Sadism and Masochism - The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty - Vol. I.

By Wilhelm Stekel

This is volume I of “Sadism And Masochism”, a 1929 work by Wilhelm Stekel that explores the psychology of sadomasochism and related subjects. Wilhelm Stekel (1868 – 1940) was an Austrian physician and psychologist, as well as one of Freud’s earliest followers. Other notable works by this author include: “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1943), “The Technique of Analytical Psychotherapy” (1950), and “Impotence in the Male” (1927). Contents include: “The Polyphony of Thought”, “The Psychology of Hatred and of Cruelty”, “The Theory of the Resistance”, “The Definition of Sadism and Masochism”, “Relation of Sadomasochism to Homosexuality”, “Sadomasochism and Infantilism”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473389526

Book preview

ONE

I

THE POLYPHONY OF THOUGHT

How one thing depends upon another is the greatest mystery about life in my opinion, and no doubt if we could see the network of cause and effect spun and spinning around us, it would be a very interesting and wonderful spectacle.

EDEN PHILLPOTS.

To analyze a patient means to be able to read his conscious and unconscious thoughts. Were the analysis built only upon the facts which the patient treated relates to us, from which we might then draw our conclusions, it would in no wise differ from Catholic confession. The method of free associations, the discovery of the great genius of Freud, consists in the disclosing by the person analyzed of everything that passes through his mind, even indifferent facts that he considers insignificant and not worth mentioning and painful ones concerning which various inhibiting reasons (shame, vanity, fear of revealing another’s secret, dread of betrayal, and the like) would lead him to remain silent. The success of the analysis depends upon one’s ability to train the individual to impart his associations without restraint. That is, it becomes evident that very few persons can give account of their own thoughts. The majority of people think superficially. Analysis therefore represents education of the patient to recognize his own thoughts. The parapathic’s bad habit of thinking beyond the mark comes clearly to light in the analysis.

The statement that we are accustomed to think beyond the point sounds perhaps unlikely. Only careful observation in analysis reveals that there are two kinds of thoughts: such as are uttered and thought out (comprehended in words) and others which withdraw themselves from our observation before they are put into words. The question arises whether these latter ones may be considered as thoughts. They actually represent thought in statu nascendi; that is, thought which has not yet found words. Thus we would deduce that there is thinking without words, which Apfelbach¹ calls feeling thought. This seems to contradict our experience. We are accustomed to designate as thought only that which can be verbally expressed.

We will not go more fully here into the question whether this thinking without words is really to be called feeling thought. Such thinking can be observed in many states. It manifests itself as thinking in images. There are patients who, asked to give their free associations, immediately produce a series of pictures which plainly represent preliminary stages of thought. The symbolic value of these images, which actually hide in the form of figures important affects, can be explained only by analysis. Every one of these images stands for a thought in statu nascendi.²

The process of putting our thought into words is doubtless much more complicated than we have formerly conceived. We frequently search for a suitable expression for a situation or feeling, unconsciously hit upon a choice between different words, whereby the choice in itself signifies a psychic betrayal and permits the recognition of deeper complexes that have not come to verbal form.

Words are in fact compromise formations. Idea and word coincide most perfectly with concrete objects. If I speak the word table, I know that idea and word agree. To be sure, there are any number of different tables. But they all fall under the concept table. Through adjectives and compounds the concept may be more narrowly defined: round table, small table, card table, and so on. Nevertheless, table may denote a deeper complex, as we have learned from dream analyses. The symbolic use of concrete objects makes possible a further application and permits an affective charge to the idea table. (An example: Separation from table and bed [bed and board] shows that table may be used sexually. Table may also mean a poison complex and conceal unconscious criminal ideas in the verbalization of a thought.)

The process of putting into words is much more difficult in the case of feelings, moods, affects, abstract concepts. Here the words are plainly compromise formations, which have different meanings in different situations and with different persons. One need only think of the complex significance of the word love to understand how rarely word and feeling can be identical.

The thought process which precedes the putting into words must be comprehended as a conflict of opposing impulses.

As Freud has shown in his well-known and fundamental book regarding errors in speaking, repressed currents, too, frequently succeed in forcing themselves through against the will of the speaker. But the phenomenon of misspeaking merely proves to us that a permanent struggle is going on between energetic streams opposing one another.

All energies arise from the impulsive life. Speech and the preceding thought process draw their energy, too, from the impulsive life. One of Nietzsche’s most profound sayings is, Thinking is only a relating of the impulses to one another. The affect, although the intellect works upon the impulse, gives the thought process its specific coloring.

Now the experience of analysis shows that this affect is mostly concealed. Thinking is under the control of two principles, the pleasure principle and the reality principle (Freud). The larger part of our thinking, so far as it is conscious to us, is directed by the normal person toward the reality principle. The imperative of life’s necessities, which we call duty, crowds back our longing for pleasure. (It is the ideal of all mankind to make pleasure of duty, to form a unity of duty and pleasure.) Duty is the strongest expression of the reality principle. A large part of our life is filled by the demands of duty. It is a question, however, whether the pleasure principle can ever—even if only temporarily—be suppressed. The idea has been current hitherto, supported also by Freud, that the reality principle and the pleasure principle alternate with each other.

