PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL

Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse, illusion.

A. S. EDDINGTON

CHAPTER 7

NATURE AND SPIRIT

In 1900 THE PHYSICIST PLANCK gave the first impulse to the quantum theory, and in 1905 Einstein published his first treatise on the theory of relativity. As these theories underwent further development during the last quarter of a century, they led to the proposition "that, under the influence of the facts of atomic physics, contemporary physics earnestly doubts the practicability of a rigid causality" (Einstein).1 Near the turn of the century, when this anti-causality movement was beginning in physics, Freud tried to apply the strict determinism of natural science to psychic events, and to demonstrate the principle of causality in mental life from which it previously had been barred.2 About a quarter of a century later, philosophers and physicists themselves began 3 to develop the epistemological implications of the new physical world view, and to regard the principle of causality as threatened by "chance" events. In ignorance of this movement, I was questioning the physical causality in Freud's determinism, and opposing "freedom of will" to such causality.4

Now it is well known that the subjective feeling of free will has always been the argument which philosophers have opposed to the principle of causality, and that Bergmann (p. 7) confesses that, from the time Hume raised the question until now, no one has successfully opposed this argument by bringing forth evidence to prove the validity of the law of causality. But Kant's utterly novel orientation gave the problem a new turn. Prior to precritical philosophy, science had been the image and photograph of reality. According to Kant it was rather an interpretation of reality which is governed by certain categorical premises. In Kant's sense the law of causality is a hypothesis which underlies experience. It is well known that Kant was the first to try to formulate this "antinomy" between the principle of causality which is necessary to scientific knowledge, and the principle of freedom which is indispensable to practical action.

The value of Kant's effort lay in his formulation of the problem, which inhered in his conception of the principle of causality as a postulate imposed by man on nature, and not as a law extracted from his knowledge of nature. Hessen's work, 5 which discusses the whole problem, shows that, although Kant's attempt to solve it no longer seems acceptable, philosophy has not gone beyond this point.At least until recently, physics has behaved rather naively toward this conflict. It considers its own task to be "the complete emancipation of the physical account of the world from the individuality of the mind which forms it, or from anthropomorphic elements. It is the task of physics to build a world completely free from the alien elements of consciousness. This is the transcendental premise of physics" (Bergmann, p. 3). But knowledge has progressively emphasized the point that the physical world is a world of interpretation and abstraction, or, as Eddington says, a purely physical world.

Never until now has it been so clear what a surpassing role the interpretation of facts plays in physics. Although Einstein's conception of the world has received recognizably strong support from empirical data, its greatness is in no sense to be sought in the facts themselves, but in the new meaning which it has given the empirical facts. The facts have not proved of decisive value to the world picture; it is rather the scientist's transcendental hypotheses (to use Kantian terms) which have held such a position (Bergmann, p. 1).

Here, as at other points which I shall indicate, I find myself in complete agreement with this view which marks a crisis not only in physics but in all of science. Independently of this movement in physics, and on the basis of purely psychological experiences, I sensed a crisis in psychology which approximates quite closely the collapse of the scientific world view. 5à Only, in this connection I went a step beyond the crisis in physics, since I conceived of the psychological attitude itself which determines the meaning of facts, as an interpretation of the human microcosm based on the ideology of consciousness and will. However, I still find myself on a common footing with physics, since I did not simply hypostasize freedom of will out of subjective experience or deduce it philosophically, but was rather driven to it as the physicists had been driven to "chance," by a too strict application of determinism, to mental phenomena in this instance. I have pursued to its ultimate consequences 5b the principle of causality which Freud applied to psychic events in a naive "physical" way, and have been led inexorably to a point where I simply had to derive mental phenomena from a "causality of willing" in order to understand them. My conception was not that the principle of causality was "false," but that it no longer sufficed for our current level of awareness because its psychological meaning had undermined its heuristic value.

I believe that this parallel is not accidental. Man seemsnow to have entered a new phase of his mental evolution, which is expressed in both physics and psychology. In other words, the modern physicist sees nature just as the modern psychologist sees man. Until recently both were ensnared in a natural science ideology whose untenability I recognized in the psychic sphere, just as certain physicists began to doubt its strict applicability to nature. On the basis of the same ideology which became so fateful for physics, Freud had fallen into the error of trying to discover behind mental phenomena a reality "free of consciousness," and of believing that he had found it in the "unconscious." He regarded his interpretations of the mental world as facts and as images of reality, just as the physicist had regarded his interpretation of the world as reality itself. But with this attempt to comprehend mental phenomena objectively, it became completely obvious that such comprehension could be mediated only by consciousness, irrespective of the subjectivity or objectivity of the observations made. To be sure, the psychological conception of this subjective influence was more difficult because the coincidence of subject and object is more marked in psychology.

