Chapter IV: Part 4

Finally his nervous condition got so bad that a physician had to be consulted. The physician being fully aware of the patient’s domestic relations did not have to consider very long and ordered the sick man to take a trip. More easily prescribed than done. For our patient had one very bad habit: he could not be alone. It was a cruel punishment for him to have to look after his small daily wants away from home. What was he to do? His wife would gladly have gone along with him. But there were numerous objections to that. Besides, the wise physician would not hear of it. In this quandary the distressed man thought of his gentle, affectionate, young daughter. Everybody rejoiced at this happy solution; the anxious physician, the jealous wife, and, not least, the sensible daughter who had not yet seen anything of the world and whose secret dreams of youth had been disturbed by the erratic educational methods of her mother, in which exaggerated love and pitiless sternness alternated.

Great excitement marked the time for departure. Mother changed her plans ten times over. First she wanted to drop everything and accompany her husband; then she wanted to induce the unhappy husband to give up the trip, and so on. Finally the time for departure arrived. They were on the platform at the station and were saying the last good-byes. Mother had an unlimited number of things to say and suggestions to make. Then the conductor gave the last warning and there was no time to lose. Through the little window the happy father and the still happier daughter looked out on the source of their woes who had been suddenly converted into an inexhaustible fountain of tears. Was she so grieved because the objects upon whom she was wont to project the discontent of her unresting heart were gone? With a sudden movement she wiped away her tears and called after her daughter in stentorian tones: “Freda, now you’ll take the place of your mother! Remember that!”--What else she said was lost in the din of the moving train whose shrill whistle drowned the asthmatic woman’s commanding tones. During the next few seconds they waved their last greetings and then the scene so painful to all was over.

Father and daughter looked at each other, their faces beaming. For a little while, at any rate, they would be free and have nothing else to do but to enjoy life. The mother’s last words rang in their ears. Involuntarily the man smiled and remarked tenderly to his daughter: “Well--I shall be curious to see how my little sunshine will take her mother’s place.” The little one looked at her father seriously and replied: “Papa, I shall try to do so to the best of my power, surely.” And deep within her she rejoiced at the thought that strangers might think her really the young wife of this fine-looking man.

After a few minutes Freda began to complain that it was getting very cold. “There is a draught! It’s terribly cold!” The anxious father at once closed the window. After a little while she complained that the compartment was unbearably stuffy. Why had not the conductor assigned them a more spacious one? Had papa given him a tip? She had been told by a friend who had just returned from a wedding trip in Italy that conductors are respectful and accommodating only to those who give liberal tips. She was not so inexperienced as a certain papa seemed to think. If he gave the man the tip they would surely be transferred to a more comfortable car. Somewhat irritated, the father complied with his daughter’s wish. After considerable trouble they were transferred from their small cosy compartment in which they could sit alone, to a large one into which a stout elderly gentleman entered at the next station and plumped himself down beside them. Freda had an insurmountable repugnance to fat old gentlemen. She reproached her father; he had not given the conductor a large enough tip.

Why waste words? After a few hours the poor man saw only too clearly that his daughter was bent on taking her mother’s place in the true sense of the word. She pestered him with her moods and gave him not a minute’s rest. He tried to console himself with the thought that Freda was not herself owing to the excitement of the last few days, and that she would soon be herself again. Vain hope! The girl was as if transformed. From a quiet, amiable child, she had become a moody, fractious torment. The trip which had been intended as a cure became an unmitigable torture. For at home he knew how to adapt himself quietly to his wife’s tyranny. But here, away from home, he was constantly getting into all sorts of unpleasant situations. Finally, he pretended to be too sick to continue the trip and after a few days they returned home.

I have narrated this tragic-comical history in such detail because it makes the meaning of “Identification” clearer than any definition could. What had happened to the young girl to transform her so quickly? Her mother had enjoined her to take her place. She had to some extent taken upon herself her mother’s duties. She identified herself with her mother. She played the role of mother exactly as she had for years seen it played at home, though, in secret, she had disapproved of her mother’s conduct. This identification nullified her own personality and replaced it with another.

