حقیقت و واقعیت بخش دوم
II
WILL AND FORCE
"Man is fearful of things which cannot hurt him and he knows it; and he longs for things which can be of no good to him and he knows it; but in truth it is something in man himself of which he is afraid and it is something in man himself for which he longs."
Rabbi Nachman
My re-introdttction of the will concept into psychology solves a succession of problems in such a simple and satisfying way that it may seem to some a deus ex machina. But I know too well that I have not brought it in as such ; on the contrary that I have busied myself long and intensively in the attempt to solve certain problems which psychoanalysis had brought up anew without coming to a satisfactory solution. Only after a struggle against prejudices of every kind did the acceptance of will as a psychological factor of the first rank seem unavoidable but soon also became a matter of course, so much a matter of course that I had to say to myself that only a tremendous resistance could have hindered the complete recognition and evaluation of will as a great psychic power. Thus the problem soon presented Itself to me as a universal one, going far beyond the critique of psychoanalysis. Why must will be denied if it actually plays so great a role in reality, or to formulate it in anticipation, why is the will valued as bad, evil, reprehensible, unwelcome, when it is the power which consciously and positively, yes even creatively, forms both the self and the environment? If one puts the problem thus, then one sees at the same time that^his apparently necessary contradiction is not only the basic problem of all psychology, but lies at the root of all religious dogma as well as of all philosophic speculation. jIn a word, not only all religion and philosophy are avowedly moralistic but psychology was also and must continue to be, as long as it cannot place itself beyond this will problem and thus be able to solve it. Religion and philosophy are, as we know, highly valued because of their moralistic tendencies and their ethical content while it is the pride of psychologists to deny this weakness in their sience. Certainly psychology should not be moralistic, but it was necessarily so as long and as far as it busied itself with the content of soul life which is saturated and pierced through and through with moralistic principles. To an unusual degree this is true for therapeutically oriented psychoanalysis and that constitutes in my mind its greatest advantage as an educational method. As psychology it has been obliged in its theory formation to justify this moral-pedagogic character in part and in part to deny it. However anti-moralistic psychoanalysis may seem, at bottom for Freud, will —or whatever he understands by that term — is exacth' as "bad" as for the Old Testament man or the Buddhist or the Christian, exactly as reprehensible as it still is for Schopenhauer or other philosophers who played reason against it. The problem therefore is not peculiarly psychoanalytic, not even purely psychological, but cultural and human. Its solution depends upon one single point. The conception of will as evil, its condemnation or justification, is the basic psychological fact which we must understand and explain instead of criticizing it or taking it as presupposition or finally as a primary phenomenon as psychoanalysis has done in the concept of guilt. That is the point at which real psychology begins. That psychoanalysis could not go on beyond this point is understandable from its nature as a therapeutic method, psychoanalysis began as thrapy its knowledge comes from that source and psychotherapy according to its nature must be oriented morally or at least normatively. Whether it has to do with the medical concept of normality or with the social concept of adaptation, therapy can never be without prejudice for it sets out from the standpoint that something should be otherwise than it is, no matter how one may formulate it. Psychology on the contrary should describe what it is, how it is and where possible explain why it must be so These two diametrically opposed principles, Janus_headed psychoanalysis has necessarily mixed up and the lack of insight into this condition as well as a later denial has finally led to such confusion that now therapy is psychologically oriented and theory moralistically so instead of the reverse. A closer interpretation of this paradoxical state of affairs will best lead into the understanding of the will problem underlying it. The psychoanalj'tic patient seemed in the beginning to suffer from repression of impulse, from inhibitions ; evidently because he denied impulse as bad, as unethical. One can quite well imagine therapy resulting when an authority (doctor or priest) or a loving person permits the individual this impulse satisfaction ; in other words says to him, "It is not bad as you assert, but good (necessary, beautiful, etc.)." This kind of therapy has always existed and still does today, in religion, in art, and in love. Also psychoanalysis began with it and essentially has always remained with it. First it operated directly, as Freud encouraged his patients to a normal sexual relation, that is, psychologically speaking, permitted it. But even in all the complicated outgrowths of psychoanalytic therapy and theory this one justification tendency still remains the actually effective therapeutic agent. Only now they say, "your evil wishes"— as prototypes of which CEdipus and castration wishes, the worst that man can wish, are brought forth—"are not evil, or at least you are not responsible for them for they are universal." That is not only correct but is often therapeutically effective especially with trusting natures, not in the ironical but in the psychological sense of the word, with men who always seek some kind of excuse for their willing and find it now in the id instead of in God. But as men have seen through the so-called priestly deception, which actually