اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

VII

HAPPINESS AND REDEMPTION

"I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith

— no, only to forget myself

/for a moment, that only do I want of I intoxication, that alone."

Omar Khayyam

At this point we leave the historical and typological methods of comparison which forced themselves upon us as parallel phenomena in considering creation as a continuous ongoing and developing life process, and return to those spiritual states which always emerge in the individual as reactions to the will-guilt conflict as we have described it, and influence and determine its manifestations decisively. The longing for happiness and redemption dwelling in all of us can only be expressed as a momentary present life value for the individual and can only be understood from that viewpoint. Accordingly we see the need for happiness and redemption in humankind becoming always more individualized. Upon the religious justification and the heroic ethical solution of the will-guilt problem, there follows the effort to find individual redemption in the emotional love experience, which gives this developmental phase value not only historically-, but also individually for the particular person with whom it characterizes childhood, puberty and maturity. We need for the understanding of these parallel phenomena no phylogenetic causality, but only the will causality of the individual from which the same reactions always follow with psychological necessity. In the course and progress of the latter we have discovered, in addition to the principle of will causality, another principle derived from it which has helped determine the gradual transformation of the concepts of happiness and redemption decisively. This is the "Realisierungsprinzip" ^ which in distinction from the "reality principle"of Freud has a dynamic significance inasmuch as it views reality, not as something given once and for all to which the individual adapts himself more or less, but as something which has come into being, yes, is continuously becoming.

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1 This term has no suitable equivalent in English. It means a making real, a literal "realizing" in contradistinction to the static "reality principle."