This is a phenomenon that takes the most surprising forms among the victims of hysteria. But it would be erroneous to think that it occurs only among hysterics. Almost all persons, especially women, succumb to the seductive power of identification. I wonder if it is because of this that all of us secretly bear a measure of neurosis with us throughout life! At home, Freda might have concealed her hysteria as a kind of reaction to her mother’s conduct. It was only when she had to play the mother’s role that the neurosis, in consequence of an unconscious affect, became manifest. It is thus that epidemics of hysteria break out. If a neurosis is capable of transferring an affect, it can arouse another, slumbering neurosis. For to-day we know, from Bleuler’s studies, that suggestion is not the transference of an idea but an affect.

The phenomenon that the above case brings out so clearly and unequivocally may be seen in everyday life behind various motives, catchwords, tendencies, and strivings. Notwithstanding these disguises the eye of the investigator will not find it difficult to recognize the mechanism of identification and the element of the neurosis in the normal person. But if this is so everybody is neurotic. Let us not get excited about this conclusion. There is no such thing as a normal human being. What we call disease and abnormality are only the highest peaks of a mountain chain that rises to various heights above the sea-level of the normal. Every person has his weak spots, physical and psychical. We can reckon only relative heights, never the absolute, inasmuch as a standard of the normal is really never at our disposal.

There is no difficulty in finding illustrations of the process of identification in the so-called normal. Take, for example, the valet of the nobleman. How thoroughly imbued he is with his master’s pride of ancestry! With what imperturbable scorn he looks down upon the common rabble! It never enters his mind that he is one of the masses. He has no glimmer of appreciation of the absurdity of his airs, because the mechanism of identification has clouded his intellect and an emotion has strangled his logic. He even gives verbal expression to his feeling of identification. He seems to have become fused into a unity with his master, for he submerges his individuality, his ego, and on every occasion speaks of “we” and “us.”

“We are starting south to-day,” he announces to the neighbours. “We shall stay home,” he declares oracularly to visitors.

We see the same thing in the school child. It takes a little time before he can free himself from the influence of his teachers and of the school. Not infrequently he cannot do so owing to the permanent fixation of his identification with them. Horace’s “Jurare in verba magistri” (_i.e._, to echo the sentiments of one’s master) is nothing but the result of a completely successful identification. One who cannot free himself from this affect and substitute for the confident “we” of the school the uncertain “I” of individuality can never hope to become an independent personality.

Some feelings, such as so-called party spirit, pride of ancestry, solidarity, national pride, etc., are only identifications. The German identifies himself with his great national heroes, e.g., Schiller, Goethe, Bismarck, etc., and is then as proud of being a German as if that implied that he had himself been responsible for their great achievements. The well-known and almost ridiculous pride of the Englishman is only the product of an extreme identification. But, as a matter of fact, the British Government also identifies itself with the humblest of its subjects and protects him in whatever corner of the earth he may happen to be. The officer who takes great pride in his regiment, the pupil who is all enthusiasm for the colours of his school, and the ordinary citizen who can see no element of goodness in any but his own political party, all bear witness to the great power of identification. It is in this way that socialism has become such a tremendous power. Not because it furnishes the proletariat with a dream of a happier future, not because it has supplied it with a religion. (The Church supplies this want better.) No! Only because it has enabled the individual, the weak one, to feel himself one with a tremendous majority, to identify himself with an organization that is world-wide. Socialism is the triumph of identification and the death-knell of individualism.

The most beautiful instance of identification is furnished by love. One who is in love has completely identified himself with the beloved. “Two souls with but a single thought; two hearts that beat as one.” Has not Rückert designated his beloved as his “better self”? (Or Kletke’s very popular song: “What is thine and what is mine?”) A lover almost literally transfers his whole ego into another’s soul. He projects all his yearning upon that one object. He is oblivious of his mistakes until the identification is over. Then the intoxicating dream, too, is over.

With the aid of identification a lover can transfer his passion upon any object that stands in some sort of relationship to his beloved. It is in this way that fetichism sometimes results. That is why love for a woman so easily leads to a love for her kindred. There is a Slavic proverb which says: “He who loves his wife also cherishes his mother-in-law.” And, on the other hand, a discontent with one’s wife is often concealed behind a stubborn hatred of her relatives. In many instances the feeling against mothers-in-law cannot be interpreted in any other way.

