasion of Greece by powerful and 
 ruthless barbarian hordes. 
 
 It goes without saying that if two first cou- 
 sins are neurotic and marry, their children will be 
 in a bad plight. They will only have abnormal 
 examples before their eyes. If blood relations, 
 however, are healthy, their offspring, unless in- 
 fluenced by unscientific talk about the dangers of 
 inbreeding, are bound to be quite as hale and 
 hardy. 
 
 Whether our heredity is good or bad, whether 
 our father was a genius or a fool, our grandfather 
 
66 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 a saint or a criminal, we can counteract years 
 of imitation by becoming aware of the source of 
 many of our involuntary acts and thoughts. 
 
 When we become convinced that we are imi- 
 tating someone else instead of trying to be our- 
 selves, imitating a weak, sick model, instead of 
 picking out a worthy person for imitation, we can 
 in a reasonable period of time entirely change 
 our mode of life and our form of thought. 
 
 Our parents may have constituted the wrong 
 kind of environment, but if we do not let senti- 
 mentalism blind us as to that fact there will be 
 at our disposal libraries, lectures and meeting 
 halls, where we can become acquainted with ac- 
 tive, worthy men and women, positive and pro- 
 ductive, whom we can and should imitate, and 
 thus dispel the mental ghosts which thrive in the 
 atmosphere of certain neurotic homes. 
 
 Ask yourself: Am I myself,, or am I imitat- 
 ing someone else? 
 
 Is my model a positive one or am I following 
 the neurotic, selfish and unsocial line of least 
 effort? 
 
THE HEREDITARY TAINT 
 
 67 
 
 The day when we realize the weakness of he- 
 redity and the power of imitation we shall take 
 more pains to surround our children with influ- 
 ences that will upbuild them physically and men- 
 tally and avoid bandying half-scientific state- 
 ments about inherited traits which at times prove 
 a curse to the weak and gullible. 
 
 Then the knowledge of our abnormal ascen- 
 dancy will not trouble us in the least. Instead of 
 saying: "What can I do against such odds?" we 
 shall train ourselves to avoid the mistakes of our 
 forbears. Father killed himself by overeating. 
 Let us not do likewise. Heredity shall then cease 
 to be a menace and will, on the contrary, be a 
 warning and a guide. 
 
LESSON VIII 
 The Neurosis 
 
 On the basis of what has been explained in the 
 foregoing chapters we can define every "ner- 
 vous" or "mental" ailment as the morbid expres- 
 sion of a craving which is not consciously recog- 
 nised. 
 
 The word nervous ailment is very unsatisfac- 
 tory for the purely physical deterioration of a 
 nerve, due to an accident or a war wound, may 
 cause, for instance, an eyelid to close or a hand to 
 wither. Psychoanalysis has nothing to do with 
 such conditions which are relevant of medicine 
 or surgery. The word mental disease is quite as 
 unsatisfactory. "Nervous" headaches,, or stom- 
 ach aches, "nervous" blindness, "nervous" impo- 
 tence, etc., have nothing to do with wounded 
 nerves and are generally of "mental" origin, al- 
 
 68 
 
THE NEUROSIS 69 
 
 tho the expression "mental disease" is rarely ap- 
 plied to them, being reserved for "insanity." 
 
 Insanity is another inaccurate word: a patient 
 can only be described as insane when several phy- 
 sicians have decided that his condition makes it 
 unsafe for him or his environment to be left at 
 large. Hence behavior which appears insane and 
 dangerous in one place may only appear eccentric 
 in another place. 
 
 The word neurosis is thus far the best to desig- 
 nate all varieties of morbid conduct, from a slight 
 touch of blues to violent "manic" behavior. 
 
 Many meaningless classifications of the neu- 
 roses have been offered. I will present several 
 of those classifications,, for their vocabulary is 
 in very general use, even in the writings of the 
 most modern psychiatrists, for convenience' sake. 
 
 For many years a distinction was drawn be- 
 tween neuroses and psychoses, the first term being 
 applied to mild cases, the second to severe cases. 
 
 Three varieties of insanity were generally rec- 
 ognised : Paranoia, in which the patient has delu- 
 sions of greatness and persecution; Manic De- 
 
 
70 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 pressive Insanity, in which the patient alternates 
 between periods of great excitement and 
 periods of profound depression ; finally, Dementia 
 Prcecox, including practically all the cases which 
 were neither "pure" paranoiac nor "pure" manic 
 depressive cases. 
 
 Dementia Prcecox patients had to be further di- 
 vided up into paranoid types, when their behavior 
 in certain respects reminded one of paranoia; 
 hebephrenic types, when they were childish and 
 silly ; catatonic, when they became stereotyped in 
 their gestures, motionless, etc. 
 
 That sort of classification is handy for psychi- 
 atrists in a hurry, for it gives a clear picture of 
 what the patient is doing at the time when he is 
 observed; patients, unfortunately, do not always 
 persevere in one line of behavior and often have 
 to be reclassified. Nor would psychiatrists ex- 
 amining them independently at varying periods 
 always agree on their diagnosis. 
 
 Freud offered a classification which is almost 
 as arbitrary. He draws lines of demarkation be- 
 
THE NEUROSIS 71 
 
 tween the actual neuroses, the psychoneuroses and 
 the psychoses. 
 
 The actual neuroses include neurasthenia and 
 anxiety neurosis ; the psychoneuroses include hys- 
 teria,, anxiety hysteria and the obsessions. Epi- 
 lepsy is classified either with the neuroses or the 
 psychoneuroses. 
 
 Freud further differentiates between the De- 
 fence Psychoses and the Overpowering Psy- 
 choses. In the first, one idea is violently re- 
 pressed; in the second, a craving has absolutely 
 overpowered the personality. 
 
 Freud's classification is very artificial for there 
 is no "pure" clinical picture including only cer- 
 tain symptoms and always excluding all other 
 symptoms. 
 
 Every morbid state includes anxiety, slight or 
 severe. The vague ailment known as neuras- 
 thenia, and the various compulsions are merely 
 symptoms, not definite disease entities. 
 
 Kempf was the first to suggest the word neu- 
 rosis for all neurotic ailments, be they neuroses, 
 psychoneuroses or psychoses. 
 
J2 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 He divides neuroses into five distinct types: 
 
 a. Suppression Neuroses in which the patient 
 is more or less conscious of the cause of his trou- 
 ble: for instance, a man in love, who loses his 
 sleep or his appetite. 
 
 b. Repression Neuroses in which the patient 
 cannot recognise the cause of his trouble: for 
 instance, a patient who becomes lame in a morbid 
 endeavor to be taken care of and insists that his 
 lameness is due to a fall. 
 
 c. Compensation Neuroses in which the patient 
 displays egotism, intolerance, boastfulness, to 
 cover up a feeling of inferiority or undesirable 
 wishes : for instance, a very sick man imagining 
 he has herculean powers. 
 
 d. Regression Neuroses in which the patient 
 becomes childish, lazy, slovenly. 
 
 e. Dissociation Neuroses in which the patient 
 is annoyed by weird, distorted images, hallucina- 
 tions, fears, etc. 
 
 Here again the criticism may be made that 
 there are no neuroses which do not show at some 
 time one of those five mechanisms, suppression, 
 
THE NEUROSIS 73 
 
 repression, compensation, regression and dissoci- 
 ation. 
 
 Every neurotic is conscious of some suppressed 
 cravings, unconscious of many repressed ones, 
 always seeks compensation for some form of in- 
 feriority, regresses to a more or less distant past 
 in his search for precedents ; finally the struggle 
 between his conscious and his unconscious per- 
 sonalities always results in a dissociation, a split,, 
 however slight. 
 
 I shall not therefore attempt to offer to my 
 readers a new classification of the neuroses. 
 
 What is important after all is not the disease 
 but the patient. 
 
 As some one said very justly: "there are no 
 sicknesses, there are only sick people." 
 
 What is vital is the individual psychology of 
 each neurotic. 
 
 Classifying him as a paranoiac renders no serv- 
 ice and simply describes the way in which he is 
 trying to reach a certain goal, altho he does not 
 know that he is trying to reach that goal. 
 
 Every neurotic has a goal which he tries to 
 
74 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 reach in morbid ways. The question to ask our- 
 selves is then : 
 
 "What is the neurotic trying to do and why has 
 he adopted one specific variety of morbid be- 
 havior ?" 
 
 It is only when we have answered that ques- 
 tion that we can hope to help him out of his diffi- 
 culty by revealing to him what he is trying to 
 do and pointing out a way of doing it which is 
 pleasant and socially acceptable. 
 
