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IV

TRUTH AND REALITY

"Nur der Irrtum, ist das Leben, und das Wissen ist der Tod." "Only in Error is there Life; Knowledge is Death."

SCHILLER

In the previous chapters we have elaborated the contrast between knowing and experiencing in terms of the development of consciousness from a tool of will and an instrument of will affirmation, to the tormenting self-consciousness of the modern individual. Knowledge in the sense of self knowledge leads finally to constant awareness of itself, and since it is always present in immediate experience too, disturbs it grievously if it does not block it completely. To this development of consciousness into the neurotic self restriction of living there corresponds the general evolution of the neurosis from a basic will problem to a problem of consciousness.^ If in the first place, the will was bad and its denial to blame for all suffering, now conscious knowledge about ourselves and our problems, in other words the insight into this denial process, constitutes the evil, the sin, or the guilt. The problem of consciousness has yet another aspect which is opposed to this termination in tormenting self-consciousness and this is consciousness as a source of pleasure. Consciousness originally as a tool of the will and an instrument for its accomplishment or for justification is a source of pleasure just as is the carrying out of will itself.Yes, the consciousness which confirms will and approves of its accomplishment is the very source of pleasureT^In this psychological sense, pleasure and displeasure are actually only two opposite consciousaspects of will phenomena.

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1 See in this connection "Will Therapy," Book I, chap. v.

The putting over of will in living plus the consciousness of it in experience is the mechanism of the pleasure feeling which we call happiness. It is at once a double, really a redoubled enjoyment, first in the act of will itself and again in the reflecting mirror of consciousness which says "yes" once more to the will achievement. Only when consciousness is placed in the service of the counter-will and manifests itself as a tendency to repression or denial, do we feel unpleasantness and experience in the summation of painful feeling and the simultaneous consciousness thereof, the sense of pain contrasted with pleasure which also rep resents a reflection phenomenon of consciousness. Both reactions relate to the present attitude of consciousness, to the will expression revealed in experience. Knowledge, on the contrary, is more an historical process, which follows experience and feeling, although it is often very immediate. Knowledge separates consciousness from experiencing, or rather is itself a consequence of this separation and has the tendency to preserve the pleasurable, to remember it and to deny and forget the painful. (Why this never quite succeeds is not only the problem of the neurosis, but of all human suffering) In other words, how does it happen that consciousness turns from an organ for pleasure in the service of will fulfilment into an organ of pain in consequence of will denial. I believe this comes about because consciousness from the beginning has a negative character, just as will originally is negative, denying. The negative side of consciousness, however, is its connection with reality, just as the will also emerges as counter-will on the reality of the strange will. Consciousness originally by means of the sense organs is the mediator of reahty, of the real world, and as such has the capacity to cause pain, like reality. It opposes the will accordingly as reality does (for example in morals) because originally and even further it is the psychic representative, not only of will, but also of reahty. In other words, consciousness is intensified reahty which we perceive with pain as long as and insofar as the will is not able to put it into its service, to overcome it, which it strives to do with outside reality also. In this sense all is real that opposes itself to our will as invincible resistance, whether it be outer reahty or the inner reality of consciousness. In order to come from this reality side to the inner truth side of consciousness, we must take a further step in the building up of the will psychology and approach the difficult sphere o f the emotional life. For the area in which all these will and consciousness phenomena take place perceived in sense terms as pleasure and pain, or spiritually as happiness and sorrow, is the emotional sphere standing equally close to will and consciousness where all these activities come together and flow into one another. frhe emotional life represents accordingly the strongest inner force. It is even stronger than the sexual instinct which is always capable of being controlled and satisfied somehow. Not so the emotional life, which is uncontrollable and insatiable, yes, whose very essence consists of its inability to be controlled or satisfied. If we consider first the relation of the emotional life to the sphere of will, we find that it is a two-fold one. All that we designate as emotion in the narrower sense of the word, love, gratitude, longing, tenderness, is finally only the breaking, or rather the softening of the will. It is not that we subject our own will to the will of the other by means of emotion, but rather our own softened will is the emotion itself, a kind of self subjection, inthe face of our pride. The defense against this yielding o f self-will we perceive as shame. the affirmation of it as love, and the denial as hate, a kind orliardening of the will.'''Here we touch upon the second side of the relation of will to the emotional life, namely, the affect. For what I call affect is a kind of warding off of emoti^on, actually an attempt to guide it back into the sphere of will as psychic action, while emotion is passive. Scorn, anger, hate are affirmations, exaggerations of the negative will which sets itself against the rising softening influence of emotion by diverting it into the sphere of will as a defense. On the other hand, the affirmation of emotion through the will, or better said, its release into emotion, leads not to subjection to the other, but to that which we call surrender, a kind of beneficent release of will. We must postpone a discussion of the relation of the emotional life to the sexual life which is so often emphasized but has never been understood, to the chapter on "Happiness and Redemption" in order to turn now to the relation of the emotional sphere to consciousness. Of the affirmation of will-hardening manifested in the affect, there is only this to be said, that it momentarily overpowers consciousness in order afterwards to force it to justify the affect expression. Where this does not succeed, the originally denied emotion appears afterwards in the reaction of repentance, which often leads to the complete breaking of will. The influence of emotion as a will phenomenon upon the sphere of consciousness shows itself where will denies the emotional yielding, without increasing it to full denial in an affect. This partial denial is certainly not without influence upon the emotional sphere itself, where it manifests itself as the transformation of positive emotion (love) into guilt feeling, thus again proving guilt to be the result of miscarried denial. The influence upon consciousness is a manifold, to a large extent a grave one, which aff'ects not only all of our behavior but also our thinking and so leads us back to the theme "Truth and Reality." The original nature of denial is seen in the attempt to oppose to a painful reality, the power of the individual will. Soon, however, the denial mechanism is turned entirely inward where it expresses itself in the emotional sphere as affect and in the sphere of consciousness as repression. This leads secondarily then to all the thought processes which we know as distortion, rationalization, justification and doubt. Repression as I have already shown before ^ is denial continued in conscious thought and appears when the individual becomes aware of emotional denial and wants to repress the associated memory content in order to be free of the feeling (which however has its origin in the sphere of will not consciousness). This repression can fail of its purpose or succeed only partially and then doubt sets in, which brings into question the reality of what has been thought, that is, the truth, since it can neither repress it consciously, nor deny it emotionally.^[oubU therefore, is originally intended to sh alce truth. it is the intellectual struggle forTruth, for certaiatX:^ This, however, is nothing other than the old battle lifted from the sphere of will and emotion into the sphere of consciousness and is conducted with the same inevitability and stubbornness as the original will conflict itself. Accordingly no argument avails against doubt because truth is what it avoids, just as no arguments convince the counter-will, of which doubt is only the intellectual manifestation.