Thus there runs through the soul of mankind an endless chain of identifications ranging from the normal to the pathological. The child that puts its father’s hat on its head identifies itself with him just as certainly as the lunatic who thinks himself Napoleon. Both have realized their wishes. But there is this difference between them: In the normal the identification is held under control by the force of facts, whereas in the lunatic the identification has suffered a fixation. A delusion is frequently only a wholly successful identification in the interests of the desire to escape from painful realities. Delusion and truth are plastic conceptions. Who could presume to define where truth ceases and delusion begins? From Schopenhauer’s point of view our whole world-philosophy might be said to be only a process of identification. And truth is nothing but the transference of our own limited knowledge upon the outer world.

REFUGE IN DISEASE

The psychological study of disease is still, alas! a very young and immature science. We have been held so long in the thrall of the materialistic delusion of having to look for bacilli and other micro-organisms behind all diseases that we have almost wholly neglected the psychic factor in disease. It now seems that these psychic factors play the chief role in the so-called “nervous” diseases, whereas all the other “causes,” namely, the predisposition, heredity, infection, etc., it now turns out, do play a certain role, not an unimportant one, it is true, but yet a secondary one. The influence of emotional disturbance upon these diseases has only recently received careful study.

We have learned that psychic causes may play a great role in the occurrence and the prevention of disease. We may confidently assert that without the presence of a psychic component which invokes the disease hardly a single case of nervous disease could occur. Paradoxical as this may sound it is nearer the truth than the orthodox teachings of our day. For who does not recollect times in his childhood when he longed to be sick that he might not have to go to school, and that he might at the same time be petted and indulged by his parents? A little of this infantilism persists with us throughout life. Hysterics especially are distinguished by the infantilism of their thoughts, their feelings, and their ideas. This being so, we must agree with Bleuler when he asserts that the most common cause of hysteria is the desire to take refuge in disease. It will be of interest here to reproduce Bleuler’s report of one of his cases (from his book on “affectivity, suggestibility, and paranoia,” published by Karl Marhold in 1906).

“A _paterfamilias_ suffers an injury in a railway accident. How terrible it would be if he were so disabled that he could no longer provide for his family and if he had to go through life that way, suffering all the time, and half the time unable to work! How much better it would be if he were dead or wholly disabled. His attorney informs him that his annual earnings equal the interest on 80,000 francs, and that he could bring an action for that amount--a sum which would insure his family against want for the rest of their lives. Are there not indications enough that he will need this sum? Isn’t it a fact that he is already suffering from insomnia? Work fatigues him--his head aches--railway journeys make him apprehensive and even cause attacks of anxiety; how helpful it would be, nay, how absolutely necessary it would be, to prove that he is very sick and to get that 80,000 francs! And now the traumatic neurosis or psychosis is established, and will in all probability not be curable until the lawsuit is satisfactorily settled.” Bleuler does not mince matters but roundly asserts that in this case the wish caused the neurosis. Would it be proper to call these people malingerers? By no means! For, naturally, all these wishes are not clearly known to these individuals; they suffer in good faith. The wish emanates from unconscious levels. Consciousness vehemently resents any imputation of the thought of simulation. Such invalids usually protest vehemently their desire to be well. “How happy would I be if only I had my health! Then I would gladly dispense with damages!”

Here I should like to report two cases from my own experience which serve to illustrate the refuge in disease even better than the case described by the distinguished Swiss psychiatrist. The first was a very sick woman who had been bed-ridden for six years. No organic malady could be discovered. The diagnosis was hysteria. The deeper cause of her malady was as follows: Her husband was a coarse, brutal fellow, continually upbraiding her for something or other and raising fearful rows; but when she was sick his whole nature underwent a change. Then he became amiable, affectionate and attentive. As soon as she was well he became the old, unendurable, domestic tyrant. Finally, there was nothing for this delicate, weak woman to do but to take refuge in disease. Her limbs used to tremble and refuse their function, so that she had to stay in bed or be rolled about in an invalid chair. All the skill of her physicians--and she had the best the metropolis had to offer--proved unavailing. Naturally the cure of such a case is hardly possible unless one can remove the cause for the refuge in disease. In this case this solution was out of the question, and so the woman goes on enjoying the blessed fruits of her invalidism, complainingly but not unhappily, exulting within, but miserable without.