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We have illustrated this principle of the gradual and continuously changing realization of the unreal and the reverse process of making the real unreal which parallels it, in the evolution of the idea of God. This develops in humanity and in the individual from the projection of the most real principle of all, namely, the will, in the unreal concept of God, to the real personification of the counter-will in the father principle, and of positive willing in the love principle. Our scientifically oriented era, however, has driven this "Realisierungsprinzip" still further toward its denial in the moralistic parent ideology, and the ethical love ideology since it would make the spiritual itself real, a last despairing attempt which we see culminate in the psychoanalytic world view. At the same time we see the neurotic type of our time suffering from the loss of all illusions, breaking away from the psychoanalytic therapy which makes the will concrete and justifies the guilt really, and striving after new spiritual experiences, as indicated in parallel attempts toward a new orientation of psychology in terms of total personahty and total experience. This reaction of the spiritual against the psychological seems to me to correspond to a reaction against the whole scientific ideology to whose practical consequences and activities man reacts on the one side with guilt, as to all of his will consequences, while on the other he flees to spiritual reality, that is, to emotional experience in order to find there salvation from will as well as from consciousness. Whatever the need for happiness and salvation may have meant to the men of an earlier age, for the hyperconscious, willrestricted neurotic type of today they represent the attempts to get free of the conscious will-ego temporarily or permanently, in a word, they strive for an abrogation of the individualism from whose isolating consequences we suffer. As always, the man of earlier times sought to win happiness and salvation or to imagine it, while for us, after the failure of the common attempts to make real or unreal as they he before us in religion and science, there remains only the individual solution carried out in the love experience, whose failure has led finally to the most individualistic form of therapy. Already the hypertrophied self consciousness of the neurotic type begins to recognize this latest illusion of an individual therapy as affording neither happiness nor salvation. This recognition, however, like all psychological knowledge, is no creative one in terms of a pleasurable will affirmation but a painful becoming conscious, a disillusioning awareness of all these connections which we do not will to know for the sake of knowledge, but which we have to know because no other course remains open to us. In order to comprehend this process of decay in all illusions, the unreal as well as the real, in its full bearing, and to understand_the inherent need of iQaHnrn T7i>\n for jredprnp^iioiijWe must examine it, especially in the three aspects which it offers us today, namely, its relation to sexuality, to the emotional life, and to the consciousness of the individual. In relation to sexuality, we find that the modern man no longer understands and experiences the sexual purely biologically, but as we have explained, uses it morally as the essential content of the will and guilt problem, which inevitably contributes to the formation of the neurotic conflict. From this it follows that he has also attached the need for happiness and redemption to the sexual content, insofar as it is to free him from the compulsion of the moralistic. In other words, having utilized sexuality psychologically, he now wants to use it spiritually. Originally sexuality had as little to do with morality as with redemption, but its original biological meaning does not explain its modern role and function. In its psychological meaning as will accomplishment, which it represents for both sexes, sexuality can probably afford happiness, insofar as happiness is perception of pleasure, that is, a brief consciousness of will accomplishment itself. However it can afford no salvation that aims at the dissolution of, or escape from individuality, from the conscious self, because it is sex that emphasizes difference in the highest degree and accordingly can only be pleasurable, that is, affording happiness, when the individual, man or woman, is able to affirm his individuality and its will. This the neurotic is not able to do and accordingly sexuality affords him not even the happiness of a brief self forgetting but only increases his awareness of difference, that is, increases his guilt consciousness. Sexuality tends to make possible for him a flight from consciousness instead of enjoyment of the will achievement in consciousness, which constitutes the essence of pleasure. Sexuality with this opposition of sex and will becomes the symbol of inner conflict instead of release therefrom. For him this real solution with the freedom of will in the love choice and its justification through the "other" becomes the compulsion offracia^wiH which the "other" represents for the individual will, anH^to'wnich, accordingly, the counter-will reacts negatively. The erotic emotional experience lifts these difficulties found in the physical sex relation to a certain level in the releasing happiness of love but shatters on other grounds in the final solution of the conflict as well as in the redemption of the individual from it. In the emotional experience the individual yields primarily through his own emotion, so that the giving up to the other is no subjection of the will actually, but only the consequence of his own voluntary softening of the will. The emotional experience represents therefore a kind of attempt at self redemption which actually aims at independence of the other will and object and also strives not for the other's subjection, but its own subjection. This giving in of will holds for both sexes, exactly as the physical sex act means for both sexes will accomplishment. The conflict re-enters in the emotional sphere when the will opposes the yielding to the other, so that the individual who finds salvation in his own emotional yielding finally strives after redemption from this individual emotional compulsion as he formerly strove after release from the racial sex compulsion in the emotional love experience. Here again we see that the need of man for happiness and redemption not only changes with different historical and individual developmental phases but that, exactly as does the spiritual content of truth, it varies in terms of the momentary will and guilt picture. From what serves today as a means to salvation, the individual at once, or tomorrow, wants to be saved as soon as this form of salvation becomes compulsory. This situation is most highly comphcated in the sphere of consciousness in which, finally, all these conflicts manifest themselves. If consciousness in its original function as the instrument of will affirms the latter's achievement, then it mediates the sensation of pleasure, but the pleasure experience then struggles after rescue from the quality' of consciousness, begrudging its momentariness, and seeks to make happiness a salvation. This pleasure, which in Nietzsche's meaning wants eternity, as it struggles loose from time conditioned consciousness becomes pain when consciousness does not affirm the will but denies it and so leads to guilt consciousness instead of consciousness of pleasure. The longing for redemption, then, has to do with guilt consciousness as a tormenting form of self consciousness which originally mediates pleasure through affirmation of the will.

We find ourselves through this discussion in the midst of the whole problem of redemption which, depending on circumstances, is connected with will or consciousness, pleasure or guilt.