is a self-deception, so they finally see through every kind of therapeutic self-deception and it is just that from which they suffer, just that which forms the very root of the neurosis. AVhen I say "see through," I do not mean necessarily consciously, but guilt feeling, which humanity perceives always and ever increasingly in spite of this apparent absence of responsibility, is the best proof of what this kind of therapy denies today, in a certain sense has always denied, and to that extent has worked only partially. In what I have already described in "Der Kiinstler" as the spontaneous therapies of human kind, religion, art, philosophy, this form of consolation works, partly because of their universality, partly because in them man accuses himself of this evil will that he would like to deny. In ritual, in artistic satisfaction, in teaching, man is unburdened and comforted through the others, the priests, the artists, the wise. But in the content of these therapeutic systems, accusation and punishment dominate as religious humility, resignation, as tragic guilt and sin, and as justification in terms of the ethical reaction formation. In a word, in all these projections of the great will conflict, man confesses in one or another way that he is himself sinful, guilty, bad. Exactly the same process of justification and self accusation we see unroll itself in psychoanalysis only here it appears in the therapeutic and psychological terminology of our natural science age, although it seems unavoidable to bring in the contentually richer ideas and symbols of earlier systems. In its technique, psychoanalysis is exactly as much a matter of consolation and justification as therapy must be according to its nature. That is, it quiets man concerning his badness, since it says to him that all others are thus also and that it lies grounded in human nature. Therefore psychoanalysis in the content of its system, of its theory, must count exactly as all the former justification attempts of humanity. In psychoanalytic theory, instinct is evil, bad, reprehensible; the individual is small and insignificant, a play-ball of the id and the super-ego ;guilt feeling is and remains a final insoluble fact. Hence it comes about that psychoanalytic theory represents the necessary opposite to the therapy, as the religious system or church dogma represents the necessary opposite to ritualistic practice, the ritual of atonement. It is a completion just as the creative work of the individual represents a completion and not merely an expression of actual experience. It follows that psychoanalysis cannot be an independent unprejudiced psychology but must be the necessary balance to its therapeutic practice, often enough its willing servant. It is still psychology, even so, but it becomes the psychology of the therapist, who needs such a theory for the justification of his practice and simultaneously for the denial of his moralpedagogical attitude. In this sense, however, this very attitude itself again becomes the object of psychology which asks further why every kind of therapist needs a justification at all and why just this one? The objection that psychoanalytic theory is founded on the experiences of the practice of therapy and that just this constitutes its value, especially its scientific value is not entirely sound. Psychoanalytic theory is founded on one single experience,.the fact of the he analytic situation, which however is an essentially therapeutic one, that is, rests on thg relation of the patient to the doctor. As the patient represents the object, could one expect to obtain even in the summation of his various experiences, a universal human psychology? It would represent only the psychology of a part of humanity, let us say even of the majority, namely those in need of help. The psychology of the helper, of the therapjst, would remain and this side of human nature is at least just as important.
My contention goes far beyond this conclusion in maintaining that psychoanalysis betrays much more of the psychology of the therapist, of the helper, of the active willing person, only it represents it as the psychology of the patient, the seeker for help, the willness. This is not to deny the psychological value of psychoanalysis in which as I believe, we can study the fundamental problems of human soul life as never before and nowhere else, only we must first agree on certain basic questions upon whose clarification our fruitful utilization of psychoanalysis depends. In a word, the psychology of the normal man, the average type given us by psychoanalysis is in reality the psychology of the creative man, not only of Freud, as Michaelis has shown beautifully in the single case, but of the type. It unveils to us the psychology of the strong man of will, who while almost God himslf and creator of men in his practice, in his theory must deny his godlikeness with all its characteristics and represent himself as a smal,weak, helpless creature, a person actually seeking help and comfort.
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1 Edgar Michaelis: "Die Menschenheitsproblematik der Freudschen Psychoanalyse. Urbild und Maske. Eine grundsatzliche Untersuchung zur neueren Seelenforschung." Leipzig 1925.
Although enough human tragedy lies in this apparently unavoidable fate of the creative type, thedenial continued into the work, the philosophy, darkens its nobleaspect. For the work born out of this superhuman internal struggle to represent an infallible revelation of the latest universally valid psychological truth may be comprehensible as a reaction against the content of the system, but brings so many trifling features into the picture of the personality as well that the tragedy almost turns into a farce. Nietzsche, who experienced thoroughly the whole tragedy of the "ereative man and admitted in his "amor fati" the willingness to pay for it, is in my option the first and has "been up to now the only psychologist.