Our everyday life furnishes numerous petty examples of refuge in disease: the nervous wife who breaks out in a hysterical crying spell if her husband reproaches her; the schoolboy who complains of headache when he cannot get his lessons done; the husband who gets pains in the stomach every time his wife makes life unbearable;--they all take refuge in disease as a means of escape from their persecutor. How often is this phenomenon observed among soldiers, for whom a few days of illness means the most delightful change! In these cases even the most experienced military physicians often find it impossible to distinguish between wish and reality.

A physician who does not know of the phenomenon we have designated as “refuge in disease” will be helpless in the handling of most cases of hysteria. A blooming young girl had for two years consulted specialists of the highest repute about the raging headaches with which she was afflicted. All the usual remedies, such as antipyrin, phenacetin, pyramidon, and even morphine, failed to give her even slight temporary relief. The experts thought of a tumor in the brain and of other dangerous maladies as the possible cause of these obstinate headaches. But it turned out that this headache, too, was only a refuge in disease. A casual remark of the father’s betrayed the true nature of the trouble: “My daughter is about to be married; she has been engaged for two years, and the young man is anxiously waiting for the wedding; but I can’t let her marry while she is suffering from such a severe disease.”

The headache was obviously the means of getting out of a hateful marriage. Of course one who would have been content with her first story would never have discovered the truth. What stories she told about her wonderful love! How ardently she loved her betrothed! There was nothing she longed for more than the wedding-day! How unhappy she would be if she lost him! But a careful psychoanalysis brought forth ample and convincing confirmation of the above-mentioned suspicion. The girl had been engaged once before; in fact she had not yet completely broken off her relations with her former lover. In addition thereto there were confessions about the death of all erotic feelings during the second engagement, as to which we cannot go into details. It was quite clear that her malady was a refuge in invalidism. I advised breaking the engagement. The advice was not followed. On the contrary, the family hoped that a speedy marriage might bring about a cure of the hysterical condition. But the young woman is still going about, complaining and whimpering, with her malady (from which her husband, notwithstanding his inexhaustible patience, suffers more than she). Will she ever be well? If she ever learns to love her husband she may recover her health. But where such powerful, unconscious counter-impulses, such powerful instincts, contend against an inclination, it is scarcely possible that this inclination will develop into full sovereignty of the soul.

What we have just said of the neurosis is also true of the delusions of insanity. A delusion also is a fleeing from this world into another one in which some particular overvalued idea represses all other ideas and dominates the mind. It will not be long ere this conception will be an accepted doctrine of all psychiatrists. For the time being it is the common property of creative literary artists, who, because of their intuitive insight into human nature, have frequently given expression to this idea. It is perhaps most beautifully expressed by Georges Rodenbach, the Flemish artist, unfortunately too early deceased, who says in one of his fine posthumous novels (“Die Erfüllung,” Dresden, 1905):--

“The insane have nothing to complain of. Often they achieve their purposes only in this way. They become what they have longed for and what they would otherwise never have become. They obtain the coveted goal and their plans are fulfilled. They live what once they dreamed. Their delusion is, to all intents and purposes, their inner fruition, inasmuch as it corresponds to their most ardent desires and their most secret yearnings. Thus the ambitious one ascends in his delusions the heights that have beckoned to him; he possesses endless treasures, orders the destinies of great nations, and moves only among the great rulers of the earth. Religious delusion brings its victim to the throne of God and makes life in Paradise a tangible reality. So that delusion always realises the goal that each has longed for. It gratifies our desires to the utmost limit. Sympathetically it takes a hand in our affairs and completes the altogether too pretentious destiny of those upon whom fulfillment never smiles.”