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1See the chapter "Verleugnung uiid Realitatsanpassung" in "Genetische Psyehologie" Part I. 38

If doubt represents the conscious counter-will, truth represents the will intellectually. Crudely put, one might say "What I willis true, that is, what I make truth," or to be banal, "what I want to believe." Also here again the problem is not one of content, namely to decide what the truth is, but rather what truth is and this setting of the problem contains the solution in itself just as the laconic answer of Pilate to the announcement of Jesus that he_ had come to bring the truth.Truth, however, is not only a.subjective concept and accordingly.a psychological problem, but' it is an emotion like its opposite doubt which has long been recognized as such. Both have nothing to do with reahty except that |in both stand in opposition to it.Truth is what I beheve or affirm, doubt is denial, or rejection. But the reality which penetrates consciousness through our sense organs can influence us only by way of the emotional life and becomes either truth or falsehood accordingly ; chat is, is stamped as psychic reality or unreality. In the interaction of will and consciousness as it manifests itself in the emotional life we find a continuous influencing of one sphere by the other. Even the purely sensory consciousness is not merely receptive, but is guided and restricted by will. I see or hear what I want to, not what is. What is can only be learned by overcoming the tendency to deny all that I do not want to see or hear or perceive. Still more clearly is intellect influenced by will, for logical, causally directed thinking, going beyond the effort to shut out the painful is the positive, active expression of the will to control reality. The third level of creative consciousness or phantasy, is the most positive expression of the counter-will, which noFonly says "I will not perceive what is," but "I will that it is otherwise, i.e. just as I want it. And this, only this is truth." Truth therefore is the conscious concomitant, yes, the affirmation of the constructive or creative completion of will on the intellectual level, just as we understand the perception of pleasure as the emotional affirmation of will expression. Accordingly"? truth brings intellectual pleasure as doubt brings intellectual!, pain. Truth as positive emotional experience means "it is good, that I will is right, is pleasurable." It is, therefore, willing itself the affirmation of which creates intellectual pleasure. That we do not know truth in its psychological nature but set it up as it were outside of every psychology, yes, as the criterion of psychology itself, as again related to its content. If we did not do that, this last intellectual way to justify will, the will to truth as a drive to knowledge which shall make an end of doubt would also be denied us. Once more we cannot enjoy completely the pleasure of truth seeking because it is an expression of our own will which even here on the level of knowledge and self knowledge needs the content of a general truth equally vahd for all, in order to deny its own truth, its own individuality. And here, in my opinion, we hit upon the most ptiradoxical phenomenon of the human soul. the understanding of which I consider the most important result of my relativity theory of knowledge. It concerns the law of continuous development of our general psychological knowledge. This results not as one might think pedagogically, by the handing over and broadening of the already known, whereby he who follows knows more or sees better. No, it is not only that he knows more, he knows differently because he himself is different. And this "being different" is related to the continuous development of self consciousness, which alters the whole individuality because it determines it. This knowing differently about ourselves, about our own psychic processes is in this sense only a new interpretation of ourselves, with which and in which we free ourselves from the old, the by gone, the past, and above all froinoujjisj;n past. Creative individuals, in their advancing knowledge, represent therefore only the increased self knowledge of mounting self consciousness which manifests itself in them. Only in this sense can their truth also serve as the truth and not in relation to any extra-psychological content of the truth-emotion which transforms the positive affirmation of willing into conviction.