In The Trauma of Birth (Das Trauma der Geburt, 1923), where I expanded Freud's determinism from the object (patient) to the subject (therapist), my analysis of the relation between the person "experimented upon" and the "experimenter," as this relation was manifested in the "analytic situation," weakens Freud's physical standpoint. My own orientation was a "realistic" one, which my latest work presents as a relativity psychology having no fixed standpoint for the experimenter, but only a momentarily given relationship between the experimenter and the person studied, whose closeness varies dynamically at all times. My conception primarily involved replacing a "historical" causality by an "actual" causality which, in fact, is not causality in any strict sense of the word. For according to Bergmann's formulation (p. 11 ): "Causality has two functions in science: (1) that of determining mutual junctures of events, and (2) that of directing the scientific treatment of sense data so that prediction of future events becomes possible." Although what I have called actual causality can satisfy the first of these demands at any given moment, the second cannot do so because its "causes" lie in a dynamic present instead of in 50 The second requirement, namely, of achieving a static past. "prediction of future events," would be the principal task of every natural science psychology, since theory, prophylaxis, and pedagogy are based on this understanding of expected reactions. However, such reactions cannot be predicted on a basis like that which quantum theory has recently established for physics. Concerning this point, Heisenberg, who has derived the most far-reaching implications of quantum mechanics, says:6

Regarding the sharp formulation of the law of causality, which asserts that if we know the present we can calculate the future, the premise and not the conclusion is false. We essentially cannot know the present in all its stages of determination . . . Because all experiments are subordinate to the laws of quantum mechanics; the invalidity of the law of causality is definitely established by quantum mechanics.

Like my relativity theory, quantum mechanics arises from a consideration of the influence of the observer, and leads to the recognition of an "inconstancy" in every sub-atomic process, which is equivalent to the admission of a certain freedom of the will in the psychic area.

As is well known, Epicurus allowed the atom (absolute chance) "the slightest deviation" from the vertical; and in his book The Problem of Freedom of the Will ( Das Problem der Willensfreiheit, p. 153), Heinrich Gomperz arrives at a similar "spontaneity" theory according to which material elements disclose certain individual and transitory peculiarities of behavior. It appears, then, that in psychology as in physics there is greater freedom the more one advances from masses to elements, and the smaller and finer one conceives these elements to be. Psychologically, that means that the more one approaches the individual and the more completely one analyzes his elements, the more difficult it becomes to justify strict determinism and causality, and the more freedom one must grant the ultimate individual elements.

In the areas of physics concerned with the determination of temporal position, the statistical law of averages takes over just the same functions as it does in relation to prediction and reconstruction, and which the rigid law of causality previously comprehended, with the difference that under it the single case could be temporally located and reconstructed relationally in a planned way. In the sub-atomic world everything comes true only on the average. (Bergmann, p. 52.)

To this statistical law of averages, which the physicist's experience with quantum mechanics forced him to substitute for the law of causality, there corresponds in the psychological realm the "normal psychology" which derives laws of "average events" from observation, but is unable to explain the behavior of an individual in a particular situation. Hence the attempts of psychoanalysis and its various schools to achieve an individual psychology always ended in "the statistical average," as Freud's normal psychology, Adler's social psychology, and Jung's collective psychology all betray. For the individual simply lies beyond lawfulness, and cannot be fully comprehended or explained by the causality either of natural or social science. In my opinion, the only rewarding approach lies in a will psychology which includes both ways of considering the individual, yet does not attempt to understand him principally or solely on the basis of himself alone. For in the realm of psychology, too, a correct formulation of the problem seems to me more important than any attempts to solve it, which attempts may become necessary or possible only because of its faulty formulation. The error of problem formulation itself results from confusion of practical and theoretical points of view, for, with the exception of a philosophy oriented purely to spiritual matters the goal of science is not knowledge in itself, but knowledge to the end of control of nature through natural science, and of men through mental science or psychology in particular.

As I established many years ago, 7 Freud's psychoanalysis tried to synthesize this antithesis of theory and practice, but miscarried in its completely unsystematic mixture of the two points of view. His psychic causality is purely historical, in that it tries to explain the present completely in terms of the past; while, at the same time, this causal understanding is obliged to function as the therapeutically effective agent, by effecting a different manner of reacting to the present and future. However, my analysis of the "analytic situation" has shown that the therapeutic agent is simply present experience, and not a historical understanding in which the "therapeutic" effect seems to consist of the displacement of certain actual impulses from present experience. In other words, Freud's causally explained displacement into the past implies something that is practically therapeutic instead of genetically causal. That is, because we believe we can understand the present better through the past, and because we can use the past to vindicate the present, we often regard the past as causally effective when in fact it is not. This "causal" explanation may have therapeutic effects, because it serves to justify the present by implying that neurotic reactions are more infantile, for example. Regarding the theoretical aspects of this view, Adler, Jung, and others raise the objection that such a reconstruction of the past as psychoanalysis seeks through a causal understanding of the present, must remain impossible or at least unapproachable as long as one does not apply finalistic points of view.

As is well known, Aristotle differentiated at least two types of cause, efficient and final; while the quantum theory appears to make it necessary to augment causal explanation ideologically over and above a determination of the future by the past, this theory "allows and requires a determination of the past by the future" (Bergmann, p. 58). Many physicists go so far as to assume a causal effect of a sequel upon an antecedent, because certain very general laws of mechanics suggest the view that "the cause of a process depends on the end state as well as on the beginning state" (Planck). It seems, however, that even in physics we can imagine only teleologically and not causally an assumption which substitutes "the pulling power of the future for the pushing power of the past" (Riezler). Yet in this teleological sense the "pulling power of the future" in psychic events is beyond question, as the Zurich psychoanalytic school has emphasized from the beginning. But this teleological connotation of the future's influence is exactly consistent with the fortuitousness and indeterminateness of the event.