We notice here also that happiness and redemption, at least as we understand them in the modern individual, actually represent opposites and not merely different degrees of a longing directed toward the dissolution of individuality. For the achievementjii happinessjEEiesents a peak of indi^-idualism and itspleasurable will affirmation through personal consciousness whilelhe longing for saTvationroiTlKe'contrary, strives alter the_aFFogation^ of indi^adualitv^or hkeness, unity^neness with the all. ^ccordingly~liappines§_is. only to "beaKamgdTg''the~wTII accomplish,ment,J^aJyat_ionj)nly in the_abrogation of will tjirough emotion. But this giving up of will, although it is also pleasurable, is only achieved through guilt feeling from which state redemption is then sought in turn. In this sense, the feeling of happiness releases only temporarily from will compulsion, while what we seek is the actual lasting release from tormenting guilt consciousness. Here we come upon the time element whose quantitative aspect is not only determining for the feeling of happiness and redemption, but in general represents the central factor of consciousness itself and therewith of spiritual life as such. For all our spiritual tendencies, from whatever standpoint one may view them, can be understood finally hke life itself, temporally. With all so-called psychic mechanisms, we have to do ultimately with the shortening or prolonging of psychic states ; to shorten to the point of nothingness, as, for example, denial does, or to prolong to infinity as in^thfiJjeliefJit-iiiHaoi^tality. TfJesituation, however, is ^iot~so simple as that we merely want to prolong pleasurable conditions and shorten unpleasurable on,es ; we here strike the paradox that the individual wants to prolong the pleasure whose essence lies just in its temporal limitation, which must miscarry in the same way as the shortening of pain, whose essence lies in the prolongation of any psychic state, even one that is pleasurable in the beginning. For pleasure is a certain brevity of consciousness, pain a lengthening of consciousness, at least on the level of neurotic self consciousness, where consciousness disturbs experience in the form of self consciousness and guilt consciousness and accordingly the individual wants to be saved from it. Therefore from the standpoint of the psychology of emotions, consciousness shows itself as a time problem in the sense that time represents the form of consciousness and by means of this time factor makes the different contents pleasurable or painful. Will as the constant driving force strives accordingly to prolong its pleasurably perceived affirmation through consciousness, to make the feeling of happiness lasting, that is, redeeming. Insofar as this prolongation succeeds, it is perceived as painful because compulsory and thus the individual wants again to get free of the spirits which he himself has called up. Thus sex pleasure which does away with the inner will conflict pleasurably through realization, is intended to be made lasting through the love emotion ; this emotional dependence, however, is perceived as compulsory and the individual strives for release through conscious tffoit of will which leads to guilt feeling, and from which again salvation is sought in the sphere of unconsciousness. Here belong all ideas of salvation with eternal duration from the Buddhistic Nirvana to the Christian immortality, which, however, only strive after a redemption from tormenting self consciousness and have as little to do with actual biological death as Freud's "death instinct." For the painful reality from which the individual wants to get free is his own consciousness in the form of self consciousness and release is sought in the overcoming of the temporal form of consciousness, that is, in permanence or eternity symbols, for which procreation and death as contents given in the biological process have always been preferred. Man felt himself immortal as long as he knew nothing of time, as long as he had no time consciousness. This is the meaning of the myth of the fall which represents symbolically this human destiny generally as the guilt of knowledge while the Greek myth attaches the transition from the immortal God to mortal man in almost psychological formulation to the breaking in of time consciousness. Uranos, the eternal God of heaven, is emasculated by Kronos, a symbol of time and temporal duration which from that point on had dominion over the world and men. If Freud had named the basal complex here after the hero instead of the content, he would have recognized in the "Kronos complex" what is perhaps the most important and powerful complex for the modern man. With him the time problem as a psychological determinant enters into human consciousness and its development. The eternal biological principle of procreation which the myth represents cosmically in the love union of heaven with earth, breaks through in human self consciousness in the form of time consciousness. From then on human ideas of salvation take on the character of eternity which culminates in the blessed life of the Christian kingdom of heaven. The psychological recognition of the time problem as the form of human consciousness, therefore, leads away from the brief instinct satisfaction of happiness, to the eternal lasting peace of blessedness, that is, to redemption. Human ideas of redemption have a development and a history and this history, as always, has been interpreted and misinterpreted as long as men, in ignorance of the will-guilt problem lying at their roots, played the one of the two factors against the other instead of recognizing them in their essential relationship and interaction. Redemption, according to the constellation of this conflict can relate now to will, another time to guilt, and finally also to consciousness. In relation to the time problem, however, will, guilt and consciousness maintain themselves differently, for the will, however one comprehends or interprets it, remains a constantly operating force, while consciousness above all is a quality, a state, and as such is passive and temporary', yes momentary. (Th^ feeling of pain, which manifests itself psychically as guilt iCelina, arises from the attempts to unite these two incommensurable powers. In order to understand all the possibilities arising here in their historical development as well as individually, we must insert again a bit of will psychology and trace the opposing effect of the three factors, will, consciousness, and guilt feeling upon one another. The problem is considerably complicated, but is for the first time psychologically interesting through the fact that the will in the different levels of development through which it goes from the negative to the positive and creative, reacts upon the individual himself, upon what he has overcome and become. In the relation of will to consciousness there is a naive phase of development in which the two are one, as once probably the conscious individual will was one with the biological life impulse which it only represented and affirmed. The first developmental phase of the individual will, as it manifests itself in counter-will, corresponds to a "not willing," because one must ; the second phase, that of positive will expression, corresponds to a "willing" what one must; the third creative phase, to a willing of that which one wants. The first phase corresponds to consciousness that one wills (against the compulsion of the other will) ; the second phase to a contentual knowing of that which one wiUs (because one must) ; the third creative phase binds the ego consciousness to the first with the positive will expression of the second, but corresponds in content not to a "must," but to a "self willed." On the first level, we perceive guilt feeling as a consequence of counter-will ; on the second level we have guilt consciousness because we deny the own will, since we interpret willing as compulsion, we will, either not knowing what we will (content repression or rationalization) or that we will at all (dynamic denial). The third level, finally, creates guilt through conscious affirmation and expression of the own will and its personal content. Thus consciousness and guilt which originally cooperate in the ser\nce of the negative will expression and the creative will achievement, finally place themselves inhibitingly in the way of will itself, yes call a halt to human will as such in neurotic guilt consciousness. All man's longing for happiness and redemption corresponds then to a spontaneous therapeutic attempt either to unite harmoniously once more this insoluble opposition of will and consciousness that manifests itself as consciousness of guilt or to separate them entirely. Both must miscarry. In the harmonious union, in the working together of will with consciousness which affirms the will, we sense, it is true, the feeling of happiness, but this can only be brief in duration and its lengthening can never be attained in continuous consciousness, therefore redemption is sought in unconsciousness, which involves a separation of the feeling of happiness from the temporal form of consciousness. Accordingly we have ever after the tendency to make-eternal which manifests itself in the different spheres of will, consciousness and guilt, whether we would immortalize pleasure in emotion, self consciousness in truth or the ego in creative work. All these self perpetuation tendencies correspond to the positive beneficent spontaneous therapies as we trace them in religious and love emotions on the one hand, in creative knowledge and artistic creation on the other. They do not all lead to redemption, however, because they always depend on the affirmation of consciousness and accordingly are limited temporally. The actual redemption ideas which aim at eternal duration and a deliverance from consciousness can only be understood through guilt feeling, to the overcoming of which belongs release from will just as much as release from consciousness because it is just from the opposing reactions of these two that the tormenting self consciousness arises. The effect of guilt feeling on the conscious will extends from will restraint in the ethical sense beyond the crippling of will of the neurotic to the denial of will as Schopenhauer above all others has described it in all its appearances, including the destruction of will in self murder. Both exhaustively and magnificently the same philosopher has handled the eternal longing of man for salvation from this tormenting will. But Schopenhauer has been driven by emphasis on the guilt problem into pessimism, like Freud who finally followed him in this, so that there is no redemption except that of eternal nirvana, which Freud interpreted biologically as death instinct. This solution of the will problem to which Schopenhauer as we know was led by the Hindu religious philosophy, corresponded to the Hindu soul, which in the Buddhistic doctrine constituted the highest deification of human consciousness, and its ideal of redemption accordingly pictures a release from an overcoming by consciousness through the all powerful will. Schopenhauer, from the emphasis on guilt feeling, to which the Hindus give expression in the doctrine of transmigration of souls, has carried over his longing for salvation from consciousness to the will. Freud finally valued consciousness at first as a releasing source of healing against the sexual will in order finally to strike against guilt feeling as the insuperable obstacle. Nietzsche, who sought neither philosophic truth nor therapeutic illusions, but presented himself creatively, had the advantage of finding in the affirming will expression of self creation, the only redemption from will. For the neurotic human type, however, who suffers from consciousness and guilt feeling, salvation is to be found only in will denial as he can no longer find it in the temporary abrogation of consciousness in ecstatic states (and such is the creative act of will also). With him then the desire for redemption relates to the will to live in Schopenhauer's sense, to the instinct for Hfe in Freud's meaning, speaking psychologically, to the will itself, but only because he cannot get free from the knowledge of it and the guilt consciousness following therefrom. (^his leads then to the real task of individual psychotherapy, whose chief difliculty for me — like that of education —seems to he in this, that both parties with their different psychologies have correspondingly different goals^ On the level of individual therapy this opposition is shown in the fact that therapist and patient have a different salvation ideology. The therapist, as the strong will type who wants to create man in his own image, hke the educator, sees salvation in getting loose, in the freeing from the compulsion of the evil will, whose self creative affirmation he denies at the same time in the therapeutic ideology of helping; the guilt springing therefrom he tries to dissipate through release from willing. The neurotic patient, on the contrary, wh already suffers from will denial which he can no longer idealiz through any illusion seeks not release from will but from co: sciousness which torments him in the form of guilt consciousnes He no longer wants to know, to know otherwise or better, bu' not to know at all, much more needs to be brought through emo tional experience to positive will expression and affirmation while the therapist just the reverse seeks the release from crea tive will in conscious knowledge. Since I reserve for another cop^ nection the further presentation and development of this contrast in the psycliology of the helper and the patient, so important for the therapy and theory of the neuroses,^ I now turn again to the universal spontaneous therapies as they lie before us in the happiness and redemption ideologies of humanity. For the same contrast in the psychology of both happiness and redemption-seeking individuals as we discover it in the artificial therapeutic situation, is maintained in the universal therapeutic power which the sexual and love life of men has become in the course of evolution. Here both sexes enjoy the beneficent feeling of will accomplishment, corresponding to the individual and sexual personality, but they find also release from individual consciousness in the temporary ecstatic self-forgetting of sensuous deUrium and emotional 3-ielding, and finally free themselves from guilt through the creation of the child as a generic function which is then transformed into an individual creation in bringing it up. S^his blessedness through harmonious working together of all three spheres is found, however, onlj' in the ideal love experience, which is not only limited in time as is all experience of happiness, but for the most part only endures for a brief period, as it shatters in the conflict of the two individual willj)) As happiness means the consciousness of will attainment, it is not only brief in accordance with its own nature, but also is bound to reality, that is, to the overcoming of an external obstacle, a resistance, while redemption seeks a purely inner state of equal importance, which shall make the ego independent of the outer world. With the attempt of the individual to make the short-lived condition of happiness lasting, that is "saving," the pleasure quality is not only withdrawn from it as already pointed out, but the external resistance belonging to it is made permanent. In the individual love experience, which owes its possibility only to a favorable conjunction of the most diverse factors, the difficulty just pointed out manifests itself in this way, that the strange will finally becomes an external representative of the own counter-will instead of leading to an inner dissipation of it. In other words, the inner dualism showing itself as opposition between the racial sexual instinct and the conscious individual will, finds in the duality of the sexes onh' an external symbol—not the reverse.