He was at all events the first who recognized the "moral" danger in every philosophizing and psychologizing and sought to avoid it. He would have succeeded still better, that is at a lesser cost, if he had recognized the necessity of the "moral" in all psychologizing (including the therapeutic) instead of analyzing the philosophers from that viewpoint in so masterly a way. At any rate he recognized the problem and was right to see in it a danger for himself first of all, although correctly understood it is not the common danger he made it. In this sense he is at all events much less philosopher, that is, moralist, than Freud for example and accordingly also much more a psychologist than he. Certainly his freedom from office and calling which he had to buy so dearly had much to do with it. In no case, however, was he a therapist who needed a psychological justification, no, not even a patient, a seeker for help, in spite of all his illnesses. JHe was himself, which is the first requirement for a psychologist^ and therefore he was also the first and only one who could affirm the evil will, who even glorified it. That was his psychological product for which he paid not with system building and scientific rationalization, but with personal suffering, with his own experience. Nietzsche's contribution, therefore, based on Schopenhauer's important discovery of will, is the separation of the will from the guilt problem (the moral). He has not completely solved the problem, could not solve it, because for its solution the analytic experience was necessary. By which I mean not so much the experiences of the analyst through the patient, but also and much more the experience of humanity with psychoanalysis. As Nietzsche's will affirmation represents a reaction to the will denial of the Schopenhauerian system, so Freud's theory is again to be understood as a throwback from Nietzsche's attitude to an almost Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism. I do not doubt that my will psychology which has arisen from personal experiences represents in its turn a reaction against Freud's making evil" of the will ; I shall show further that the whole history of mankind in the individual himself and in the race represents just such a sequence of will action and reaction, of affirmation and denial. I shall then show also that in the historical developmental process of this will conflict, as in its individual manifestations we have to do not merely with a repetition in the sense of the Freudian fatalism but that a continuous evolution can be traced in terms of the broadening of consciousness and the development of self-consciousness. For as little as Freud's theory is a "repetition" of the closely related one of Schopenhauer, so little has my will psychology to do with Nietzsche's "will to power," with which Nietzsche has again finally smuggled evaluation into psychology. With this comparison I mean only to point to a common psychological aspect of experience, which necessarily conditions these reactions, and which we intend to make the object of our investigation. The will in itself is not as "evil" as the Jew-hating Schopen-hauer believes along with the Old Testament, nor as "good" asl the sick Nietzsche would like to see it in his glorification.It exists as a psychological fact and is the real problem of psychology, first as to its origin, how it has evolved in man, and second why we must condemn it as "bad" or justify it as "good," instead of recognizing and affirming it as necessary. The epistemological question, whence it comes, what it means psychologically, will throw a light upon the ethical question of condemnation or justification in the answering of which, however, we must guard against bringing in moralistic evaluations before we have recognized their psychological source. Which is to say also that we must guard against bringing therapeutic viewpoints into psychology with Freud or pedagogical aims with .Adler or ethical values with Jung for at bottom they all involve one and the same cardinal error. That the will must be justified in therapy, we already know, yes, even the patient is caught in the denial of it, that is in guilt feeling, and his seeking for help is just an expression of this will conflict. That the will in pedagogy is reprehensible, goes without saying, for pedagogy is obviously a breaking of the will as ethics is a will limitation and therapy will justification. If I said we must guard ourselves against bringing in therapeutic elements, that is, moral evaluations into psychology, then I must elucidate this further before I go into a sketch of a philosophy of the psychic (seehsch). Although my will psychology has resulted not wholly from analytic experience, but also represents the result of my philosophic, pedagogic, religious and cultural studies, still I will not deny that it was essentially analytic practice that crystallized for me all of these various materials, differing in kind and value, into a psychological experience. I must present these analytic experiences elsewhere not only from lack of space but also on objective grounds in order to exclude as much as possible a mixture of the two viewpoints since they correspond to two different world views. But this external separation would not necessarily guarantee an inner separation if I had not at the same time in my analytic work struggled through to a technique which tries to avoid the therapeutic in the moral pedagogical sense. What, you will probably ask, is this new method and what does it aim at if not re-education since any cure for mental suffering is excluded anyway? To say it in one word, the aim is sel f development that is, the person is to develop himself into that which he is and not as in education and even in analytic therapy to be made into a good citizen, who accepts the general ideals without contradiction and has no will of his own. This, as Keyserling " recently noted pertinently, is the confessed purpose of Adler's leveling pedagogical cure and as Prinzhorn has seen, the unconfessed but clear purpose of Freudian psychoanalysis which purports to be revolutionary but is really conservative, of one understood the will psychology only a little, one must at Teast know that this conservatism is the best method of breeding revolutionary, willful men who for the most part are driven into the neurosis by the opperresive majority when they want express their wills!
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1 See the observations on "Leiden und Helfen" in Part II of my "Genetische Psychologic.