• LESSON IX 
 
 The Flight from Reality and the 
 Regression 
 
 The neurotic is or thinks he is inferior in some 
 way. He may or may not know in what way he is 
 inferior. He may have weak glands whose exist- 
 ence and location he does not even suspect. He 
 obscurely feels, however, that he is not like other 
 people. 
 
 He thinks that he cannot compete with others 
 on a footing of perfect equality or cope as others 
 do with life's emergencies. 
 
 Putting down that feeling as imaginary, when 
 it appears grossly unjustified, does not solve the 
 problem. For every imaginary inferiority has a 
 tendency to become real. The man who never 
 walks because he thinks his legs would not carry 
 him,, will, after a while, develop an actual weak- 
 ness of the legs. The man who thinks that his 
 
 75 
 
76 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 stomach cannot digest any but the lightest kind 
 of food, may be terribly distressed when he 
 attempts after several years of childish dieting, to 
 eat pork or beef. 
 
 A feeling of inferiority may be forced upon 
 us in a good many ways. A child suffering from 
 a tuberculous hip, a rupture, intestinal inflam- 
 mation, is constantly reminded by his parents 
 or guardians that he is not like the other children. 
 He finally accepts that reminder as the statement 
 of an absolute and permanent fact; for whiie his 
 condition deprives him of many forms of fun it 
 assures him numberless privileges. 
 
 Certain conditions from which there is appar- 
 ently no escape may have the same effect as a 
 bodily disability. A girl of thirteen had been 
 greatly spoilt by her father and mother. A baby 
 sister was born and the newcomer at once monopo- 
 lised the care and attention of parents, relatives,, 
 neighbors, family physician, servants, etc. The 
 baby's health and comfort were the paramount 
 issues in the government of the household, the 
 constant topic for conversation, the baby's cute- 
 
FLIGHT FROM REALITY 77 
 
 ness was praised, its meaningless babble consid- 
 ered as heavenly music. When soon after, the 
 father died and the poor girl was for conveni- 
 ence' sake, shipped to a boarding school, she 
 felt bereft of everything, of her prestige, home 
 and mother, stolen by the baby, of her father, 
 taken by death. She has felt "inferior" ever 
 since. 
 
 Repeated failure to win love and affection in 
 childhood years is very frequently a solid basis for 
 an inferiority complex. 
 
 The man who is burdened with such a sense of 
 inferiority or inadequacy or incompleteness, be 
 it real or imaginary, fears defeat and consciously 
 or unconsciously concentrates all his thoughts on 
 a constant endeavor to protect himself against 
 defeat. 
 
 Reality seems to him fraught with all sorts of 
 perils regardless of whatever angle he may view 
 it from. He magnifies the problems he will have 
 to solve. He looks for easy and ready made solu- 
 tions. He finds some of those solutions in the 
 present and most of them, in the past. 
 
78 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 He naturally imitates other people who are, 
 like him, "disabled" in some way and adopts un- 
 critically their solution of their problem. As I 
 have stated in a previous chapter, neurotic traits 
 and ways are easier and more pleasant to copy 
 than normal traits and ways. 
 
 He also seeks to lean on some stronger indi- 
 vidual and his memory brings back to him images 
 of safe situations while in the parents' care. 
 Freud tells us that the neurotic is trying to grati- 
 fy, as a grown-up, cravings which he repressed 
 when a child. It is much more reasonable to admit 
 with Adler that the neurotic, seeking safety, 
 harks back to the safest period of his life, child- 
 hood. In his childhood, all his problems were 
 solved for him by adults in his environment. 
 
 The more servile his imitation of his own child- 
 ish behavior is, the more severe his neurosis will 
 be. A patient at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Wash- 
 ington, D. C.,, regressed, not only to childhood, 
 but to the prenatal state. She spent her days 
 squatting in a blanket hanging by its four corners 
 
FLIGHT FROM REALITY 79 
 
 in front of a window, thus reproducing symboli- 
 cally the position of the fetus in the womb. 
 
 In other words the dominant trait in the neuro- 
 sis is an attempf at escaping present reality and 
 at substituting for it an easier set of environ- 
 mental conditions in which the neurotic will not 
 stand in fear of defeat. 
 
 The flight from reality is carried out along the 
 line of selfish, unsocial, least effort. The result 
 is always, in its final analysis, and regardless of 
 its apparent success, unpleasant for the neurotic 
 and for his environment. 
 
 As some one said: "The neurosis is an adapta- 
 tion to life which has failed." It fails because the 
 neurotic solution for life's problems is too direct, 
 too simple, too primitive, too archaic, the neurotic 
 disregarding too completely the complexity of 
 modern life. 
 
 The neurotic refuses to realise that every hu- 
 man being is a mere cell in the body social. No 
 cell can expect to lead a separate life, unrelated to 
 the life of the body; no cell can expect preferen- 
 tial treatment from the other cells unless it earns 
 
 ,ent 
 
80 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 that privilege thru unusual accomplishments. (For 
 instance, the brain cells which are fed and pro- 
 tected by the entire organism because they pro- 
 duce the electric power without which no part 
 of the body could remain alive.) In the human 
 body any cell which detaches itself from the sur- 
 rounding cell withers and perishes. Any cell 
 which becomes a drain on the other cells is ex- 
 pelled by them. 
 
 The neurotic, thinking he is different from all 
 other human beings, sets himself apart from the 
 others and attempts to secure too quickly and 
 without giving adequate compensation the things 
 which he craves. 
 
 He may be a murderer, eliminating another 
 man to acquire quickly and without work his vic- 
 tim's possessions, or a thief attaining the same 
 results without violence, or a gambler who ex- 
 pects from luck or fate what others expect from 
 slow, continued effort. 
 
 Others do their allotted tasks indifferently and 
 blame convenient scapegoats for the resultant 
 failure : "My heredity is bad," "I had no educa- 
 
FLIGHT FROM REALITY 81 
 
 tion," "I don't sleep nights," "I am a victim of 
 my environment," "I am a sick man," etc. 
 
 Others refuse to recognise a part of reality. 
 Amnesia destroys a period of our past which an- 
 noys us, aphasia or stammering prevent or delay 
 utterances of a damaging nature, blindness or 
 deafness close our eyes or ears to unpleasant de- 
 tails of our environment. 
 
 Travel, in many a globe trotter, is a flight from 
 reality into what, owing to the enchantment of 
 distance, seems unreal. 
 
 Drugs blunt our perception of reality, and so 
 does alcohol. 
 
 Drugs and alcohol also act as scapegoats: "I 
 was drunk or drug-crazed at the time and I can- 
 not remember what I did." 
 
 Heart trouble, rheumatism, sleeplessness save 
 us from many exhausting tasks. Gastric pains 
 assure us a better diet. 
 
 Epilepsy, fainting, sleeping sickness, etc., as- 
 sure us a peaceful existence in which we shall 
 lack neither sympathy nor care. 
 
 In dual personalities, our second state enables 
 
82 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 us to lead a simpler life than the one we must lead 
 in our normal state, while all the misdeeds com- 
 mitted in the second state are condoned. 
 
 Homosexualism protects woman from man's 
 domination, man from woman's domination. Mas- 
 turbation obviates the necessity of finding and 
 keeping a sexual partner. Total impotence or fri- 
 gidity saves us from the fear of all sexual crav- 
 ings. 
 
 Complete insanity enables us to indulge in 
 unsocial acts without fear of punishment. Final- 
 ly, suicide eliminates entirely the dreaded reality. 
 
 Our choice of a neurosis depends naturally on 
 two factors, our vitality, that is, the condition of 
 our organism and especially of certain glands like 
 the thyroid and the adrenals which make us either 
 aggressive or submissive, and memories recorded 
 in our autonomic nerves and which predispose us 
 to act in a certain way because that way is familiar 
 to us. 
 
 The murderer would become a sneak thief 
 if he had weaker muscles and deficient adrenals. 
 A devitalised liar might develop stammering or 
 
FLIGHT FROM REALITY 83 
 
 aphasia. A weak woman may become a life in- 
 valid ; with a better thyroid she might have been 
 a nagging wife, a poisonous gossip, a brutal 
 mother. 
 
 Memories, especially memories of neurotic so- 
 lutions which worked, help us to select from the 
 many available neurotic ailments. 
 
 A woman intent on escaping reality will imi- 
 tate her mother's neurotic ways if they once 
 seemed to solve her mother's problems. She will 
 adopt her headaches, her hysterical vomiting, her 
 fainting fits. 
 
 A patient of mine whose father died from can- 
 cer of the rectum after years of idleness, tried 
 hard to irritate his rectum thru continuous 
 scratching. The slightest inflammation of his 
 rectal region, coupled with his family's supersti- 
 tious belief in heredity, would have assured him 
 at an early age the peaceful life of an invalid. 
 