With this separation of-the content_of truth from the feeling of_trueness, there is revealed to us the problem of truth and reality in its complete practical meaning, as well as in its psychological and epistemological aspect. The only "trueness" in terms of actual psychic reality is found in emotion, not in thinking, which at best denies or rationalizes truth, and not necessarily in action unless it follows from feeling and is in harmony with it. This, however, is seldom the case because the will for the most part does not permit it but preserves for itself the supremacy over the sphere of action. Then, however, action ensues either on the basis of conscious thought guided by will or is the expression of an affect and is, therefore, not emotionally true in either case. For the most part it stands thus, that the denial tendency arising from the negative origin of will and ruling our entire spiritual life in the sphere of thought and action, particularly as far as it concerns our relations to other people, manifests itself as selfdeception concerning its own emotions, but really is the truth. The paradox therein is this, that exactly what we pretend consciously to be the truth, this it actually is psychically. It is only that we attach to emotion, as it were, this intellectual denial in order not to admit it to ourselves and the other. Again the will in its negative form presses in past emotion and must deny even while it sanctions it. This is the psychological side of the situation. In relation to practical action, to behavior, the result is that we pride ourselves on playing a role when it has to do with true emotional reaction. We actually play, then, what we are in truth, but perceive it as untrue, as false, because again we cannot accept ourselves without rationalization. Just so, in the exaggeration of an action or reaction, the more genuine it is, the more we perceive it as voluntary exaggeration. (I play the injured role, means, I am injured.)

The understanding of this relation between truth and reality is not only highly important psychologically as it reveals to us the psychic truth-status _of lying, pretension, dramatization, but also practically for judging the actions resulting therefrom. This explains why we rightly judge a man by his actions and these again according to their manifest appearance, as not only the laity but also justice and education do. For the psychic motivation, upon which one finally stumbles with careful analysis, may be psychically true but it is not actually like the act itself whose psychological understanding always includes its interpretation in terms of the will-guilt problem. Accordingly, therefore, the so-called Freudian slip is psychologically truer than the correct behavior which always rests on a denial of what we really want to do and which usually comes through only in blunders where at the same time it is made ineffective, as also in the dream through the sleeper's incapacity for action. Here also light falls upon the peculiar phenomenon of the intentional blunder, in whose mechanism the emotionally true intention again betrays itself. In this sense the majority of our actions as we have previously described in conscious acting, pretending, falsehood, are really would-be slips.

From this results not only a new comprehension of human behavior, but also an understanding of it, a view of life that is therapeutic in an anti-analytic sense. It is to the effect that our seeking the truth in human, motives for acting and thinking is destructive.With the truth one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer.The more a man can take reality as truth appearance as essence the sounder, the better adjusted. the happier will he be.