The individual event is accidental within its limits of deviation. Precisely for this reason the event can be understood only after it has occurred. Since natural laws do not preclude chance or a state of suspension between various possibilities, the event that actually occurs can only be explained finalistically (Bergmann, p. 66, after Whitehead: Science and the Modern World, p. 134).

Although finality represents only another kind of causality, does assume a kind of looseness in the law of causality. In physics, on the other hand, teleology it introduces anthropomorphism, which Medicus formulates in his book, Freedom of Will, and Its Limits (Die Freiheit des Willens und ihre Grenzen, 1926, 88 ff): "Atoms seek their goal." Actually, many physicists like Eddington incline to a panpsychic world view, which has been advocated not only by Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and other Western philosophers, but by Indian philosophers as well, and which underlies the primitive's animistic conception of the world.

However, we now know that this animistic conception was founded not on a knowledge of nature or natural laws, but on the naive projection of spiritual phenomena onto reality. And its value for our thought lies precisely in the fact that, unlike our scientific conception of the world, it could not have been derived from nature of which it was not yet aware, but that it was a projection of inner mental existence. Thus the primitive's power which animated the universe animistically was his mana, which he regarded as supernatural, obviously because he knew only its effects and not its causes. But again, just as with biological sexual processes, it is not this ignorance itself which becomes the problem for us and the primitive, but the fact that this ignorance must be maintained when it no longer really exists. This maintenance results from an act of will which I have termed denial. This act stands at the service of the ego which wants to conserve, preserve, defend, and justify itself. Just as it was ignorance of will process which first underlay one's need to ascribe its effects to the supernatural, it soon became a case of recognizing one's own evil-doing will, which recognition led to a self-justifying projection onto others, sorcerers, demons, gods, etc. The causes which one discovered for such processes as death and reproduction were false causes which satisfied primitive man's ostensible "hunger for a cause" because they were practical, comforting, and "therapeutic."

Although without any doubt the human mind has since found many correct causes for natural events in particular, to the extent that it was and is an interpretation of mental events, psychology still rests on the standpoint of "false" or justifying therapeutic relationships. However, by its own claim, psychoanalysis, which presumes to have discovered the "psychic reality" behind mental phenomena, is oriented therapeutically; and, in shifting responsibility from the individual, its whole causal theory is an attempt at consolation which is in no way inferior to spiritual belief or religious consolation, except that such consolation was derived from the application of the causal principle which spiritual belief had won by denial and religion had won by moralizing. As Hessen (op. cit., 153) has clearly shown in accordance with philosophical knowledge of the principle of causality, "this is nothing other than an application of the logical law of causation to reality, or, more precisely, to events in the real world. However, the law of causation is only a formulation of the lawfulness of thought, and causality asserts that the structure of existence corresponds to that lawfulness. The need to think is a need to be, for thinking and being coincide. However, that means nothing more than that the world should be amenable to conceptualization." It is quite easy to bring this philosophical formulation into agreement with our psychological view, or even to translate it word for word into the language of will psychology. For what science calls "conceiving" of the world virtually means controlling the world, and, in the primitive equation of thinking and being as will-phenomena, we have recognized the identity of the need to think and the need to be. Thus the principle of causation is an intellectual form of will assertion which in its false, disciplined, causal connections is obvious, and which in its correct connections is as scientific as will causality confirms it to be.

This explains the feeling which has characterized past and present controversies about the principle of causality and, particularly, the repeated attempts to preserve this principle in spite of all experience contradictory to it, because one wants paradoxically to preserve freedom of will, of which the principle of causality is an intellectual manifestation. So perhaps it is no accident that at the moment physics began seriously to doubt the principle of causality, in the psychic area Freud's system was attempting to lend the principle the support which freedom of the will had previously withheld from it. However, since psychoanalysis had sought to compress freedom of the will into the frameworks of deterministic compulsion and causal destiny, it overstrained the causality principle by applying it to the will whose intellectual expression it was. We now find ourselves at the heart of both the causality principle as an intellectualizcd will principle, and of the will problem itself; for, as I explained in my will psychology, this problem is a dual one. The will, which can cause evil, can represent evil; thus the will principle becomes moral principle, and the moral principle, causal principle. In its positive expression, the will principle creates animism as a projection of itself; in its negative expression, the will creates religion as a moral justification of itself; and finally, in its intellectual expression as causal principle, the will principle creates science which obtrudes nature practically and theoretically upon willing in order to it.