 It goes without saying that in our choice of 
 remembered solutions, we imitate ourselves first 
 whenever convenient. 
 
84 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 The things which worked in our past are always 
 tried first. 
 
 A patient who had suffered from night con- 
 vulsions when a child (which assured him of the 
 mother's care day and night) developed, at twen- 
 ty-seven, night fits of epilepsy, giving him the 
 same advantages, besides an excuse for idling. 
 
 He had been a squeamish baby. At the time 
 of his "breakdown," he developed a "nervous 
 stomach" which compelled his mother to prepare 
 special meals for him and prevented him from 
 straying too far from home (added difficulty in 
 finding employment). 
 
 A boy of fifteen sent away from home during 
 the summer to a farm house where he received 
 scant attention and felt very home-sick, started 
 again to wet his bed at night as he had done till 
 he was seven (thus compelling his mother to lav- 
 ish more physical care upon him). His regres- 
 sion to childish enuresis made his continued so- 
 journ in an unpleasant place an impossibility. He 
 had to go back to his home and his mother. 
 
 Another patient wet his bed until the very 
 
FLIGHT FROM REALITY 85 
 
 night preceding his departure for college. After 
 that, that neurotic symptom would have only 
 brought him humiliation without vouchsafing him 
 any extra care, and it disappeared. 
 
 During the war, neurotics were often freed of 
 their symptoms by being torpedoed, that is, sub- 
 mitted to an extremely painful electric discharge. 
 The cure being worse than the ailment, the ail- 
 ment yielded. That sort of treatment, however, 
 is merely brutal and stupidly inefficient, for the 
 symptoms it removes either return shortly after- 
 ward or are replaced by an entirely new set of 
 symptoms. (A lame man becoming blind after 
 being "cured" of his lameness by punitive electro- 
 therapy.) 
 
 In the next lesson we shall review the most 
 common neurotic ailments and analyze their 
 actual meaning as a means of escape from reality. 
 
LESSON X 
 Pen Pictures of Neurotics 
 
 If the limits of this book allowed me to present 
 in all their details some of the cases I have studied, 
 I could show that every neurotic ailment is an in- 
 valuable asset to the neurotic, altho a painful and 
 undesirable asset. The neurotic, obsessed by his 
 feeling of inferiority, does not realise that he 
 could probably compete successfully with other 
 human beings with fair weapons, if he only dared 
 to try. But he does not dare and he bears a 
 grudge to the reality that frightens him. 
 
 A well established and recognised neurotic ail- 
 ment assures the neurotic the following advan- 
 tages : 
 
 IT IS A SHORT-CUT TO POWER (unso- 
 cial, because lazy, selfish, dishonest or criminal). 
 
 IT ALLOWS ONE TO FOLLOW THE 
 
 86 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 87 
 
 LINE OF LEAST EFFORT (being cared for 
 by one's environment). 
 
 IT ASSURES ONE OF SYMPATHY 
 ("This sickness has wrecked my life"). 
 
 IT PROTECTS ONE'S EGOTISM ("Who 
 can tell where I would be but for my sickness?"). 
 
 IT PROTECTS ONE AGAINST THE HU- 
 MILIATION OF FAILURE ("What can you 
 expect from a sick man?"). 
 
 IT INSURES ONE EXAGGERATED 
 CREDIT FOR TRIFLING ACCOMPLISH- 
 MENTS ("I did that in spite of my sickness"). 
 
 IT ENABLES ONE TO SELECT SCAPE- 
 GOATS ("I am a victim of my heredity, environ- 
 ment, etc."). 
 
 IT ENABLES ONE TO GET EVEN WITH 
 PEOPLE (spending for treatment a stingy hus- 
 band's money, making a disliked person suffer, 
 compelling a bully to obey, etc.). 
 
 Every one of the pen pictures I intend to pre- 
 sent illustrates one or more of the above assets, 
 but complete records of cases would show that in 
 
88 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 every case every one of those assets were vouch- 
 safed to the neurotic by his or her illness. 
 
 An Insane Craving 
 
 A young woman undergoing treatment for 
 murderous cravings, but who was beginning to 
 understand her states of mind well enough not to 
 do anything foolish, told me one day that, while 
 attending a wedding the day before, "she felt an 
 insane craving to shout" which she, however, re- 
 pressed. 
 
 "What thoughts came to your mind just then ?" 
 I asked her. 
 
 "I thought : everybody will turn round to look 
 at me and come to my assistance." 
 
 "At what time during the ceremony did you 
 have that thought?" 
 
 "While the pastor was turning toward the bride 
 and saying how beautiful she was." 
 
 When I asked my patient why she hated the 
 bride, she first denied indignantly having ever 
 had such feelings., but further questioning elicited 
 the information that while my patient is small and 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 89 
 
 stout, the bride is tall and slender. The bride is 
 a Unitarian, my patient a Baptist who considers 
 that Unitarians are heathens. My patient eloped 
 with her husband and did not have any elaborate 
 wedding. The bride has a wealthy home where 
 many guests were assembled to witness the mar- 
 riage ceremony. 
 
 TRYING TO JOIN THE CROWD 
 
 A woman of forty called on me and assured 
 me that she was going insane owing to her change 
 of life. She had for several years financed and 
 nursed a group of invalids living in her home, a 
 brother, an aunt and a cousin. Her climacteric, 
 which afterward proved not to be a climacteric, 
 and about which she had gathered, thru unguided 
 reading, the most absurd and inaccurate notions, 
 seemed to be the excuse she had been seeking for 
 years for deserting her parasites and enjoying 
 the peace and the care-free, tho morbid, idleness, 
 which had been their lot. 
 
 When I finally convinced her that her health 
 should be her first consideration and prevailed 
 
9o LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 upon her to move away from her "sanatorium" 
 and to shift its burden upon other relatives, all 
 the symptoms of her self-diagnosed "psychop- 
 athy" (as she called it on her first visit), disap- 
 peared. 
 
 A FLIGHT FROM RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 A manufacturer worried over business difficul- 
 ties became obsessed with the idea that his ner- 
 vousness and sleeplessness were due not to his 
 business failure, but to syphilis, which he con- 
 tracted when twenty-two years of age. Accord- 
 ing to all the usual tests, his infection had been, 
 if not cured, at least made very harmless by 
 specific treatment. 
 
 Exactly a year before he consulted me, he had 
 had himself committed to a hospital for the insane 
 where he remained some ten weeks. 
 
 As both his admission to that institution and 
 his first call on me preceded by two weeks the 
 yearly accounting of his firm's books, I grew sus- 
 picious and drew from him the admission that he 
 had swindled his partner out of a good deal of 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 91 
 
 money thru "private sales" and other devices and 
 assigned almost all his possessions to his wife 
 "as he no longer felt competent to handle funds." 
 
 A mere crook and pretender, the reader may 
 remark. By no means ! 
 
 A victim of the fear of exposure called re- 
 morse, and who, if exposure had come might 
 have become a genuine paranoiac, ending his days 
 in an asylum, safely removed from financial re- 
 sponsibility. 
 
 THE EGO ON PARADE 
 
 An epileptic attended a restaurant party. Every 
 man had brought his sweetheart. He alone had 
 no one to flirt with. So long as the conversation 
 remained general, he did not feel "queer." As 
 the evening wore on, however, he began to notice 
 that the air was bad, the tobacco smoke too thick, 
 the conversation stupid and he calculated that 
 the bill for the entertainment (a Dutch treat) 
 would run high. He drew a waitress into con- 
 versation and felt better. But when a patron, 
 with whom she was more intimately acquainted, 
 detracted her attention from, him, he threw a fit. 
 
92 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 The laughing, flirting, singing and dancing 
 came to an end. He had been neglected by all. 
 Now they all had to pay attention to him, pick 
 him up, nurse him, find a physician, take him 
 home. 
 
 He had become the center of interest and 
 avenged himself upon his friends for their per- 
 fectly justified neglect of him which he, however, 
 resented terribly. 
 
 GASTRIC PAINS WITH A PURPOSE 
 
 A husband whose digestion had always been 
 good began to suffer torture every time he had to 
 lunch down town. He decided that the home fare 
 would improve his condition and he wasted a con- 
 siderable time every day going home for lunch. 
 His gastric pains disappeared almost suddenly 
 when a friend whom he suspected of liking his 
 wife too well left for South America. 
 