Actually, there is no separation! There is always present a continuous struggle of the pleasure principle against the reality principle. We may also look upon this struggle from the point of view that our reality has to be won from the pleasure principle. Here, too, I refer to Nietzsche’s well-known words: Every delight craves eternity, deep, deep eternity. This is only partly correct. Every pleasure is eternal, and the longing for pleasure never leaves us for one moment of our lives.

While, therefore, we turn our attention to reality, there is a second tendency, which remains mostly unconscious, the striving for pleasure. This pleasure principle at times breaks through in speech. It would lead us too far to describe this inner mingling of reality with pleasure. Just one example: Reality is able to make itself felt in the realm where the pleasure principle has control. We see the restraints of real morality penetrate the dream and prevent the fulfillment of the pleasure striven for.

Man must therefore lead a hidden thought life which cannot be expressed through speech. That wise saying of Talleyrand, Language is given man that he may conceal his thoughts, is too true not to have been repeatedly expressed. (Molière, Voltaire, Cato, Plato, have said the same thing.) Dante also says: How weak and confusing is speech to set forth an idea! And how does the idea relate itself to what is perceived? We say too much when we call this relationship ‘inadequate.’

This disparity between speech and thought or, better stated, between that which we want to express and that which we are able to express, arises for the greater part from the fact that we never have one single thought but countless ones, an entire polyphony, of which language expresses only the melody, while intervening tones and counterpoint remain hidden.

The ordinary conception of thought having a single direction can no longer be held. (We know, it is true, of persons who could accomplish two different tasks at the same time; they pass as curiosities. This phenomenon of doubly directed attention has nothing to do with that which I call polyphony of thought.) I affirm: The thought process shows a quite extraordinary condensation. A conflict precedes the putting of thought into words, ending in most cases in the victory of the reality principle.

As I conceive it, therefore, thought is a stream of which we see merely the surface. Or an orchestra of which we hear only the parts that give us the melody. It is evident that deviating tones in different voices would give a dissonance. This leads us to think that the law of bipolarity holds good also for thought. The polar voice conceals itself or finds expression as a symptom or a symptomatic action. Opposing streams force their way through at the same time (for example, proper grief and malicious joy at the death of a beloved being, often even deeply repressed necrophiliac and other sadistic instincts).

An English patient, whom I analyzed after I had finished this work, furnished me a marvelous confirmation of this viewpoint. It might seem that the following dream had given me the figure of polyphony. But this present work had been already published in the Fortschritten der Sexualwissenschaft und Psychanalyse [Progress in Sexual Science and Psychoanalysis] (Vol. I, 1924, Verlag, J. F. Deuticke) when the patient brought me the following stereotyped dream, which I give here because of its importance:

I am in a great concert hall in the conductor’s chair. Before me a full orchestra, looking to me to lead them. Behind me a crowded and well-lighted auditorium. My conductor’s chair is high and narrow, and I must hold myself upright and not lounge, lest I should fall off. I have no score and do not know what symphony is to be played, but all are ready and waiting for me to start.

I dare not look round at the crowd behind me, though I feel their eyes upon me. I must make a start, as the whole orchestra relies on me to keep the various parts together in harmony and rhythm.

I look round me anxiously to find where is the one instrument that is the most important and with which, if I can once get a complete understanding and sympathy, I shall be able to control the other parts and instruments without further difficulty.

The great anxiety is that I do not know even upon which side of me this one all-important instrument is, but if only I can pluck up courage to make the first beat, I feel that I shall hear and know the leading instrument and shall at once feel the time of the symphony and understand its meaning and be able to interpret it sympathetically.

So I take the plunge in fear and anxiety, and all goes well; but still I am full of anxiety lest my understanding should be at fault and there should be a catastrophe and the whole concert end in chaos and unbearable humiliation for me.

So it is left, and I either forget the dream or wake with a feeling of anxiety and relief at having escaped the great responsibility.

This remarkable dream may be considered from different points of view. Let us first take it functionally. The orchestra is the symbol of his psyche. He has to conduct the symphony of his life and his psyche. We discover first an uncertainty of himself, as well as an insecurity before life’s tasks. He does not know how to guide and control himself. The conscious ego is symbolized as the conductor. He stands puzzled and helpless before the whole number of voices. He has to lead, and yet he is only the one led. He devotes himself to one single voice and does not know whether this voice is at the right or the left of him. As I have explained in Sprache des Traumes [Language of the Dream], right in the dream denotes the way of the normal and right, left that which is forbidden and sinful. At the right lies heterosexuality, at the left homosexuality. A voice, the all-powerful upper voice, aids him in preserving the appearance of leadership and strong will. But he feels that in a short time everything may change. He fears the chaos, the catastrophe, the unbearable humiliation. His seat is narrow, and he may not make himself comfortable. He must always be on his guard, always keep watch, always hold the reins of his instincts firmly in his hand.