We should like to pursue further these three stages of development which stress the relation of causality to will, guilt, and consciousness respectively; yet in order not to depart too far from our theme we should keep the course of these currents in psychology before us. As recent scholars have emphatically agreed, primitive man's naive emphasis on will left no room in his mind for causality.8 The question of the course of unusual events was really a kind of "philosophical astonishment that anything could happen independently of willing; hence the causes that were discovered were such "will causes" as bad spirits, sorcerers, mana, or one's own mistakes, all of which could account for death. Be it a matter of naive projection or of moral self-justification, it is always the will which is the causal factor. However, from the beginning, the setting of the problem has had a purely practical aspect which intrudes even into our scientific ideology, namely, that knowledge of causes not only makes it possible to bring about the same or different events in the future, but that such effects must be voluntary because we could not otherwise control them. The premise of magical man was the identity of thought and reality, or of willing and being; and this view underlay even those of his understandings and actions which were not causal but "fatal." That is, when anyone unwittingly carried out a voluntary act, the fatal effect appeared not on the basis of the causal principle, but on the basis of the identity principle which rested on the will principle. "Speaking as would Levy-Briihl, there exists a feeling of mystical unity, but none of causal connection, between the rain and the rain-maker. It is a matter of introducing and activating causes, and not of producing or restoring the normal relation between the man who wants rain and rain itself (Beth, op. cit.9 p.170).

As is readily seen, this fatal effect is the characteristic feature of the next stage, in which thinking and acting are no longer fatalistic but appear to be morally determined. This is the stage of religion formation at which morality rules in place of a quite different fatalistic causality. 9 This morality looks for the causes in the default of one's own will, and finds them in a justification of this will. In this sense the god of the religious stage is not only a personification of the will principle which underlies my will psychology, but also an incorporation of the causal principle as it existed under moralistic ideology. God was the cause of the world, which therefore had to be causally understandable. In other words, the strict causal principle was religious because both religion and causality represented only various expressions of the will principle at the moralistic and intellectual (scientific) stages of man's thinking. Jesus' doctrine that not a sparrow falls without God's will on earth, and Newton's discovery that no apple could fall in the absence of cosmic law, were but issues of the same will ideology. Neo-Scholasticism even used the causal principle to establish the cosmological proof of God. 10 The endless strife over this point between science and religion is completely meaningless because the causal principle and the will principle are basically the same.

In order to understand this identity thoroughly we must draw upon will psychology as I have developed it in my two latest works. When it is once recognized, the evil of willing necessarily leads for the most part to denial and negation of willing, and to the creation of inner as well as outer inhibitions which hinder and block expressions of will. However, these inhibitions themselves are negative will expressions, or manifestations of counter-will. Thus, in the individual as well as in the so-called compulsive neurotic, we find clear signs both of such expressions and of a conflict of will which corresponds throughout to that between godlike freedom and causal compulsion. The entire history of human development, and not merely of man's spiritual development, shows how the individual gradually negates and denies his own will in order to justify it, and how he seeks to extirpate it when justification is impossible. The law of causality is only one of many forms in which this voluntary restriction and justification of will is expressed; yet it is the characteristic form for our scientific world view, just as God was the characteristic form under the religious world view. Accordingly, the causal principle is the religion of the natural scientist by means of which he seeks to explain and govern the world, just as the adherent of religion tried to use the concept of God to these same ends; However, at the religious stage, the scientific principle of causality corresponds not only to moral restriction of the will by God, but, to the extent that its intrusion into the spheres of will and morality miscarries, to a preservation of the will principle in the intellectual sphere. When the will is denied and replaced by sin and guilt, it experiences in the physical principle of causality an intellectual resurrection which has been threatened only recently by the physicist's intellectual, and the psychologist's epistemological, awareness. While physical theory once had to prove the divine lawfulness and meaningfulness of the world in causal terms, it now has insight into the imperfections of human conceptualization, which impels it to recognize the dominance of chance and volition. This new attitude is not a return to the omnipotence of will, but only an intellectual insight into its irrevocable loss, and it is to be characterized by what I have described as an "extirpation of God" from the world and from man. It is a process which expresses itself in the increasing influence of self-consciousness upon the consideration of facts, and whose interpretation in the sense of self-derogation has become increasingly influential. While the religious man projects his will power and his conscious moral attitude onto God, before whom he humbles himself while remaining haughty and powerful in other respects, modern man recognizes God in himself, and feels himself small and vain in comparison. He can rule nature but he cannot know it. That is, he can force his will causally, but this will itself remains as inexplicable and incalculable as natural events themselves finally are.

It is characteristic that psychology along with physics should be in the midst of a similarly humbling self-awareness. Only this "feeling of inferiority" from which we all suffer is no "neurotic complex" such as Adler intended to cure by pedagogical measures; it is much more the developmental negativism of the religious man, who no longer can have any illusions about his unimportance. We now stand at the boundary of psychology as it has grown out of spiritual belief, a psychology which leads from a projected awareness of nature to moral self-recognition and self-judgment. It does not matter whether the projection is animistic, religious, or scientific. As long as it is projection illusory. With it is helpful and therapeutic, because it is increasing self consciousness and growing self insight, this psychology becomes destructive until, with fuller awareness of the truth about one's own self, it ends in a feeling of utter powerlessness. The victory of knowledge about nature may not be crowned by one of knowledge of self, for it has to be bought with self-knowledge too dearly. Although man's control of nature by knowledge is his greatest victory, his correspondingly greater self-awareness becomes his greatest defeat. As Nietzsche saw correctly, salvation can be expected only through a rcevaluation of guilt into will, and thus through a return to positive affirmation of will. However, this appeared impossible, so that Nietzsche's work was essentially an intellectual destruction of the old values, generated by his insight into their origins; and Nietzsche's philosophy of positive will remained incomplete and undeveloped.