At the moment when we begin to search after truth we destroy reality and our relation to it. Be it that we find in the beloved person in truth a substitute for the mother, or for another person, or for ourselves. Be it that, just reversed, we establish through analysis that we really love the hated person, but must displace this love upon another person, because our proud will does not permit that we confess this to ourselves. In a word, the displacements are the real. Reality unveils itself to analysis always as something displaced, psychologically untrue. This is a cognitive fact but no life principle. It is not at all a matter of putting an end to these displacements because it is impossible as the analytic situation teaches us best of all, where the patient only continues this displacement process further, in denying the actual feeling relation to the analyst, and displacing it upon other persons or situations. This displacement, if it succeeds, we regard and rightly so as healing, for this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism, but the essence of reality, the— as it were—continuous blunder. This is also the authentic wisdom of the Greek ffidipus myth, whose hero would live happily in his displaced world of appearance if he were not driven by his intellectual pride, the will to truth, to expose his reality as lies, as appearance, as falsehood. He carries out his will pleasurably in the search for truth, in the overcoming of obstacles, but suffers in the content of what he finds, which brings to consciousness the denied emotions (in the case of ffidipus, for his parents). From this conception there results a paradoxical but deep insight into the essence of the neurosis. If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can accept the appearance of reality as truth, that is, the more successfully he can repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes not from a painful reahty but from painful truth which only secondarily makes reality unbearable. Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at the point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living and wholesome but in the refusal of these mechanisms which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living.

The neurotic, as distinguished from the creative man of will whom the hero (Edipus represents on the intellectual level, is not the voluntary happy seeker of truth, but the forced, unhappy finder of it—He seeks, moreover, no general objective truth, and finds his own subjective truth, which runs like this—"I am so little and bad and weak and worthless that I cannot deceive myself about myself, cannot accept myself as a worthwhile individual."

While the average well adjusted man can make the reality that is generally accepted as truth into his own truth, the creative searcher after truth seeks and finds his own truth which he then wants to make general—that is, real. He creates his reality, as it were, from his truth. The neurotic, on the other hand, finds his subjective truth but cannot accept it as such and destroys therewith the given reality, that is, the pleasurable relation to it, as he is neither in position to make it his truth nor to translate his truth into reality. The difference lies again in the attitude or rather in the kind of consciousness, in its relation to will. The average man has reality consciousness more strongly developed, the creative type will consciousness, the neurotic individual selfconsciousness. Reality consciousness comes from adaptation of will, the creative phantasy consciousness from will affirmation, the neurotic self consciousness from will denial. The will itself is justified in the first case, generally and socially ;in the second case, individually and ethically ; in the third case it is denied. The differing quality of conscious attitude to the will problem which decides the predominance of pleasure or pain, of destruction or construction, depends essentially upon the fundamental significance of the content problem. Reality consciousness is predominantly oriented from the standpoint of content; its truth is, as already said, the actual, and is therefore exclusively content. The creative consciousness is also contentual but in distinction employs predominantly subjective material, phantasies of every kind, which in the last analysis represent will phenomena. The neurotic self consciousness, on the contrary, busies itself in an introspective way, which we can only designate as psychological, with the psychic processes themselves, and they consequently represent his predominant content. Certainly the neurotic also has real content and phantasy content, of the first too little, of the latter too much, but the essential thing in his form of consciousness is still the introspective self-consciousness of the psychic processes as such. Also in this sense and on this account, the neurotic is much nearer to actual truth psychologically than the others and it is just that from which he suffers. Psychoanalytic therapy then works therapeutically for the neurotic in that it offers him new contents for the justification of his will in the form of scientific "truth." It works therefore on the basis of illusion exactly like religion, art, philosophy and love, the great spontaneous psychotherapies of man, as I called them in "Der Kiinstler." On the other hand, the psychotherapy which lets the individual first of all accept himself and through that learn to accept reality, must also, according to its nature, use illusions not truth in the psj'chological sense because it is that from which the neurotic suffers. In this sense, psychoanalysis too is therapeutic but only so long or with those individuals who are still capable of this degree of illusion and with a class of neurotics whom we see today, this is often no longer possible. The insoluble conflict in which psychoanalysis itself is caught arises because it wants to be theory and therapy at the same time and this is just as irreconcilable as truth with reality. As psychological theory it seeks truth, that is, insight into psychic processes themselves and this works destructively, as neurotic self consciousness shows only too clearly. As therapy it must oft'er the patient contentual consolations and justifications which again cannot be psychologically true, or, as far as they are true, cannot work therapeutically. This brings us back again to the part played by the will prob-lem in the neurosis. This disintegrating destructive character of self consciousness arises in the last analysis from the original negative character of will which works itself out, not only toward the outside as resistance, but also toward the inside as counterwill. The destructive element enters first through denial, negation, and finally relates to our emotions, that is, to ourselves. Here the psychology of the neuroses branches off and can be comprehended only as the opposite of the psychology of the creative individual who confirms his will and himself but not in terms of the psychology of the average man. The fundamental methodological error of Freudian psychology is that it is oriented therapeutically on the psychology of the normal man and knows the creative only in its negative expression as neurosis. The Freudian psychology pictures the man as he would be if he were normal, healthy, but the mistake lies in this that the neurotic individual cannot be made normal and healthy in this way, but only through the positive, creative affirmation of will, which the moralistic pedagogical therapist wants to translate into normal adaptation.

