As these examples show, Freud’s theory is resourceful, perhaps dangerously so, in incorporating apparently recalcitrant counterexamples.
So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have otherwise been determined.
For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future.
The uneducated relatives of our patients – persons who are impressed only by the visible and tangible, preferably by such procedure as one sees in the moving picture theatres – never miss an opportunity of voicing their scepticism as to how one can “do anything for the malady through mere talk.” Such thinking, of course, is as shortsighted as it is inconsistent. For these are the very persons who know with such certainty that the patients “merely imagine” their symptoms. Words.
The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego.
An anticathexis of this kind is clearly seen in obsessional neurosis. It appears there in the form of an alteration of the ego, as a reaction-formation in the ego, and is effected by the reinforcement of the attitude which is the opposite of the instinctual trend that has to be repressed – as, for instance, in pity, conscientiousness and cleanliness.
So far we have mainly been concerned with probing after the hidden meaning of dreams, the route we should take to discover it, and the means the dream-work has employed to hide it.
The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
That others rejected it too, and still do, I find less surprising. ‘For the little children do not like it’ when there is talk of man’s inborn tendency to ‘wickedness’, to aggression and destruction, and therefore to cruelty.
We possess no criterion which enables us to distinguish exactly between a psychical process and a physiological one, between an act occurring in the cerebral cortex and one occurring in the sub-cortical substance; for ‘consciousness’, whatever that may be, is not attached to every activity of the cerebral cortex, nor is it always attached in an equal degree to any particular one of its activities; it is not a thing which is bound up with any locality in the nervous system.
The dream is to be regarded, says Binz, “as a physical process always useless, frequently morbid.
Alternatives are difficult to represent, and in some cases they are expressed by the division of the dream into two halves of equal length.
It is the relation of similarity, congruence, or convergence, the just like, which dreams have the most various means of expressing better than anything else.
The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish, which then allowed it, though already properly prepared, to “originate” for consciousness.
The fact is that a survival of all the early stages alongside the final form is only possible in the mind, and that it is impossible for us to represent a phenomenon of this kind in visual terms.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
The substitute gratifications, such as art offers, are illusions in contrast to reality, but none the less satisfying to the mind on that account, thanks to the place which phantasy has reserved for herself in mental life.
We will turn, therefore, to the less ambitious problem: what the behaviour of men themselves reveals as the purpose and object of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so.
At one point in the course of this discussion, the idea took possession of us that culture was a peculiar process passing over human life and we are still under the influence of this idea. We.
It is an honour to have plenty of enemies!