Therefore psychoanalytic doctrine attacked therapeutic objectives logically enough, but ran into moral ones instead, and found itself faced with the insurmountable problem of in terms of the Oedipus and guilt. Its "causal" explanation castration complexes corresponds on the one hand to an attempt to justify will in the sense of the biological sex impulse (Oedipus), and, on the other, to judge will morally (castration) in the sense of Schopenhauer's extirpation of the "seat of will." With both of these steps, Freud has gone beyond the real psychological sphere in order to operate therapeutically, once when he justified sex, again when he judged will morally, and both times in the name of the scientific principle of causality. His causal explanation of willing, which was based on the sex impulse, was an attempt at justification; his causal explanation of will inhibition on the basis of anxiety amounted to a moralistic judgment of willing. But, in the last analysis, his whole application of the principle of causality to psychic material comprised only a disguised attempt to preserve the old will principle in the realm most proper to it. He had to fail in this attempt because the paradox of applying the causal principle to the will principle ultimately disclosed their identity. While that outcome robbed the Freudian attempt of some of its sublimity, the attempt was valuable and instructive even though the solution was typically ephemeral.

Psychoanalysis is therefore to be regarded as therapy in the most completely illusion-promoting sense of the word; for its psychology is based on the relation of the 7 to the Thou, whether one interprets this relation religiously as does Jung, socially as does Adlcr, or as infantile in the Freudian sense. It does not recognize the individual as such, but as a being whose will is "causally" explained by sexual libido, and whose consciousness is finally determined by the unconscious. Theoretically, Freud has tried to explain the entire individual causally, whereas individuality itself means extra-causality. But in therapy the will becomes of subtle importance, not only in the seemingly weak-willed neurotic, of whose performance the analyst has such a low opinion, and whose will expression the analyst interprets as "resistance"; for the therapist's will itself seems to be described as something almost godlike in its potency. This is not causally explained, although a situation in which one will influences another is at least conciliatory to the causal principle. Strangely enough, Freud's theory has consistently become more causal during its development. In my opinion, this happened because the theory led into a blind alley. For in the "pleasure principle," which Freud established in 1911, there still lay a certain individual "freedom/* despite the apparent biological influence of the sexual character of pleasure on the principle. But the experience that man did not always behave according to the pleasure principle drove Freud to considerations which entangled him still more deeply in the causal principle instead of leading him out of it. His "Beyond the pleasure principle" could have become a "Beyond the causal principle," had he not sought shelter in a more comprehensive causality which he described as a "compulsion to repetition." However, in its significant aspects, this compulsion to repetition is controlled by the will principle; and Nietzsche, who in 1881 proclaimed "the perpetual return of the same," disclosed in Zarathustra that pleasure wants perpetuity and that it is the will which is responsible for the repetition compulsion. In his presentation of perpetual recurrence, Nietzsche was not completely dedicated to causality, since, in an incomparable flash of critical insight apropos of the physical concept of mechanics, he saw just the inexactness of natural law as the "necessary condition of existence and action. We would starve without it. Skepticism and foresight are always late and are seldom tolerated" (from unpublished material about the time of Joyful Science (Frohlichen Wissenschaft, 1881). It appears here as elsewhere that the assimilation or direct comparison of man with the cosmos, on which mythology, religion, astrology, and science rest, only represents a wish to deny the incalculability of one's own fate by an assumption of natural lawfulness. The same holds for the concept of time, of which Bergmann says,

. . . that we fix, or as we may almost say, nominate a visible representative of absolute time sequence such as the notion of the fixed stars about the earth, which then becomes the "clock" (not for measuring time but for determining chronological order) to which we refer when deriving the time sequence, and hence the causeeffect relations, of all other events.

A well-known example of this flight from uncertainty into a pseudo-objective certainty is the calendar which was originally used in Egypt, Babylon, China, Mexico, and elsewhere as a book of fate or table for evaluating particular dates as favorable or unfavorable for important undertakings.11