 He had reasons to believe that his wife and his 
 friend had been lunching together frequently. But 
 his "pride" compelled him to repress his suspi- 
 cions even to himself. 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 93 
 
 A young man with a strong mother fixation had 
 vomiting fits whenever compelled to eat at a res- 
 taurant. Being "very sickly" he seldom worked 
 and allowed his 'mother to support him most of 
 the time. At home, however, he had a ravenous 
 appetite and did more than justice to the noon-day 
 meal. 
 
 He could not take any position which did not 
 allow him, enough time to go home for lunch. 
 
 SUSPICIOUS THROAT TROUBLE 
 
 On one occasion I sent a young couple who, 
 owing to sexual ignorance and family maladjust- 
 ments, had messed up the first years of their mar- 
 ried life on a second honeymoon. The result was 
 disastrous. Ten days after their departure, the 
 wife who was my patient, telephoned from a sea- 
 side resort that she would be too sick to keep her 
 appointment the next day. 
 
 To my query "What business did you have to 
 get sick ?" she gave a rather impatient answer. 
 
 When three weeks later she returned to the 
 
94 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 city, she upbraided me for my lack of sympathy 
 and for asking such silly questions. 
 
 She assured me at first that she had had no 
 reason for being sick. 
 
 I assured her that she must have had very good 
 reasons, as experience has taught me that many 
 a "sore throat" (diagnosed as diphtheria when 
 the patient is well-to-do) is the "conversion" or 
 physical expression and result of a repressed 
 scene. 
 
 After a long cross-examination she finally 
 made a full confession. 
 
 To her sentimental nature, the perspective of 
 a tete-a-tete in that almost deserted spot (it was 
 in the winter time) appeared very romantic. Her 
 matter-of-fact husband, on the other hand, viewed 
 things differently. The empty dining room meant 
 boredom. Nor were the appointments at that 
 time of the year what they might have been at 
 the height of the season. 
 
 Physical comfort to him was more important 
 than romance. Finally, the hotel rates were out- 
 rageous. 
 
 \ 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 95 
 
 A real lover or a husband with the soul of a 
 lover might have overlooked those details. In the 
 course of the dinner, the tactless fool managed 
 to intimate that the whole thing was a nuisance 
 and that the game was not worth the candle. 
 
 After dinner, they retired to their room and 
 read the papers in silence for an hour or two, 
 after which the young wife felt very sick, fever- 
 ish, etc. A doctor was summoned and diagnosed 
 diphtheria. The doctor was young and good look- 
 ing. She was quite sick for two weeks. 
 
 One will notice that the nature of her illness 
 made all sexual intimacy impossible, in fact, com- 
 pelled her husband to sleep in another room. Her 
 sickness increased the gloom of the place, its dis- 
 comfort and also the expense of the trip. She 
 got even with her husband for whose crusty sor- 
 didness the attentions of the nice young physician 
 fully made up. 
 
 TWO CASES OF PROTECTIVE DIZZINESS 
 
 I. A bank clerk suffered from dizziness and 
 once fell, injuring his wrist severely. I soon found 
 
96 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 out that the dizzy spells always came on the same 
 day of the week. On that day the clerk was com- 
 pelled to stay after hours and attend to special 
 duties which easily led into temptation. As soon 
 as I found that out, I asked him point blank: 
 "How much have you stolen thus far?" 
 
 The amount, fortunately was not very large. 
 
 He has since confessed to his employers and 
 is repaying the "loan" in weekly instalments. He 
 no longer feels dizzy. 
 
 2. A young married woman also had several 
 dizzy fits as she was leaving her home to go shop- 
 ping. For several days she did not dare to ven- 
 ture on the street alone and asked her maid to 
 accompany her. She had no difficulty in keep- 
 ing her balance when the girl was with her. 
 
 One day, feeling better, she went out and was 
 overcome in front of a telephone booth in a drug 
 store. This made me suspicious and I asked her 
 whom she was going to call up. 
 
 This brought a blush and a confession. For 
 a month she had been struggling against the temp- 
 tation to meet a man who had made several trysts 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 97 
 
 with her. Consciously she craved the excitement, 
 the romance of the situation. Unconsciously the 
 man was repellent to her. 
 
 Her unconscious had saved her from the temp- 
 tation by "converting" her indecision into the 
 same dizzy state which had tried to protect the 
 bank clerk from further thefts and their conse- 
 quences. 
 
 SICK HEADACHES AND SICK VOMITING 
 
 The woman suffering from sick headaches 
 is almost invariably a weak individual who 
 either shrinks from taking decisions or is domi- 
 nated by her husband, perhaps burdened with 
 household duties if not with several noisy, ill-be- 
 haved children. 
 
 Protected by her sick headache, she can post- 
 pone all decisions, let some one else shoulder the 
 responsibilities and incur criticism in case of 
 failure. 
 
 In her home she becomes a center of attention 
 and sympathy. Her husband must look and act 
 sorry whether he feels sorry or not. 
 
 
98 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 She is relieved from every household care. The 
 children are silenced. Neighbors or relatives of- 
 fer assistance. The doctor calls, chats and brings 
 news. For one, two or three days, mother has 
 made herself felt, has compelled every one to 
 realise her importance and is herself a little more 
 convinced of her real importance. 
 
 And life resumes its humdrum course until 
 mother facing the necessity of making another de- 
 cision, seeing the possibility of defeat and hu- 
 miliation, being reminded of her lack of impor- 
 tance, resorts once more to a flight into sickness. 
 Little Rollo has had a glorious time Saturday 
 and Sunday. He is not sure he has done all his 
 home work. And at 10.30 on Monday morning 
 there is a dreadful teacher who is going to ask 
 him questions. Right after breakfast or just af- 
 ter reaching the school house Rollo has an attack 
 of vomiting. If this happens at home, Rollo is 
 safe against the annoyance of going to school. If 
 at school, who would bother, the poor sick child, 
 who would expect him, even when the fit is over, 
 to be as smart as a perfectly well boy would be? 
 
PEN PICTURES OF NEUROTICS 99 
 
 Finally, the teacher, knowing that Rollo is "deli- 
 cate" will not pester him in the future and makes 
 many allowances for his "trouble." 
 
 The trouble is that all those expedients work 
 well, too well. 
 
 When in trouble, the neurotic, negative indi- 
 vidual who does not care to face life, has a ten- 
 dency to solve his problems in the easiest way, in 
 a safe way which has been proved to work. 
 
 Sickness is always a good solution for our dif- 
 ficulties. Chinese statesmen have made the dip- 
 lomatic sickness famous. The difference between 
 the neurotic and the Chinese statesman is that 
 the neurotic is really sick and the Chinaman pre- 
 tends he is sick. 
 
 Pretending, however, is a dangerous game. 
 Pretend long enough that you are dignified and 
 you will acquire a great deal of dignity. The man 
 who stoops down, stares at the ground and drags 
 himself along the street is likely to gradually suit 
 his mood to his attitude and to feel depressed. 
 
 Our moods influence our attitudes but our atti- 
 tudes influence our moods quite as much. The 
 
ioo LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 man who thinks that he can never cope with the 
 world's emergencies by being himself and that he 
 must pretend and cheat will train himself soon 
 to pretend and cheat unconsciously. 
 
LESSON XI 
 
 Genius and Neurosis 
 
 Normality is indeed a very relative term. It 
 depends upon latitude, longitude, climate, social 
 position, local customs, etc. 
 
 The great sluggish masses of "ordinary" peo- 
 ple who just work, reproduce their kind and ac- 
 complish daily all the acts of life according to an 
 immutable ritual, consider themselves and are 
 generally considered as normal. 
 
 They are normal animals, surely, but are they 
 normal human beings ? Animals go thru the mo- 
 notony of invariable acts repeated day after day 
 and are apparently satisfied. 
 
 After many centuries of cat life, cats still lie in 
 wait near a mouse hole for the mouse that may or 
 may not come out of the hole; robins wait for 
 worms to crawl out of the damp sod. 
 
 IOI 
 
102 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Man uses mouse traps and turns up the sod 
 for worms. 
 
 Man, or at least some men, are apparently dis- 
 satisfied with reality as they find it. Some of 
 them proceed to modify reality so as to make it 
 more pleasant for themselves as well as for others. 
 Once, some man dissatisfied with walking, rode 
 animals ; dissatisfied with that mode of transpor- 
 tation, he hitched a vehicle to the animal and rode 
 more comfortably; later another man discarded 
 animals as motive power and used steam, then 
 electricity. Finally, cloyed with travel on the 
 surface of the earth, man rose above it, first in 
 balloons, slow and helpless, then in dirigibles, 
 faster and less unreliable, finally in planes speedier 
 than any bird. 
 
 Why are animals satisfied and men dissatisfied? 
 I don't know. But whatever the actual cause may 
 be, man differs from the animals because animals 
 are static and man is evolving upward. 
 