2"Vom falsehen Gemeinschaftsideal" (Der Weg zur Vollendung, 14 Heft, 1927).
3 Hans Prinzhorn: "Leib-Seele—Einheit." Ein Kernproblem der neuen Psychologie, 1927.
No the man who suffers from pedagogical, social and ethical repression of will, must again learn to will, and not to force on him an alien will is on the other hand the best protection against excesses of will which for the most part only represent reactions In my view the patient should make himself what he is, should will it and do it himself, without force or justification and without need to shift the responsibihty for it. How I present the method leading to this end and utilize itf practically, I will discuss elsewhere. Here it has this value only to show how and in how far I can apply my practical experiences to the founding of my will psychology justifiably because as a matter of fact they are not therapeutic in the moralistic pedagogical sense but are constructive. Otherwise I should not have succeeded at all in understanding what a tremendous role will psychology plays in general. In the Freudian analysis the patient is measured by a minimum scale, as it were, as perhaps the weak-sighted by the ophthalmologist in order to be brought up to normal vision. This minimum scale consists of the primitive fear pictures of the Edipus and castration complexes together with all related sadistic, cannibalistic and narcissistic tendencies. Measured by these the modern civilized man certainly feels himself better than the more evil primitive, at all events not worse, and thus we get the basis for the therapeutic justification. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not making fun of this, any more than of the necessary profession of the ophthalmologist or the normal vision of my chauffeur. But if, for example, a weak visioned painter can create better pictures when he works without glasses, it would be folly to educate him to the wearing of spectacles because he then would see the same as his neighbor the banker. It is just as foolish to educate a man who is inhibited in his self-development by the norm of the Edipus complex, which he seeks to escape. By this holding up of a mythological decalogue as a confessional mirror one can probably work therapeutically, but one must know what one does, not for the sake of a fanatical sense of honor, but in order to be able to succeed in actuality. However, one must also be ready to admit that the morality lying at the bottom of this therapy is the Jewish-Christian morality which it seeks to conserve, while that part of humanity which has already outgrown it includes the main body of neurotics, whom one can scarcely hope to cure with the morahty from which as a matter of fact they suffer. That, however, is the therapeutic significance of the CEdipus complex; a kind of mythologizing of the fourth commandment, which perhaps still lingers in the Greek CEdipus story but, as I shall show, is certainly not its meaning. Psychologically the Edipus complex as I have already indicated in my "Genetische Psychologic" has no other significance than that of a great even if not the first will conflict between the growing individual and the counter will of a thousand year old moral code, represented in the parents. Against this itself, nothing is to be said it must probably have its value as it has so long preserved itself and thereby apparently mankind. The child must subject himself to it, not in order that he should let his father hve and not marry his mother, but that he should not believe in general that he can do what he wishes, that he should not even trust himself to will. Also on another ground than that of the dominance of the strongest must one render acknowledgment to this old testament moral code against which perhaps at bottom all hatred of Jews is directed! Apparently we have to thank the reaction against it for all great revolutionaries of spirit and deed, who have displaced the old. For on this powerful imprint of centuries the counter will strengthens itself, trains itself, must first of all seek the most different by-paths and disguises, in order finally to prevail, and when it has reached this goal, deny itself in guilt feeling. Here only a constructive therapy, which must not even be an indi\-idual therapy, can take hold helpfully. I do not mean constructive in the sense of a medically oriented normal therapy as it is handled in the analytic situation by Freud, who interprets as resistance the counter will of the patient awakened by the authoritative pressure of the therapist. Here lies the moralistic pitfall into which the analyst falls hopelessly when he steps in as therapist of society and not of the individual. For against this parent-like representative of the social will is aroused the self will of the weakest patient although it is interpreted by the Freudian therapist as resistance on the basis of his own will and in terms of his own social and moral ideals that is, as some thing which must be overcome or even broken instead of being furthered and developed. Without the understanding and courage of a constructive therapy, individual therapy degenerates into a mass education which is based on the traditional world view and the Jewish-Christian morality. We shall see elsewhere in how far a freeing of will in education, as it is already utilized today in the program of modern pedagogj', works and is justified psychologically. At all events, to correct always seems easier to me than to prevent or to educate, particularly because there is a natural tendency to self healing, yes, even to over-heaJiag (in Ostwald's sense), while the tendency to self education if it exists all events is much harder to awaken and to developj as itpresupgosesonjthe part of thejndividual the acceptance of his own_will. This tendency," the destructive technique which I have evolved in individual cases, tries to build up into a principle of idividualization the presentation of which I must postpone to alater time after fundamental psychological problem of will and force is known and recognized in its universal meaning.