In Truth and Rcalittj ( Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit ) I have expressed ideas concerning the psychological mechanisms, like those expressed by Nietzsche regarding the inexactness of natural law as a condition of existence. I said there (49 f ) that just the false, "uncausal" connections make adaptation to reality possible, and that we are thus able to bear reality only by denying, displacing, and rationalizing it, and not by recognizing psychological truth which is destructive. As paradoxical as it may seem, the false relationships in mental or spiritual life are the real ones, for they are the causes of all the human reactions which we observe and study in psychology. However, this view implies both a dethronement of psychology as knowledge of self, and a reinstatement of ethics and epistemology in this role. For psychology can as little replace the recognition of thought, as religion and morality can be replaced. Psychoanalysis seems however to raise this claim as a substitute for morality, or at least some individuals want to believe that it can be such a substitute. One would not have been able to elevate the Freudian doctrine to a new religion and morality had it not already contained such a tendency within itself. For all religion, morality, and psychology betray themselves as new and differing attempts to solve the will problem interpretatively; religion tried to solve it by projection, morality by introspection, philosophy by rationalization, and psychology by interpretation. Both religion and morality motivate causally, but fatalistically and morally, respectively; and philosophy and psychology both motivate finalistically, and rationalist!cally and interpretatively, respectively. However, the causal principle as such corresponds to a moralistic formulation of the will principle, and so that it cannot be applied in a psychology of the individual personality. This insight underlies the recent psychological developments of Struktur and Gestalt psychology, in which neither subject nor object is measurable or subjugated strictly to the law of causality. There are unities in place of elements; there is understanding in place of explanation, and description in place of generalization. This "modest" orientation corresponds approximately to the views of the newer physics, but like these it is too negative, too timid, or one may almost say, too intimidated. As I indicated with reference to the psychological orientation of physicists, there seems to be a tendency also for psychologists to disparage themselves. This tendency is indeed characteristic of the spirit of the times, but it tells more about the psychology of the scientists than of man.

In the present volume I have tried to conceive of psychology as a creative expression of freedom of will in the spiritual sense, since I have shown repeatedly how it grew out of spiritual belief, and how it seeks to preserve the ideology of immortality, while no longer believing in the soul to which it owes its existence. First, the body itself was felt to be immortal, then the collective soul, then procreative sexuality, and finally, the individual and his collective works (science). But with man's development, the picture of the soul itself had changed. This change was reflected particularly in the bodily location of the soul, which originally was in the materials of life themselves ( blood, breath ) , then in bodily organs important for life (liver, heart, etc. ), later in the female sexual organs important for reproduction and in male sexual matter (semen), and finally in consciousness. These different localizations of the soul correspond to the animistic, sexual, and psychological eras. Thus, psychology became possible only at the fully developed stage of consciousness, in which the seat of the soul became transferred to consciousness; psychology is therefore characterized by consciousness as its inwardly oriented instrument of observation, which it focuses on the negative and already moralized phenomenon of will. Before we consider consciousness and its implications, let us glance briefly at the psychic phenomenon which consciousness itself considers and interprets at the psychological stage. At this present stage the primal, free action of positive willing appears as a reaction not only to outer stimuli but to inner self-established inhibitions and resistances which are just as "causal" as external stimuli. Freedom of the will appears only as a denial of compulsion, and what remains of free, positive willing becomes rationalized morally as compulsive causation, fatal necessity, or justification. Thus the psychic phenomena with which psychology deals are absolute opposites of the primal, mental, or spiritual events in which guilt-free projection of positive free will predominated.

As the seat of the soul, consciousness, which stands opposed to these phenomena at the psychological stage, has another meaning besides that of reflecting natural events. It had mediated man's knowledge, if not his recognition, of sexual processes and death; and yet, at the same time, it had become a kind of insurance against death. It did this in two ways: first, in the dream, which provided a more continuous awareness of existence of a self permanently threatened by life; and secondly, in a higher, broader sense, in which it proves its existence by representing the seat of the soul. Thus there appears finally the paradox that man feels immortal just because of his fleeting consciousness, which death extinguishes; and that he remains convinced of the frailty and transitoriness of his body, which primitive man believed existed forever. Death, which was recognized by consciousness, was denied by individual self-consciousness; and this selfconsciousness interpreted the psychic phenomenon of will in its own sense. No wonder then that psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis, which never analyzed the observing consciousness itself, has yielded only self-deception, just like the original spiritual belief from which it descended, and which, in spite of its own testimony to the contrary, it still tries to preserve.

Here lies the cardinal error from which natural science suffers. The soul may not exist, and, like belief in immortality, it may prove to be man's greatest illusion; nevertheless must picture not only the objects, but the content, of psychology, whose objects are not things or facts but ideas and ideologies. And, like our entire human reality, which includes scientific psychology, these same ideologies are products of spiritual belief. Psychology has to do only with interpretations of spiritual phenomena in and of themselves, and as they refer to the individual self, whether they are already objectified or are still subjective. However, interpretation itself is nothing but an intellectualized will phenomenon, and while it may therefore be a matter of interpretation of the external world, of other humans, or of one's own self, there always lies in this kind of understanding an actual "handling" in the real sense of the word, a taking possession of a thing, a violation, a creation in the sense of one's own ego and in the likeness of one's self. The creative person fashions the world according to his conscious, willing ego; the neurotictype interprets it psychologically according to his moralistic, guilt ego; and the psychotic identifies himself with it in the sense of his magic, spiritual ego. Just as animism was the ideology of the primitive era, as sexual ideology was characteristic of antiquity, and as the Middle Ages comprised the era of Christian ideology, so psychological ideology rules today. This is meaningful only in relation to our explanations, and particularly to the one depicting contemporary psychology not only as a science for the explanation of mental and other phenomena but as a continuation of, and a substitute for, this spiritual phenomenon which fashions the contemporary ideology that governs our conception and alteration of our world. However, psychology, which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology, is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology, and an ideology of resentment in Nietzsche's sense. It destroys illusions and ideologies, which can no longer withstand its progressive self-consciousness. It becomes progres-sively unable to maintain even itself, and finally, as the last natural science ideology, it destroys itself. Therefore psychology cannot replace morality, because all attempts to set natural law in place of the rules created by human willing have generally not proved feasible in physics, biology, or psychology. For, as Kant first recognized, so-called natural laws are only outward projections of the laws of individual willing; and the famous parallel between the "starry heavens above me" and the "moral law within me" properly exists not because morality corresponds to a lawfulness of the cosmos, but because the cosmos is interpreted morally in the sense of a higher, divine will.