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1 See "WiU Therapy," Book II.

That is to say, the dualism of the self conscious individual no longer rests on the developmental level of bisexuahty lying behind it for aeons, which would let us sleep peacefully if we had not developed in ourselves as consequence of the will-guilt conflict, the will to conquer the other and the longing for will subjection in emotional yielding, which we then interpret from within the wiU psychology in terms of sexual ideology as masculine and feminine. /rhe shattering of the human longing for happiness and redemption even in its highest individuahstic form, in the love experience, leads finally to a form of salvation characteristic of the modern man, which I would Uke to designate quite generally as "therapeutic." yTherewith it becomes clear that this salvation tendency concerns guilt consciousness, for the making happy of the other releases from guilt and thus makes the individual himself happy. This therapeutic redemption ideology characterizes not only the love life of our time which itself is only an expression of it, but alone makes intelligible the meaning of individual psychotherapy of our present cultural life. For on the one side we see the particular person in search of salvation shatter on this individualized Christian sacrifice ideology ;while on the other hand the modern type of psychotherapist who gradually succeeds the priest, has to thank the same ideology of redemption-of-the-other for his origin and steady growth. And while we previously found in the difference of the redemption ideologies of patient and therapist, a difficulty for successful treatment, here the fundamental likeness of their psychic structure, however positively and negatively expressed, proves to be a hindrance. The neurotic type suffers in this, that he seeks to realize his longing for salvation only in the beatification of the other, for that is the form adequate to the modern man, in which the individual seeks release from his guilt; just so, however, it is the right form for the psychotherapist to seek his release from will in helping, in sacrifice for the other. However, the gratification which both strive for cannot be won in this way, but only through positive will accomplishment, while salvation is attainable in general only independently of the object. This mixture of happiness and salvation-need, as it manifests itself clearly only in the therapeutic situation, is the characteristic mark of modern type who was described as neurotic.