What a beautiful idea! Delusion is a wish-fulfilment exactly as the dream is. The madhouse is the paradise of thoughts, the heaven in which wishes meet with unlimited fulfilment. And human beings sicken so often, and madness increases with such uncanny rapidity, because our most secret wishes are never gratified, because in these dull times the miraculous has died, and because life demands so much renunciation and yields so little happiness.

Let us draw these lessons from the foregoing remarks: to keep one’s desires within bounds means to assure one’s spiritual health. Inordinate ambition, which foolish parents kindle in their children’s hearts, is often the cause of an early breakdown. We must school ourselves and our children to wish only for the attainable and to attain our desires. Our ideals must live in our breasts, not in the outer world. Then we may find in ourselves what the world denies us. They who can find refuge in their health will escape having to take refuge in disease.

WHY WE TRAVEL

Why do we not know why we travel? Haven’t we the imperative obligation to recuperate? Does not our malady enforce a trip to a health resort? Are we not thirsty for new countries, new people, a new environment?

Peace! peace! No, we do not know! Or rather, we do not wish to know. Naturally, we always have a few superficial motives at our disposal when it suits us to mask our unconscious secrets from ourselves and from the world. Why do we travel? Psychologists have given many reasons, but they do not go beyond such superficial motives as “the desire for a change,” “a craving for excitement,” “curiosity,” “fatigue, the need for a rest,” “flight from the home,” etc. Some go further and attribute the desire to travel to the elementary pleasure of being in motion. For these psychologists the little child’s first step is its first journey, the last step of the weary aged their last journey. Others again veritably classify journeys and distinguish between trips undertaken for health reasons, business trips, scientific trips, etc.

Vain beginning! In reality one trip is like another. If we would understand the elementary feelings associated with a trip we must go back to our youth. In youth we still have a sense of the wonderful; in youth the horizon of our fantasies is aglow with wondrous visions. But of course the world about us is solemn and wearisome, full of duties and obligations. But ah, the wide world without! There dangerous adventures smile alluringly; there unrestrained freedom beckons; there deeds may be achieved that may make kings of us. In our thoughts we build a small skiff that will take us out of the narrow channel of our homes into the vast sea; we battle on the prairie with the brave and crafty Indians; we seek out the sun-burned gold-fields in the new world; we put a hurried girdle round about the earth, and--when at top speed--we would even attempt a flight to the moon.

Nothing that makes an impression on the human mind is ever lost. Our youth with its fantasies and childish desires exerts an important influence on us all our life. Henceforth all our excursions are journeys into the realm of youth. All, all are alike. Life hems us in with innumerable obstacles, bonds, and walls. The older we grow the greater becomes the weight that loads us down. In the depths of the soul the tintinnabulation of youth is ringing and speaking to us of life and freedom, and keeps on ringing alluringly till weary man surrenders and takes a trip. The tinkling music of the soul works strongest on the mind of youth. He, fortunate he, knows not the difference between the music of his heart and the hum of the world without. He knows not yet that the world is everywhere the same, the people everywhere the same, and the mountains, the lakes, the seas, with but slight variations, the same. His longings carry him out, far out, and he seeks their fulfilment.

The adult lives a life of bitter disappointments. He never seeks the new. He longs only to get rid of the old. And the aged wanderer, having reached the end of the vale of life, follows his buried wishes, his memories of the beautiful days in which there was still something to hope for, in which he was not beyond self-deception.

It is not to be denied that ours is _the_ travelling age. This is partly due to the fact that we experience so little, as we have already said, in our craving for excitement. The many inventions that have conquered time and space have made it possible for us to fly over the whole world, and thus the primary purpose of travelling, the hunger for experience, shrinks into trivial, merry or vexatious hotel adventures. But in every such trip one may discover a deeply hidden kernel of the voyages of the old Vikings. Every journey is a tour of conquest. Here at home we have found our level; our neighbours know us and have passed their irrevocable judgment on our person. To travel means to conquer the world anew, to make oneself respected and esteemed. Every new touring acquaintance must stand for a new conquest. We display all our talents for which we no longer have any use at home and all our almost rusty intellectual weapons, our amiability, our courteousness, our gallantry, are again taken out of the soul’s lumber chamber and put to use in conquering new persons. This secret foolery compensates us for all the plans of conquest that we have long ago given up. To conquer persons without having to depend on one’s social background is one of the greatest delights of travelling.