 The more marked that upward trend is in a 
 man, the more normally human or the more ab- 
 
GENIUS AND NEUROSIS 103 
 
 normally neurotic he will be. All depends on the 
 final result of that upward urge. 
 
 Up to a certain point neurotic and creative man 
 are alarmingly alike. Both of them are dissatis- 
 fied with reality. 
 
 There, however, their resemblance ends. 
 
 The trip to Chicago is more pleasant nowadays 
 than it was a hundred years ago because a dissat- 
 isfied man substituted the Twentieth Century 
 Limited for the stage coach. And for that reason 
 we call him a genius. 
 
 The neurotic would also be dissatisfied with the 
 stage coach, but his dissatisfaction would ex- 
 press itself either thru a fit of anger in which he 
 might abuse or destroy the stage coach or a delu- 
 sion in which, while remaining at home, he might 
 imagine he had been transported to Chicago. In 
 neither case would he make the trip to Chicago 
 more pleasant for others. 
 
 The woman in the blanket, mentioned in a pre- 
 vious lesson, was certainly dissatisfied with the 
 appearance of her environment. 
 
 She thereupon devised ways and means to 
 
104 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 eliminate a large part of that environment. A 
 painter, sculptor, architect, reformer, of genius 
 would have, on the other hand made that environ- 
 ment more pleasant not only for himself but for 
 others as well. 
 
 Like the neurotic, the genius is egotistical. In 
 the neurotic, egotism is a mask for a sense of in- 
 feriority. In a genius it denotes confidence in 
 one's aims and one's ability to realise those aims. 
 Every genius starts in life with a slight sense of 
 inferiority; but instead of using that inferiority as 
 a convenient weapon wherewith to hold up the 
 world, the genius compensates for that inferiority 
 in ways which will make that inferiority harmless 
 for the whole world. 
 
 An inventor conscious of his inferiority, as far 
 as bodily strength is concerned, creates a labor- 
 saving device which enables him and all the other 
 weak people to perform certain strenuous tasks 
 without exhausting himself and without shirking 
 any duty (for instance an electric washing ma- 
 chine, an electric crane, etc.). 
 
GENIUS AND NEUROSIS 105 
 
 The genius, like the neurotic, is inclined to with- 
 draw from the world for periods of varying 
 duration. 
 
 Allowing many unimportant tho well-meaning 
 people to fritter away our time in piffling conver- 
 sation, card games, "parties," etc., is not condu- 
 cive to creative work, nor to the concentration 
 which creative work requires. 
 
 But the genius withdraws from the world in 
 order to do better work for the world. The neu- 
 rotic withdraws into his blanket in order to revel 
 in his own selfish thoughts, in his own morbid 
 dreams. 
 
 In other words, the neurotic is always selfish. 
 The genius always unselfish. The world is better 
 off for the geniuses who live in it and who leave 
 it improved in several respects. The world is 
 worse off for the neurotics who live in it and leave 
 it deteriorated. 
 
 The so-called normal people leave the world ex- 
 actly as they found it. Hence we might state that 
 the neurotic is negative, the so-called normal man 
 
106 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 neutral and subnormal, while the creative genius 
 alone should claim the title of normal human be- 
 ing, as he alone is positive and helps the human 
 race in its upward striving. 
 
• LESSON XII 
 
 Sex and Ego 
 
 The early psychoanalysts, whose conclusions 
 were based mainly upon their observation of hys- 
 terical cases, accepted the theory of a purely 
 sexual etiology of the neuroses ; that is, they con- 
 tended that the neurosis was always traceable to 
 a disturbance of the sexual life ; they even stated 
 that no neurosis was possible when the sexual 
 life was absolutely normal. 
 
 Such an attitude was, of course, very one-sided. 
 The general public, however, unfamiliar with the 
 advance made in recent years in the field of psy- 
 choanalytic research still believes that psychonaly- 
 sis occupies itself mainly with details of the pa- 
 tient's sexual life. 
 
 It could not, of course, neglect such an import- 
 ant factor, in certain cases, the only factor, but it 
 
 pays much more attention, even in apparently 
 
 107 
 
108 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 pure sexual cases, to another human craving, one 
 which is infinitely more powerful than sex, the ego 
 craving or ego urge. 
 
 The ego urge is the force that drives us to 
 secure food (more food, better food, easier food 
 and hence power), which enables us to dominate 
 other human beings and employ them directly 
 or indirectly to minister to our needs. 
 
 The ego urge is therefore a purely selfish crav- 
 ing which strives to assure the survival of the in- 
 dividual. It is only checked by the safety urge, 
 the safety nerves (see frontispiece) when its 
 exaggerated manifestations jeopardize individual 
 survival. 
 
 The sex urge is infinitely less selfish in its nor- 
 mal aims. 
 
 It strives to insure the reproduction of the spe- 
 cies, and hence is essentially altruistic. A male 
 must seek a female in order to procreate a third 
 human being. 
 
 The perversions, in which male seeks male or 
 female seeks female or in which a lone male or a 
 lone female satisfy their sexual cravings thru 
 
SEX AND EGO 109 
 
 masturbation, are the result of the selfish ego 
 urge interfering with the normal exercise of sex 
 functions. 
 
 This is why Wflhelm Stekel, a famous Austrian 
 psychoanalyst, insists on designating homosexu- 
 alism as the homosexual neurosis. 
 
 I said in one of the preceding paragraphs that 
 even apparently purely sexual cases cannot be 
 understood unless we take into consideration the 
 interference of selfish ego cravings with the nor- 
 mal functions of the sex organs. One case from 
 my practice will illustrate my meaning. 
 
 An impotent patient planned one day to make 
 advances to his stenographer who appeared to 
 fancy him. He was to keep her after hours and 
 in case she responded to his advances, he had 
 planned to take her to the theater and to supper. 
 Alone with her, he felt that he would probably 
 be as impotent with her as he had been with other 
 women and sent her home. 
 
 Asked whether the incident had depressed him, 
 or humiliated him much, he blushed and answered : 
 -"No." Further questioning brought out the in- 
 
no LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 formation that the first idea to cross his mind 
 when the girl left him was : "I have saved about 
 twenty dollars." 
 
 And he added: "I suppose that if I had not 
 been impotent all my life I would not have $20,000 
 in my name now." 
 
 To this selfish type, potency meant lower resist- 
 ance to temptation and the risk of sharing his 
 pelf with a wife or mistress. 
 
 Sex and love lose a good deal of their mystery 
 when restudied from the psychoanalytic point of 
 view. They lose none of their legitimate romance 
 but they are no longer the frightening puzzles 
 which, to the uninitiated, cause more anxiety 
 than real joy. 
 
 Sex attraction can be dissected easily into its 
 component parts. 
 
 Remember some of the weddings you have at- 
 tended. Now and then the bride and bridegroom 
 made up a really handsome couple, but, how many 
 times did you say, or think, when they walked 
 down the aisle : What can he see in her ? What 
 can she see in him? 
 
 1 
 
SEX AND EGO in 
 
 You know that your handsome business part- 
 ner is deeply in love with his barrel-like wife, and 
 the beautiful Mrs. Brown thinks that her shrimp 
 of a husband is Prince Charming reincarnate. 
 
 Cynicism would not bring forth a fitting solu- 
 tion for the problem, for in neither case did sor- 
 did consideration influence them in the choice of 
 a mate. 
 
 Nor can we state for certainty that your part- 
 ner and Mrs. Brown acquired such unlovely 
 spouses to spare themselves the torments of jeal- 
 ousy. Many neurotics are extremely jealous as 
 they suffer from a feeling of inferiority and think 
 that in competition with any other human being 
 they are bound to meet defeat. 
 
 Heiresses running away with chauffeurs, 
 wealthy men marrying girls of shadowy reputa- 
 tion, are very often neurotics who feel that they 
 will dominate more completely their life mate if 
 they select a person of inferior social status. 
 
 But those are exceptions. Nor can we ex- 
 plain the attraction of a homely man or woman by 
 saying of the unprepossessing person : He is such 
 
ii2 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 a good fellow,, she is such a nice woman. We 
 can like a fine fellow or a nice woman, but what 
 makes us at times fall in love with and worship a 
 person who is frankly homely to disinterested 
 observers ? 
 