Just as animism was the ideology of the primitive era, as sexual ideology was characteristic of antiquity, and as the Middle Ages comprised the era of Christian ideology, so psychological ideology rules today. This is meaningful only in relation to our explanations, and particularly to the one depicting contemporary psychology not only as a science for the explanation of mental and other phenomena but as a continuation of, and a substitute for, this spiritual phenomenon which fashions the contemporary ideology that governs our conception and alteration of our world. However, psychology, which is gradually trying to supplant religious and moral ideology, is only partially qualified to do this, because it is a preponderantly negative and disintegrating ideology, and an ideology of resentment in Nietzsche's sense. It destroys illusions and ideologies, which can no longer withstand its progressive self-consciousness. It becomes progres-sively unable to maintain even itself, and finally, as the last natural science ideology, it destroys itself. Therefore psychology cannot replace morality, because all attempts to set natural law in place of the rules created by human willing have generally not proved feasible in physics, biology, or psychology. For, as Kant first recognized, so-called natural laws are only outward projections of the laws of individual willing; and the famous parallel between the "starry heavens above me" and the "moral law within me" properly exists not because morality corresponds to a lawfulness of the cosmos, but because the cosmos is interpreted morally in the sense of a higher, divine will.

The insecurity of the causality principle of natural science can be traced in biology as in physics. Only, its influence on the collapse of psychological ideology is more evident, particularly because psychoanalysis has overstressed the biological factor in favor of the moral one. For man lives basically not as a biological organism alone but as a moral being as well, and this bipolarity accounts for all his problems. In the biological sphere his will manifests itself as action, and in the moral sphere as reaction. The task of all education and therapy is to reconvert this reaction into action, or to translate compulsion of will into freedom of will. But in the biological sphere there already rules a "freedom" like that in physics, which pertains to the inorganic "cell' or atom. For biology reduced to chemistry cannot reconstruct organic cellular life "causally," and, according to the most incisive explanations by Weismann, death seems to be only "accidental" and not "necessary."12 He proposes that "in the single-celled organism there is essentially no 'natural death/ or death from inner causes" (op. cit., p. 17). Only with the multicellular organism, which reproduces by "propagation" rather than by division, is there a natural death. And in this instance, death pertains only to the somatic and not to the reproductive cells. Thus modern biology not only recognizes a kind of immortality, but, like primitive belief, it also finds that "the most intimate cause of death is actually reproduction" ("the further and deeper, however, that life power is standardized relative to the duration and output of the period of reproduction") (op. cit., p. 65).

In one of the foregoing paragraphs I called psychology the last natural science ideology, because of all interpretation it is the one that concerns the interpretative instrument itself, which is the spiritual and feeling life of man. But it is not clear why the interpretation of just this bit of nature by human consciousness should yield truths of greater certainty or longer life than should the interpretation of other phenomena by a self-consciousness which is individually and temporally conditioned and utterly changeable. Even in psychology, and perhaps there more than elsewhere, it seems to be just a matter of proclaiming a new, current interpretation, yet not as an interpretation or even as the reality which underlies any interpretation. The only reality which exists in the psychic realm is the Now: the same Now which the physicist finds so incomprehensible, inapplicable, or simply inconceivable. Herein lies one of the most fundamental distinctions between natural science psychology and its methodological prototype, physics. For, as already noted, it is the "task of physics to construct a world of objects from which consciousness is completely excluded" (Bergmann, loc. cit., p. 25); while psychology, by way of complete contrast, is concerned with a world built exclusively of consciousness. In his Academy treatise, "Causal Structure of the World and the Difference between Past and Future" (Kausalstruktur der Welt und der Unterschied von Vergangenheit und Zukunft ) , the physicist Reichenbach has tried to use a topological formulation of causality relationships to establish the Now-point as the border between past and future without going back to physical factors. Bergmann quite properly questions Reichenbach's success, since "the concept of the Now is bound up intimately with that of the ego" (op. cit., p. 28). Freud wanted in a completely physical sense to explain psychic phenomena causally in relation to the past, and so to mediate the predetermination of such phenomena in the sense of prophylaxy and therapy. But in doing this he neglected the real psychic object, the currently operating ego and its Now, which even physics finally found imponderable and which psychology cannot treat because it concerns only actual, current, conscious phenomena.