How strange! As in ordinary life we seek ourself and are overjoyed to find ourself in our environment and get most out of the individual who is most like ourself, so everywhere abroad we seek our own home. How happy we are on beholding a familiar face even though it be that of a person who has been ever so unsympathetic or indifferent. We are delighted with him and greet him like a trusted friend--only because he represents for us a fragment of our home which we have been seeking out here and which we have found, to some extent, in him. That is why such discoveries make us happiest as revealing identities with our home. Even in this the infantile character of travelling is shown. Just as in our youth we had to learn many things that we had to forget subsequently so we act with regard to our journeys; every new city, every new region is a kind of primer whose fundamentals we have to make our own no matter how much it goes against our grain to do so. The faithful visiting of all the objects of interest with our Baedeker in our hands, the profound sense of an obligation to have seen so-and-so is clearly such an infantile trait and has about it much of the youthfulness and school-boyishness of the time in which the teacher’s authority meant compelling knowledge to follow a set norm.

Much might be said about the technique of travelling. The manner in which the thought springs from the unconscious, gently and with tender longing, takes on more definite shape and apparently suddenly breaks out during the night with the violence of a deed, presents almost a neurotic picture, and one is justified, from this point of view, in speaking of a “touring neurosis.” Every repression begets a compulsive idea. The repression of the emotions of youth begets a touring neurosis. The compulsion is strongest in the first few days during which difficult internal conflicts have to be overcome. The threads that bind us to our home, our vocation, and our beloved, must first be wholly severed. This happens only after several days, after the so-called “travel-reaction.” That is the name I would propose for that unpleasant feeling that overcomes us after a few days. Suddenly we feel lonesome and alone, curse the desire that prompted us to leave our home, and play with the idea whether it would not be better to terminate the trip and go back home. It is only when this reaction has been overcome, when the conflict between the present and the past has been decided in favour of the latter, only then has one acquired the correct attitude to travelling, an attitude which depends upon a complete forgetting of our social and individual obligations. It is, for all the world, as if after this reaction we had suppressed all our relations to our home and freed all our inhibitions. Only then can we enjoy the pleasure of travelling, but, alas, it lasts only a short time. For soon there rises before our eyes, like a threatening monster, the time when we must again resume our obligations. The sense of duty gets stronger and stronger, the desire for travelling gets weaker and weaker, and after a short but decisive conflict, the fever for travelling abates, leaving behind it a little heap of ashes in which the feeble coals of memory gradually die.

It is a profound feeling of bliss that we feel at home, for down at the bottom of the heart we have always been faithful to the home. We see everything in the new colours with which our journey has beautified the dull gray of daily life; alas! they are only temporary joys, borrowed harmonies, which lose their intensity in the day’s progress and are bound to return to their former dulness.

Particular mention must be made of the journeys of married couples. These, too, are trips into the realm of youth, into the beautiful country of the betrothal period, and thus every such trip is a new honeymoon. The energies which had hitherto been devoted to the discharge of their duties have now been freed and burst powerfully into the amatory sphere; but they may also intensify components of aversion and hatred, and are just as likely to emphasize antagonisms as, under circumstances, they may build bridges over bottomless depths. Inasmuch as _en tour_ thought and feeling are dominated by infantile traits, and inasmuch as to a certain extent a new spring of love awakens with the youthful fire and youthful tenderness, a journey may--just because of these results--result in disappointments such as cannot otherwise be brought to light in staid old age.

Let us also make mention of the opportunity a journey gives one of living a purely physical existence, of enjoying the rare pleasure of feeling oneself a creature of muscles, a thing all backbone and little brain. Let us also mention the delight of feeling oneself a stranger, of shaking off every irritating constraint, of being able to break with impunity the rules of propriety and good breeding, and we have, in comparison with all the really important psychological motives, touched only a small part of the surface psychology of travelling.