 The first step in discussing love is to dissociate 
 it from affection. We can feel greatly attached 
 to a dog, a suit of comfortable clothes, an old 
 faithful housekeeper. But we do not experience 
 toward them the feeling which makes us unhappy 
 unless we can see, take to our heart, pet and cher- 
 ish a certain human being. It is only love which 
 does that, love of a man for a woman, or a woman 
 for a man. In order to study the love of the nor- 
 mal human being, we must have a glimpse of the 
 love life of abnormal people. For abnormal 
 things are simply normal things which are a trifle 
 exaggerated. For instance the deep thinker who 
 can ignore reality for a while and devote all his 
 mental energy to the solution of weighty problems 
 is normal. The man who withdraws so complete- 
 ly from reality that he no longer pays any atten- 
 tion to his environment and is obsessed by one or 
 
SEX AND EGO 113 
 
 two ideas for unusually long periods of time, has 
 only gone a step farther, but he is insane. 
 
 Insanity, or we should say rather the neurosis, 
 is a magnifying 'glass which enables us to study 
 normal people better, for it exaggerates their ac- 
 tions as a microscope enlarges a small organism. 
 
 In the neurotic, the choice of a mate is absolute- 
 ly determined, positively or negatively, by the 
 father or mother image. By which I mean that a 
 neurotic man will never marry unless he finds a 
 woman who in every essential respect is like his 
 mother. Some, on the contrary, will never marry 
 because every woman reminds them of their 
 mother. The first case, however, is by far the 
 most frequently met with. The same can be said 
 also of female neurotics. To the female child 
 the father image should be the ideal image of 
 manhood with all the associations of strength that 
 go with it. To the male child, the mother image 
 should be the ideal image of womanhood, tender- 
 ness, affection, etc. To the abnormal child that 
 feminine or masculine ideal becomes an obsession 
 which excludes any other ideal. After which 
 
H4 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 either that ideal is the only one worth attaining, 
 or it is too high or too pure to be desecrated 
 through physical association. 
 
 Thus we find many old bachelors who live with 
 their old mother, idolize her and believe that their 
 aversion to marriage is due to their disinclina- 
 tion to leave her lonely. They are generally blind 
 to her shortcomings, physical or mental. Her taste 
 is their standard of perfection, her opinion their 
 norm of behavior. They will never marry until 
 she dies. Woe then to the unfortunate woman 
 who takes such a man as her husband, because an 
 unusually good son is supposed to make a good 
 life mate. He will nag her the rest of her life, 
 comparing her constantly to his mother, and in 
 a way which will not prove very flattering. 
 
 That slightly neurotic type of a man, suffering 
 from what psychoanalysts call the mother-fix- 
 ation, marries a woman because he imagines he 
 finds his mother's traits and characteristics in the 
 bride of his choice; and he resents the fact that 
 she is not an absolute duplicate of the mother 
 image. 
 
SEX AND EGO 115 
 
 The same applies to the girl with a father fix- 
 ation, who adores her father and is often his con- 
 stant companion. 
 
 We have all met the young woman whom many 
 people dub cynical because she shocks them by 
 saying that she is forever falling in love with mar- 
 ried men. She is not cynical. She is simply pur- 
 sued by the father image and attracted by men 
 who have in common with her father two char- 
 acteristics : they are much older than she and they 
 are married. 
 
 Such is the love life of the neurotic. That of 
 the normal men and women is ruled by the same 
 laws, only instead of being obsessed by a type they 
 are more attracted by that type than by any other 
 type. 
 
 If the average man will try to remember all the 
 women who have attracted him, he will come to 
 the conclusion that the attraction was weaker or 
 stronger according to the degree of resemblance 
 those women bore to the mother image. By re- 
 semblance, I do not imply absolute similarity, 
 mental or physical, but the possession of one or 
 
n6 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 more striking traits which impress themselves 
 indelibly on the child's mind and which later 
 dominate the thinking of the adult. 
 
 I once had a patient who had a nervous break- 
 down after an unfortunate entanglement with a 
 married man. There had been another affair of 
 the same sort in her life a few years before. I 
 suspected a father fixation and asked her what 
 the most distinctive traits of her father's appear- 
 ance were, those which would strike an observer 
 first. "His mouth and teeth and his powerful 
 chest," she answered. The same question asked 
 on other occasions about the other men elicited 
 exactly the same answer. 
 
 A positive indication can then be given to those 
 trying to decide for themselves or for others 
 about the opportunity of a certain match. 
 
 What are the elements of the father or mother 
 image which seem to have impressed us most? 
 This is easily determined by a few questions an- 
 swered without thinking, letting our unconscious 
 mind speak unhampered. Then the problem is to 
 find out whether the person who is to be selected 
 
SEX AND EGO 117 
 
 as a life mate has all those traits, or at least a ma- 
 jority of them. If he or she presents in his physi- 
 cal and mental makeup many characteristics of 
 the parent image, the attraction wielded by that 
 person will be strong and lasting. In the other 
 case, the attraction is not a vital one and may be 
 built upon romance, prejudice, practical consid- 
 erations, all elements which never make for a dur- 
 able and happy union. 
 
 It would also be a boon for both partners to 
 know exactly what traits of theirs attracted the 
 other. They could develop or retain that trait 
 whenever possible. If a man was attracted to a 
 woman because that woman had the graceful fig- 
 ure, dark hair and intellectual habits of his 
 mother, she must beware of growing stout, dyeing 
 her hair red, or becoming more and more careless 
 about her intellect. 
 
 And if a man attracted a woman because he 
 had white teeth, the swagger and the romantic 
 allure of her father, how can he hope to attract 
 her when he lets tobacco stain his teeth, and 
 when he settles down mentally and physically? 
 
n8 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Love is an art and a science, not a game of 
 chance. Thousands of divorce actions would be 
 avoided, if marriages were contracted with more 
 regard for biological and psychological facts, and 
 if the life partners did not cease soon after the 
 wedding to exert themselves to attract each other. 
 The old saying about the uselessness of throwing 
 a bait after a fish is caught is silly indeed, for 
 human fish do not remain caught and fresh bait 
 has to be constantly dangled before their eyes. 
 
'LESSON XIII 
 The Psychoanalytic Treatment 
 
 Psychoanalysts do not attempt to treat every 
 form of sickness. The psychoanalytic treatment 
 should only be resorted to when family physicians, 
 specialists, dentists, X-ray men, etc., have come 
 to the conclusion that there is no physical cause 
 for the patient's ailment. 
 
 The conscientious analyst generally demands 
 a statement to that effect from the patient's fam- 
 ily physician and should insist on a blood and 
 spinal fluid test and an X-ray photograph of the 
 teeth. 
 
 For I have seen cases of depression successfully 
 cured by cathartics, and Dr. Cotton, of Trenton, 
 has shown that a pus pocket or an impacted tooth 
 may be responsible for serious nervous disorders. 
 
 The psychoanalytic treatment is slow, expen- 
 sive and discouraging. 
 
 119 
 
120 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 The analyst must break down habits of 
 thought which the patient may have developed 
 in the course of many years, to which he is more 
 or less reconciled and which, to a certain extent, 
 provide him with absurd forms of satisfaction. 
 
 He must by a thousand tests and constant cross- 
 examination lead the patient to see his secret mo- 
 tives and face his unconscious weaknesses. This 
 takes time, months, in mild cases ; a year or more 
 in severe cases. 
 
 The intimate knowledge the analyst must have 
 of his patient cannot be acquired in the touch- 
 and-go, pulse, tongue-and-prescription method of 
 the average physician. Each interview must last 
 at least forty-five minutes. Each patient must 
 therefore pay as much as all the patients a physi- 
 cian would see in one hour. 
 
 For weeks and sometimes for months, no appre- 
 ciable betterment can be noticed in the patient's 
 condition. For that matter, the change is at 
 times so gradual that patients nearing recovery 
 remark to the analyst : "I am not better but the 
 attitude of my father (or mother or sister or asso- 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT 121 
 
 dates, as the case may be) has changed so com- 
 pletely that life is much more enjoyable." 
 
 The success of the treatment presupposes a 
 great desire to get well on the part of the patient. 
 The neurotic who is too attached to his neurosis 
 and derives from it too many advantages, is not 
 always willing to part with it. In certain cases 
 financial arrangements must be made which com- 
 pel the patient to come for treatment much as he 
 would desire to interrupt his visits. 
 
 ,The unstable patient who is not willing or able 
 to make a substantial advance payment is gener- 
 ally bored after a few visits and stops the treat- 
 ment, proclaiming everywhere that psychoanaly- 
 sis has failed to cure him. 
 
 Certain classes of patients cannot be treated. 
 
 The paranoiac whom his family compels to 
 seek help at the hands of an analyst soon comes 
 to the conclusion that the analyst is insane or 
 conspiring with his family to send him to an 
 asylum. 
 