For if I may so put it, psychology has still less to do with facts than has physics. It cannot in the least exclude consciousness, and since it cannot do this, it is not a natural science in the sense of physics or biology at all, but a science of relationships and relativities. Thus psychology is at no time an interpretation of facts such as one finds in physics and biology, but an interpretation of the attitudes of the individual self, which we project on others through the medium of so-called objective psychology. Psychology is interpretation of self in others, just as physics is interpretation of self in nature. In this sense, psychology is self-affirmation or selfassertion, and psychology as self-knowledge is self-deception or belief, for man's psychological creed is immortality.

NOTES

1 In the introduction (March 1929) to Hugo Bergmann's "The Controversy over the Law of Causality in Recent Physics" ( Der Kampf um das Kausalgesetz in der jiingsten Physik) Vieweg Sammlung, No. 98, Braunschweig, 1929.

2 In the Interpretation of Dreams ( Traumdeutung ) which appeared in 1900, Freud attempted to establish strict determinism in the realm of mental phenomena; and in Three Dissertations on Sexual Theory (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie), he tried to establish biology as the causal basis for psychic events.

3 See the outstanding critical summary by Bergmann. In his Gifford Lectures (1927) the English professor of astronomy S. A. Eddington developed the philosophical aspects under the title, The Nature of the Physical World, which volume was published in 1928. (The quotation at the beginning of the present chapter comes from this book. ) I knew nothing of this volume or of the literature to which it refers until I began preparing the present chapter.

4Truth and Reality. An Outline of a Philosophy of Mental Life (Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit. Entwurf einer Philosophic des Seelischen), 1929, and "The Analytic Reaction in its Constructive Aspects," in The Technique of Psychoanalysis (Die analytische Reaktion in ihren konstruktiven Elernenten; Technik der Psychoanalyse), II, 1929. Both volumes are from the F. Deuticke Press, Vienna and Leipzig.

5 Johannes Hessen, The Principle of Causality (Das Kausalprinzip ) ,Agusburg, 1928.

5a The Munich philosopher, Hugo Dingier, bases his The Downfall of Science ( Zusammenbruch der Wissenschaft, Munich, 1926) on a failure to consider the primacy of will and its psychological sequelae.

5b Especially in The Trauma of Birth (Trauma der Geburt, 1924) where I encountered the incommensurable quantitative features of neuroses, which I discussed later in my Genetic Psychology (Genetischen Psychologic), Part I, 1827, 31 ff.

5c ('Similarly, Einstein did not give up the old concept of causality, but substituted a more individual causality for it, because the theory of relativity means that every observer sees and comprehends things from his own individual standpoint, and thus has, as it were, his own "truth." However, this truth is at the same time determined spatio-temporally or dynamically; it relates to events and their intervals instead of to bodies and their distances; it concerns structure instead of material; and it has thus a greater concern for the immediate circumstances (even in explaining gravitation) than for "action at a distance" in the sense of Newtonian causality. The resultant application of the axiom of "action at point of contact," which perhaps corresponds to what I have called actual causality in the text, led to the quantum theory's recognition of "inconstancy" which shakes the principle of causality to its foundations. The relativity and quantum theories operate differently upon the principle of causality; relativity theory yields a more strict but individual causality, which ultimately means individual freedom outside the conditions of statistical, mass causality.

6 Zeitschrift f. Physik, Vol. 43, 1927.-In his "The Quantum Postulate, etc." (Das Quantenpostulat, usw., in Naturwissenschaft, 1928), Bohr has developed a theory of complements from Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, in consequence of which he does not exclude simultaneous perception of both complements in the negligible influence of the measuring instrument. These are the causal and the spatio-temporal modes of perception as complementary and mutually exclusive characteristics of the description of the content of experience. Bohr has used this fundamental law of quantum theory, to the effect that spatio-temporal and energetic description of a process are somewhat exclusive, to account for both theories of light: the wave theory meets the needs according to the spatio-temporal concept, and the quantum theory according to the causal concept, so that there is no single theory of light, just as there is no single psychology, and for quite the same reasons.

7 Objectives of Psychoanalysis. Relation of Theory and Practice ( Entwick lungszicle der Psychoanalyse. Zur Wcchsclbezichung von Theorie und Praxis). S. Ferenczi, co-author; written in 1922, published in 1924.

8 See especially K. Beth: Religion and Magic (Religion und Magie) second edition, 1927: "The Psychological Basis of Magic" (Die psychologische Crundlage der Magie), especially 168 ff.

9 In Oskar Goldberg's provocative work, The Reality of the Hebrews (Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer, Berlin, 1925), I find behind the causal morality of the Pentateuch (punishment for sin) the attempt to disclose the amoral succession of "error" and "catastrophe" as the basic underlying view. See especially 127 ff, "The Amoral View" (Die amoralische Auffassung).

10 See especially the excellent presentation by Fr. Sawicki: The Proof of God (Die Gottesbeweise ) , Paderborn, 1926. 183

11 Th. Danzel: Magic Man (Der Magische Mcnsch), Zurich, 1928, p.65.

12 August Weismann: Concerning Life and Death. A Biological Study (Ueber Leben und Tod. Eine biologische Untersuchung ) , second edition, Jena, LS92.