And now I come to the really important point of my thesis. What I have hitherto said is of general validity, applying to the generality of travelling people. But I believe that every individual has also a secret, deep-lying motive of which he himself is unaware and which one rarely is in a position to discover. Now and then one may succeed in discovering such a motive and one is then astonished at the strange things that may be hidden behind the passion of travelling.

There are so many things that we seek all our life and that, alas! we can never find. One is on the hunt for a friend who will “understand” him; another for a beloved whom he can comprehend; the third for a place where he may find the people he has dreamed of. Which of us has not his secret, dark desires and longings which really belong to “the other one” within us and not to the outer personage on whom the sun shines? What is denied us by the environment may possibly be found somewhere beyond. What withers here may bear luxuriant blossoms somewhere beyond....

The deepest-lying, repressed desires are the driving power in the fever for travelling. We are infected--infected by the seeds that have been slumbering within us for years and which have now with mysterious power engendered the ardour that drives us on to travel. Behind every journey there lies a hidden motive. It will, of course, be a difficult matter to discover in every case this deeply hidden motive, this innermost spring of action. In some cases one succeeds, however, and lights upon most remarkable things. One may hit upon some exciting touring experience of earlier days, upon a strange fantasy, upon some sweet wish that seems to be too grotesque to be spoken of openly. No one has yet fathomed just what constitutes happiness. It is never the present, always the future. A trip is a journey into the future, a hunting after happiness.

The best light on the psychology of the “touring neurosis” is thrown by a consideration of the opposite phenomenon--the “fear of travelling.” There are many persons who are afraid of every journey, for whom a railroad trip is a torture, for whom going away from home is a punishment. There are persons who have compromised with the present and have given up all hope of a future; who have no happiness to lose and therefore have no wish to achieve any; who fear any great change and who have become wrapped up in themselves. They are the great panegyrists of home, the enthusiastic patriots, the contemners of everything foreign. They behave exactly like the fox for whom the grapes were too sour. Because their fears won’t let them travel they prove to themselves and to the world at large that travelling is nonsensical, that the city they live in is the best of all places to live in. The fear of travelling also has a hidden motive which not rarely is fortified by justifiable and unjustifiable consciousness of guilt. Why we do not travel is often a much more interesting problem than why we do travel.

Fear and desire are brother and sister and emanate from the same primal depths. The wish often converts to fear and fear to wish. One who is incapable in his heart to fly from himself and his environment bears a heavy and unbreakable chain within his soul. So do we all. But we break it now and then. The future may perhaps create free human beings. Then there may perhaps be no abysms of the soul. Just at present darkness surrounds us. The mysteries of the soul are barred to us. Its depths are unfathomable. Even if we have illumined some hidden corner and brought something that was long concealed to the light of consciousness, it is only like a drop snatched from the infinity of the ocean. The real reason why we travel can be told us only by our “other self,” that “other one” whom we buried in our remote youth. Whither we travel is quite clear. Large and small, young and old, fools and wise men--all journey to the realm of youth. Life takes us into the kingdom of dreams, and the dream takes us back again into life, into that life to which we have been assigned and to which our deepmost desires belong. What desires? Those are the secrets we anxiously conceal from ourselves.

MOODY PERSONS

A beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly, rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over mounds after a gilded butterfly....

Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?

How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butterfly with his green net. Why did this scene excite me so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.

Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”

It really was an “unconscious” thought, then, that transformed my mood from _dur_ into _moll_. And the truth dawns on me that all our “incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things are not in order. Their consciousness is split up into numerous emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask, but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and “sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe; commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon “nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their employment, and what not.

In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!” But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of our excited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into grey shadows and disappears for ever.

Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it. Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface, so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in motion.

But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life. A woman is suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance. Now she lives in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest affection--in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does love her husband, she is as happy with her finery and wealth as a child with a toy; she can assign no cause for her melancholy.

Notwithstanding this, her depression was of psychic origin. When we investigated carefully the experiences and excitements that ushered in one of these attacks it became clear that subterranean bridges led to secret (suppressed) desires. Quite often the immediate occasion was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor woman pass her in the street. Alone? No--with a young man, very happy, care-free, their arms affectionately intertwined. On another occasion she had been reading of a pair of lovers who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a subject, beyond all others, which she could not bear to hear. At the theatre she once sat in a box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked down into the orchestra and was seized with horror. That was a yawning abyss! What if her opera glass fell down there! Or if she lost her balance and toppled over! A shudder passed through her. She put the opera glass aside and became greatly depressed.