 Homosexuals of the same sex as the analyst 
 are dangerous patients who may have delusions 
 
122 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 about the analyst and gossip about the sexual ad- 
 vances they imagine he has made to them. Male 
 homosexuals should be treated by a woman, fe- 
 male homosexuals by a man. Hysterical women 
 should always be treated by a woman, provided 
 they have no homosexual trend, for they will in- 
 terpret every act of kindness on the part of a male 
 analyst as a sexual advance; on the other hand, 
 his professional coldness may cause them to get 
 even with him by telling of an intimacy which does 
 not exist. 
 
 No hard and fast rule can be laid down as to 
 the path which an analysis should follow. 
 
 If a patient is unusually reticent or diffident, 
 the word reaction test should be resorted to as 
 soon as the general history of the case has been 
 taken down. 
 
 The following list of a hundred words is gen- 
 erally used for those tests, but any one can pre- 
 pare a different list to suit individual cases : 
 
 Head, green, water, to sing, dead, long, ship, 
 to pay, window, friendly, to cook, to ask, cold, 
 stem, to dance, village, lake, sick, pride, table, 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT 123 
 
 ink, angry, needle, to swim, voyage, blue, lamp, 
 to sin, bread, rich, tree, to prick, pity, yellow, 
 mountain, to die, salt, new, custom, to pray, 
 money, foolish, pamphlet, despise, finger, expen- 
 sive, bird, to fall, book, unjust, frog, to part, hun- 
 ger, white, child, to take care, pencil, sad, plum, 
 marry, house, dear, glass, quarrel, fur, big, car- 
 rot, paint, organ, old, flower, to beat, box, wild, 
 family, to wash, cow,, friend, luck, lie, behavior, 
 narrow, brother, to fear, stork, false, anxiety, to 
 kiss, bride, pure, door, to choose, hay, contented, 
 ridicule, to sleep, month, nice, woman, to abuse. 
 
 The patient, eyes closed, gives to the analyst the 
 very first thought that occurs to him as soon as 
 one of those key words is uttered. 
 
 Embarrassing associations are spoken more 
 slowly than pleasant or indifferent ones. When 
 the patient is unable to bring forth any associa- 
 tion, the analyst knows that the key word is con- 
 nected with some unpleasant, painful or humili- 
 ating memory, with a complex. 
 
 When the same answer is repeated several 
 
124 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 times, that word or phrase is closely connected 
 with the patient's trouble. 
 
 The mere manner in which the answers are 
 given offers to the analyst valuable clues to the 
 patient's modes of thinking. 
 
 The patient should be asked to bring every day 
 a written account of his dreams. 
 
 The associations brought forth by those dreams 
 will awaken memories of all sorts of past inci- 
 dents. 
 
 Those incidents should be, if the patient spends 
 much time in the analyst's office, told in detail, 
 if the patient only calls a few times a week, de- 
 scribed in writing between office calls. The pa- 
 tient's biography should be reconstituted piece- 
 meal and all childhood incidents properly inter- 
 preted. 
 
 In other words, nothing which may enable the 
 patient to see himself as he is and to trace back 
 to his chilhood the habits of thought which have 
 made his life inadapted to his environment should 
 ever be neglected. For I repeat, the analytic 
 treatment is not so much a treatment as a thoro 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT 125 
 
 course in self-discovery enabling the patient to 
 gradually realise the actual meaning of his actions 
 and the goal he has all his life pursued uncon- 
 sciously. • 
 
 No attempt should be made by the analyst at 
 changing the personality of his patient. I have 
 been asked many times whether an artist, for in- 
 stance, would still be an artist after submitting 
 himself to psychoanalysis. Floyd Dell, the au- 
 thor of Moon Calf has answered that question by 
 saying that only analysis enabled him to make the 
 self-revelations which fill that interesting novel. 
 
 The analyst never tries to superimpose a new 
 personality over the old, nor to shape his patient 
 after his own image. Such results, if attained, 
 would be only the temporary consequence of sug- 
 gestion and would serve no purpose. 
 
 Any personality can live at peace with reality, 
 provided it is not forced into absurd behavior by 
 unconscious factors. 
 
 Analysis resolves itself into a readaptation of 
 the patient to reality, sometimes thru a change of 
 
126 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 occupation or environment rather than into a 
 modification of the patient's personality. 
 
 An extreme egotist with a craving for motion 
 would be happier driving a taxicab than sitting 
 in an office under the supervision of some chief 
 clerk. 
 
 An exhibitionistic woman could gratify all her 
 cravings by indulging in Greek dancing, taking 
 part in theatricals, etc. 
 
 A masochist, constantly seeking suffering, 
 could make a splendid nurse. 
 
 A sadist would wield harmlessly a butcher's 
 knife or a surgeon's scalpel, etc. 
 
 The many neurotic women who waste their life 
 on lonely farms would probably be happy and 
 healthy in a busy metropolis, etc. 
 
 In many cases I have found it very good for 
 some of my more intelligent and cultured patients 
 to start analysing some mild case of neurosis ob- 
 served among their acquaintance. 
 
 We see thru others more quickly than we see 
 thru ourselves and unsnarling some one else's 
 mental kinks is a liberal education for ourselves. 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC TREATMENT 127 
 
 It goes without saying that a patient who is 
 fairly conversant with psychoanalysis and who 
 devotes much time to the study of psychoanalytic 
 books acquires insnght more quickly than a patient 
 who has to be guided at every step in his voyage 
 of self -exploration. 
 
 Many analysts object to this procedure and in- 
 sist that all psychoanalytical information ab- 
 sorbed by their patients should proceed from 
 them exclusively. They may be unconsciously 
 moved by an egotistical desire to control too com- 
 pletely their patients' thinking or a practical de- 
 sire to prolong the analysis. 
 
 The successful analysis being one which pro- 
 ceeds at a quick pace, leading the patient from 
 discovery to discovery with as few dull moments 
 as possible, one can see that analysis supplemented 
 by copious reading is likely to be less of a drag 
 on the patient's mental and financial endurance. 
 
 In too many cases, financial considerations in- 
 fluence the course of the analysis and the patient's 
 burdens should not be made heavier than neces- 
 sary by spending hours telling the patient simple 
 
128 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 facts he could read at his leisure in an inexpensive 
 book. Patients who cannot bear the expense of 
 analysis should apply for treatment at St. Eliza- 
 beth's Hospital, Washington, D. C, the only insti- 
 tution in this country where neurotics are treated 
 according to the psychoanalytic method by a staff 
 of physicians and laymen of the highest standing. 
 
LESSON XIV 
 A Psychoanalytic Who's Who 
 
 Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, 
 was born in Freiberg, Austria, in 1856. He stud- 
 ied medicine at the University of Vienna and 
 his first position was that of demonstrator at the 
 Vienna Physiological Institute. He then was 
 appointed house physician at the General Hospi- 
 tal. In 1885, he became instructor in medicine 
 at his Alma Mater. That year he left for Paris 
 to study nervous diseases under Charcot. In 1902 
 he was appointed assistant professor. 
 
 On his return to Vienna, he did research work 
 in hysteria under the direction of an older man, 
 Dr. Joseph Breuer. Breuer, more conservative 
 than Freud, refused to follow him along the paths 
 which their observations were blazing. 
 
 In 1909, Freud visited the United States at the 
 
 invitation of Stanley Hall and delivered a series 
 
 129 
 
130 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 of lectures at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. 
 On that occasion he was awarded the honorary 
 degree of LL.D., which always follows his name 
 in translations of his works. 
 
 The essential points of the Freudian doctrines, 
 which is accepted in its entirety by only a small 
 minority of analysts, are as follows : 
 
 Mental disease is the bursting forth of erotic 
 wishes repressed in childhood. Erotic impulses 
 manifest themselves long before childhood, in fact 
 from the very time of birth. They do not arise 
 from the genital region alone, but from all the ero- 
 genous parts of the body, that is, all the parts able 
 to experience pleasure, the skin, the mouth, the 
 rectum, etc. 
 
 In infancy, erotic impulses have no object out- 
 side of the body. The child is autoerotic, that is, 
 gives himself pleasurable sensations, for instance, 
 by sucking his thumb (which gratifies thumb and 
 mouth). Later he loves an object like himself 
 (homosexualism), then other beings of both sexes 
 (bisexualism). After puberty, his preferences be- 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC WHO'S WHO 131 
 
 come heterosexual, that is, male seeks female, fe- 
 male seeks male. Incomplete development at any 
 stage of that development may cause later re- 
 gression to that state. 
 
 In their object choice, boys favor the mother, 
 girls the father. When that preference is exag- 
 gerated it becomes a fixation which has as one of 
 its consequences hatred on the part of the child 
 for the parent of the same sex. This is designated 
 as the Oedipus situation or the Oedipus complex, 
 in the case of boys, the Electra complex in the 
 case of girls. This is the central complex of the 
 neurosis. 
 