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1Compare the introductory conclusions of Book I in "Will Therapy."

As he negates happiness, which the individual will affirmation is, in consequence of ethical will denial, he must upset the individual love therapy of which he is still capable only in terms of the just described salvation ideology of sacrifice for the other. In other words, he seeks to transform the possibility of happiness which Ues in will achievement in opposition to the other, into a moralistic justification of will through the other, on the basis of which alone he could (for the first time) accept happiness. Thus the love relation with the modern neurotic type has become a moralistic, yes, if you will, a religious problem, at least in the psychological sense of the word, as he can no longer experience directly and immediately the possibility of happiness which lies in the love experience because of ethical will conflict, but must transform it into an individual release from moralistic compulsion. The love emotion of the modern neurotic is not a powerful will affirmation which leads to a feeling of happiness, but a therapeutic attempt at sa-v-ing from the compulsion of the will-guilt conflict with the help of the other who as a rule is himself no therapist and hopes for the same release. After the shattering of the universal redemption therapies, as they appear notably in religion with all its ramifications in art, philosophy and science, individual salvation for which the modern type strives, is to be found only in individual happiness, but this cannot be accepted because of the ethical guilt conflict of the individual. Love, whose failure as individual redemption therapy is now e^adent, was the last attempt to transform the individual possibility of happiness with the other into an individual salvation through the other. While happiness can only be found individually and then also means individual redemption, in its essence redemption is only to be found universally because it comes to a climax just in the abrogation of individuality. If individuation has advanced so far that the individual can no longer find salvation in the universal through the universal ideologies, but must seek them individually, then there remains no other possibility of salvation except the release from individual self consciousness in death. This destructive form of salvation as it is manifested in the growing tendency to suicide of the modern individual, represents indeed the greatest victory of the individual will over the life impulse and all ethical inhibitions, but no longer works therapeutically, not even when, as in psychoanalytic theory, it is presented in the scientific garb of a death instinct. For with men even the biological factors are placed in large measure under the control of will and thus certainly are also exposed to the danger of manifesting themselves destructively because of the guilt problem. We know just from psychoanalytic experiences that men can sicken and die when they will it, that, however, just as often in a miraculous fashion they can escape death — if they will it. It is just this conflict of the individual will with the biological compulsive forces that constitutes the essentially human problem, in its creative as in its destructive manifestations. If the wiU is affirmed and not negated or denied, there results the life instinct, and happiness, like salvation, is found in life and experience, in the creation and acceptance of both without having to ask how, whither, what and why. Questions which originate from the division of will into guilt consciousness and self consciousness cannot be answered through any psychological or philosophic theory for the answer is the more disillusioning, the more correct it is. For happiness can only be found in reality, not in truth, and redemption never in reality and from reality, but only in itself and from itself. "?