The mystery surrounding her melancholy was soon solved. Her husband, fifteen years her senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally. In secret she longs for a life rich in emotions, full of sin and perhaps also of vice. Nature probably intended her for a fast woman, not for an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies beckon her to the metropolis. She would rather lose her breath in an endless dance in the tight embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately down the main avenue. She loves her husband, but sometimes she hates him. He’s the obstacle. She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was very sick once; just then the wicked thought entered her mind: “If he died now I’d be rich and free!” The reaction was not long in coming. She saw herself as a dreadful sinner. Life had no more interest for her. Since then she has been suffering from periodical attacks of depression.

What happened in this case in the wake of powerful repressions happens a little in all moody persons. An unconscious motive for the depression can always be demonstrated. In most instances it is secret reproaches that provoke the change in mood. In young people they are the sequel of exaggerated warnings about not injuring their health. Sins against religion and morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding to one’s impulses. But also the opposite! Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.

A girl suffers from violent (psychically), apparently wholly unmotived crying spells. The last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether she had excited herself in some way. Had she any reason for being depressed? No! Was she sure? A trifling matter--“of no particular significance”--occurs to her. On one of the city bridges a very elegant, young gentleman had addressed her. Would she permit him to accompany her? Indignantly she repelled him. What did he think she was! But he persisted in his role; he painted in glowing colours the delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found the courage to exclaim: “If you do not leave me at once, I shall call a policeman!” Then, flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed home, ate her meal in silence and soon thereafter gave vent to an almost unending crying spell.

And now I discover that her first attack of crying followed a similar occurrence. She was coming home from the country and had to travel at night. She asked the conductor to point out the ladies’ coupé. To her horror a tall, blonde lieutenant entered her coupé at the next station. She at once protested vigorously at the intrusion. The officer very politely offered his apologies, explaining that the train was full and that he would be quite satisfied with a modest corner. He would be greatly obliged to her for her kindness. But so anxious was she about her virtue that she was proof against his entreaties. She appealed to the conductor and insisted on her rights. The spruce officer had to leave the coupé and for the rest of the night she was not molested. But the occurrence had so excited her that she could not fall asleep and she lay awake till dawn. The following day she had the first attack of depression and crying. She bewailed her cruel fate that compelled her to be virtuous while all the hidden voices within clamoured for a gay life. She did not find herself strong enough to conquer her ethical inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not strong enough to be really virtuous.

I could cite many such examples. They all show convincingly that there are no “inexplicable” psychic depressions, that consciousness does not embrace all the psychic forces that govern and direct us.

The classification of human beings into those that are free and those that are not was determined by a social or ethical canon. But in reality most human beings are the slaves of their unconscious complexes. Only he can be free who knows himself thoroughly, who has dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of the unconscious. Most persons are under the yoke of their “other self” who, with his biting whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures, compels them to leave the table of life and goads them into the arms of crime.

The greatest happiness in life is to have achieved one’s inner freedom. This thought is still expressed in an old aphorism. “Everyone may have his moods; but his moods must not have him.”

Moody persons are the slaves of their past, masters of renunciation and assuredly bunglers in the art of life. Their only salvation is in learning the truth or in the art of transforming their depression into works of art. Most of the time they glide through life’s turbulence like dreamers. Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes about that life’s call is perceived but faintly by them. They are chasing butterflies in cemeteries....

OVERVALUED IDEAS

Ideas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin. One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently worthless piece of paper....

There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto neglected or even unknown idea and cause it to be generally accepted or to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation to topple from their thrones?

Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the “overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no emphasis. Coloured ideas are richly endowed with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.

As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above, and between them--owing to stimuli from within and without--the sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom. This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of modern psychotherapeutists.

This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.

A very old example--if one may so call it--of physiological insanity is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.” But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled precisely to define the conception of an overvalued idea. Like an example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.