 The neurosis is an escape from reality by way 
 of a regression to a lower grade of erotic devel- 
 opment. 
 
 The psychoanalytic cure consists in letting the 
 patient talk freely and in helping him to bring to 
 consciousness his repressed unconscious cravings 
 which become harmless as soon as the patient 
 realizes their meaning. The process is helped 
 along by a phenomenon called the transference or 
 attachment of the patient for the analyst. 
 
132 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 ... 
 
 The patient who has acquired enough insight 
 
 into his unconscious can then sublimate, that is, 
 gratify in socially acceptable ways, which are 
 not erotic or sexual in their nature, the uncon- 
 scious cravings which he has always repressed 
 and which have made him a neurotic. 
 
 This reduction of every mainspring of human 
 activity to the sexual libido aroused a great deal 
 of opposition from the very first. Both Dr. Carl 
 Jung, of Zurich, and Dr. Alfred Adler, of Vienna, 
 while accepting the psychoanalytic point of view 
 which I sketched in the first lesson, disagree en- 
 tirely with Dr. Freud on that point. 
 
 Dr. Jung refuses to consider every form of 
 pleasure as a sexual manifestation. The libido, 
 to him, is bigger than the sex urge. It is the vital 
 urge,, the life urge itself. 
 
 The influence of the parents on the offspring, 
 Jung thinks, is a much more important factor of 
 normality or abnormality than the child's erotic 
 development. But it is not so much the actual 
 parents as "the father image" and (C the mother 
 image," distorted or idealised by the child which 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC WHO'S WHO 133 
 
 moulds the child's mind. The parents are not the 
 object of the child's sexual desire, but a symbol 
 of safety, comfort, affection. To be normal, the 
 child must at puberty, renounce all that, and go 
 thru the stage of self-sacrifice. 
 
 To Jung, dreams are not so much the fulfill- 
 ment of wishes as they are a true picture of the 
 situation as viewed unconsciously by the patient. 
 
 Nor are repressed childhood cravings the actu- 
 al cause of the neurose. The neurose is due to 
 the fact that the patient finds himself in a con- 
 flict which he is trying not to solve for himself. 
 
 The analysis is not, therefore, a reduction of 
 morbid phenomena to childish erotic cravings 
 but a high moral task of immense educational 
 value. 
 
 The patient must be led to seek a solution of 
 his conflicts on a higher plane where primitive 
 cravings and ethical duties no longer clash. 
 
 Morality, however, is a varying element and 
 hence the patient must develop a new faith that 
 will give expression to all his finer aspirations. 
 
 Instead of placing the emphasis on the past as 
 
134 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Freud does, Jung places the emphasis on the pres- 
 ent. The reader can readily see how the two view- 
 points can be reconciled. 
 
 In certain cases frankly erotic cravings pre- 
 dominate,, in others, cravings are of a different 
 character. In certain cases, it is the symbolic 
 image of the parents which dominates the child's 
 thinking, in other cases, there may be actual in- 
 cestuous influences at work. Every "Freudian" 
 case is bound to present many "Jungian" aspects 
 and vice versa. 
 
 But even a combination of the Freudian and 
 the Jungian theories would still leave many phe- 
 nomena unexplained. The childishness and re- 
 gressive tendencies of the neurotic are fully ac- 
 counted for by them, but the neurotic's aggressive 
 traits require a more searching interpretation. 
 
 Furthermore, both Freud and Jung appear 
 rather superficial to the modern scientist who is 
 compelled to discard the traditional distinction 
 between the mind and the body. 
 
 How is it that a mental distortion can produce 
 thru the phenomenon called by Freud conversion, 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC WHO'S WHO 135 
 
 a physical symptom, paralysis, blindness, vomit- 
 ing, etc. ? Freud and Jung leave this question un- 
 answered. 
 
 Adler links' more closely mental and physical 
 phenomena thru his theory of organ inferiority 
 and compensation. 
 
 Adler does not favor the term psychoanalysis 
 and prefers to speak of individual psychology. 
 
 While Freud considers the libido as a striving 
 toward pleasure, and Jung as the life force itself, 
 Adler says that all human activities and effort 
 tend toward a goal which is the completeness of 
 existence and function. 
 
 Nature is constantly trying to compensate 
 whatever incompleteness is found in the organ- 
 ism. After removal of one kidney, for instance, 
 the other grows larger and does the work of 
 two, etc. The neurotic is a being who feels in 
 some way inferior and is trying to compensate in 
 abnormal ways for that inferiority and incom- 
 pleteness. 
 
 The neurotic views the world as made up of 
 some people who are above and others who are 
 
136 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 below. His safety demands that he shall be above. 
 To that antithesis he soon adds another one: 
 masculine and feminine. 
 
 Male or female, the neurotic wishes to be a 
 complete man for to his mind masculine means 
 superior. 
 
 The morbid infantilism of neurotic sexuality is 
 not due to the emerging of old repressions. It 
 is being dragged into the neurotic picture by the 
 neurotic who finds in it a convenient weapon and 
 excuse for unsocial demeanor. 
 
 The neurosis, to Adler, is a morbid life plan 
 Freud stressed the past, Jung the present. Adler 
 stressed the future. 
 
 The essential aim of the Adlerian treatment is 
 to lead the neurotic back to social ways and to 
 inject into him the community sense he lacks, 
 after interpreting his unsocial ways as forms of 
 attempted aggression. 
 
 With Dr. Edward J. Kempf of New York City, 
 we reach a neurological view of the personality 
 which clears off all the mysteries of the uncon- 
 scious and substitutes a purely medical vocabulary 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC WHO'S WHO 137 
 
 for the complicated and romantic explanations of 
 the first analysts. 
 
 Kempf considers that emotions are due to ten- 
 sions assumed by certain parts of the autonomic 
 system (see Lesson IV). 
 
 Any exaggerated craving, sex, ego, fear, ha- 
 tred, hunger, etc., may be the cause of a neurosis 
 if our environment compels us to repress that 
 craving too completely. 
 
 The treatment according to Kempf consists in 
 developing a transference, that is, the unlimited 
 confidence of the patient in the analyst whereby 
 the patient is enable to recognise consciously and 
 without fear all his tabooed cravings. 
 
 When the patient is able to accept those crav- 
 ings as a part of his personality he is then free 
 from fear and able to readjust himself to his 
 environment. 
 
 The best known American analysts are: 
 
 In New York City: Dr. A. A. Brill, translator 
 of Freud's work; Dr. Beatrice Hinckle, translator 
 and annotator of Jung's works; Dr. Smith Ely 
 Jelliffe, Editor of the "Psychoanalytic Review"; 
 
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 138 LESSONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 Dr. E. J. Kempf, author of "Psychopathology" ; 
 Dr. H. W. Frink, author of "Morbid Fears and 
 Compulsions"; Dr. Bernard Glueck, translator 
 of Adler's "Neurotic Constitution" ; Dr. David 
 O. Edson, author of "Getting What We Want"; 
 Dr. Gregory Stragnell, editor of the New York 
 Medical Journal; Dr. Elizabeth Severn, author 
 of "Psychology and Behavior." 
 
 In Washington, D. C. : Dr. William White, 
 author of "Elements of Character Formation," 
 "Mental Hygiene," etc.; Dr. Lucille Dooley and 
 Dr. E. Lazelle, contributors to the Psychoana- 
 lytic Review. Dr. Lazelle has delivered lectures 
 on psychoanalysis before groups of insane peo- 
 ple at St. Elizabeth's Hospital with excellent 
 therapeutic results. 
 
 In Bridgeport, Conn., Dr. S. L. Katzoff". 
 
 In Boston, Dr. I. Coriat, author of "Repressed 
 Emotions." 
 
 In Chicago, Dr. Ralph C. Hamill. 
 
 In St. Paul, Minn., Dr. Charles R. Ball. 
 
 In Portland, Oregon, Dr. Virgil MacMickle. 
 
 In Pasadena, Cal., Dr. Josephine A. Jackson 
 
PSYCHOANALYTIC WHO'S WHO 139 
 
 and Helen M. Salisbury, authors of "Outwitting 
 Our Nerves." 
 
 The psychoanalytic treatment is applied at St. 
 Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D. C, 
 which is directed by Dr. William White. Psy- 
 choanalysis of the Freudian school is taught at 
 New York University by Dr. Brill and modern 
 psychoanalysis is taught at Dartmouth College 
 where Tridon's "Psychoanalysis" is used as a 
 text book. 
 
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