The neurotic loses out, however, because of the relation to reality, because he knows too much truth about himself, no matter whether this manifests itself as guilt consciousness, inferiority feeling, or incapacity for love. It is at, bnttom always only incapacity for illusion, but an incapacity for illusion which concerns the sphere of will in the same way as it does the sphere of consciousness both of which the creative type affirms, while the normal man does not perceive them at all as separated forces which oppose one another. The neurotic not only turns his consciousness as a self-tormenting introspection toward the inside but he also turns his will as counter-will inside instead of putting it outside like the constructive man of action. With him it is not only denial of painful reality or rather of painful emotion which makes reality resistant to him, but it is the denial of feeling in general through the will which finally excuses the denying factor itself, i.e. the counter-will, on moral grounds, or rationalizes it ethically and accordingly either suffers from guilt feeling or from the breaking of the will, or both. He must then explain, motivate, understand, rationalize, justify each of his acts of will, whether positive or negative, instead of simply affirming them, which makes homo sapiens into that thought specialist among living beings, whose extreme developmental type we have before us in the classic form of the neurosis of our time, the compulsion neurosis. On_the other side, this tendency to deny will expressions and the need to justify the denial has led to all the creations of genius, as we know them from the religious formation of heroes to philosophic ethics These universal justification therapies fail before the all destroying self consciousness which is no longer capable of illusions and unsparingly exposes even the last great attempt of this kind, psychoanalysis, as it has all earlier ones because it seeks to give at one and the same time comforting contents which no longer delude and psychological truth which does not comfort. Therefore not only must every effective therapy be purely subjective, because of the difference of individualities and the corresponding neurotic types, it must also be relative because we all represent this neurotic type of intensified self consciousness whose destruction of reality, of truth, of illusion and of itself, we are only now experiencing in its full strength.

We find ourselves in a transition period in which we still seek mightily for new illusions without being able to utilize them therapeutically just as we struggle violently for truth about ourselves which makes us ever more unhappy. Psychoanalysis, as I have said, gives both. This was its strength and becomes more and more its weakness, the more it is dragged into this irresistible knowledge process of hyperconsciousness. This process has now reached a point in the sphere of consciousness which the neurotic type shows equally clearlyl Parallel with the denial of feeling, as we have just described it, there goes also the denial of consciousness and indeed to the degree that the awareness of inner truth approaches something we do not want to see_because it is painful and destructive the stronger denial tendency of the neurotic therefore is also 'a defense mechanism against this domination by self consciousness which must know the truth without the individual's wanting it. The neurotic type of our day, therefore, must rather learn not to see the inner truth about himself, not to have to sec it, as his self consciousness represents only a manifestation of the negative will. When he can again will positively and translate this into action or creative achievement, then his self consciousness does not need to torment itself with the question why it cannot will or to create his thinking in justification of this will. Here also a positive basis of his will to truth becomes apparent. Truth is to free from doubt, from the insecurity of our whole system of thought which is built up on interpretative negativism, as represented in the endless rationalizations of our will and consciousness motives. Here again truth as inner emotional experience opposes the uncertainty of reality and the thought processes corresponding to it. In the inner awareness of our true feelings the neurotic self consciousness manifests itself in its most tormenting form, in the objectified content of truth we have found the last greatest comfort of illusion, of which the self conscious type of our age is still capable. Its positive affirmation corresponds to a pleasurable act of will ; its subjective perception which is related to the emotional life, is painful, sorrowful; its constructive transformation into a general truth, although actually representing an illusion, is creative.