It appears from the dream how much he considers public opinion. He feels himself observed; the eyes of all are directed upon him. We see a cleft between his will and his ability to do. He is no conductor. Indeed—he has no score; that is, he has no proper life plan. His ambition drives him to the rôle of leader, while his feeling of inferiority makes itself effective in warning him not to enter into situations that may end in disgrace. If we inquire after his striving, his great historical mission, we find that he suffers from a Christ parapathy. He has the aspiration to be a second Christ, to save the world, to give it a new religion. If not a Christ, yet in any case a leader. He lacked the power for this mission; he always sought for those upon whom he could lean, whose doctrines he accepted and spread abroad as an apostle. In his fantasies, however, he has reached the highest, and he holds to the fiction that the world expects something great of him. The uncertainty expressed in the dream reflects the present situation in his life. He has given up his previous calling (manufacturer) and wants to become a creative spirit. Many ways are open to him. Shall he be a poet, politician, musician, or painter? There are so many ways that he does not know which he ought to choose. Recently, psychoanalysis has enticed him. For the present he will rest and wait, until light comes to him. And this light he expects from without.

The dream appears still more interesting when I consider his various sexual impulses. Reasons of discretion prevent me from giving these details. There are, however, in the sexual orchestra many parts which do not accord. Danger of catastrophe threatens from an intervening voice which might suddenly press forward and disturb the harmony of his soul. A sadistic counterpoint forms a still greater menace, manifesting itself in conscious life in the overcompensation of an active philanthropy.

He calls himself a play actor, who performs before the world and himself a rôle for which he is not fitted.

Cultural moral hypocrisy leads in the end to compelling men to play a part and to want to feel themselves better than they really are. The moral imperative would destroy the sense of personality if we did not for the most part represent ourselves as if we stood high ethically. We act and speak according to our ideal ego. Along with the ideal ego as the sole exponent of the moral imperative, the instinct ego rules as representative of the amoral imperative. While the moral ego leads the upper part, the instinct ego is concerned with the counterpoint. The moral ego expresses itself altruistically, the instinct ego, egoistically. Instinct is egoism. In most cases, this counterpoint is sadistically colored.

The reverse also appears. Persons who wish to live out their amoral imperative (the criminal, the Don Juan, the Messalina) show clearly an ethical counterpoint. In asocial sadistic individuals, inner thinking may represent the voice of social morality.

These inner voices often do not come into consciousness. It has surprised every analyst that parapathics, who tend to daydreams and fantasies, cannot remember these daydreams. Many repress the dreams at the moment when they turn from the dream life to reality. Others, however, assert that they do not know what they are thinking, that they shut out their thoughts and are not thinking anything. A nirvana of thought is impossible. There is no moment of rest in the work of the brain. One idea joins itself to another. Daydreamers hearken inwardly; they think without words; they permit other voices to sound without grasping their melody. They hear only accords or individual tones. Their thought proceeds perhaps without verbal conceptions, perhaps only in symbolic images, behind which the thoughts are concealed.

If one has once recognized that thinking has to do with a polyphony, not with a single part, then one for the first time understands the difficulty of analysis. What we want really to discover lies in the middle register or even in the counterpoint. The leading tone may under some circumstances be quite worthless for our investigation. (One thinks of the patients who always relate the day’s events and always have something important, something actual, to tell, so that they talk for weeks and months without giving out a single clue.) But he who has fine ears can, to be sure, draw his conclusions from the choice of words and the affectively toned occurrences by applying the law of psychic parallelism. Yet in most cases one would be at the mercy of the patient’s choice and discretion, did one not have in the dream a means for discovering the hidden voices.

It is not without right that Freud has called dream interpretation the via regia into the realm of the unconscious. If we correctly interpret the dream, we can discover again a bit of the concealed middle voice or sometimes silence it so that the disharmonies are gone.

But how does dream interpretation proceed? We allow the patient to bring all that occurs to him in regard to the individual portions of the dream; that is, we employ the method of free associations.

Thus we fall again into dependence upon the person analyzed. The patient silences the important voices, especially if he has learned a lesson through his first experiences and knows that through these associations he will betray the secret material he is holding back.³ The associations often lead over roundabout ways so devious that many a dream analysis, despite the association work of hours, loses itself in the sand.

Strict adherence to Freud’s method prolongs the analysis and permits the most important complexes to withdraw from the physician’s knowledge. Without the physician’s intuition, the most important complexes of the patient do not come into the analytic field of vision.

We have to reckon with the patient’s wish not to see a certain thing, not to say a certain thing, not to betray something, to act a part with himself, Every parapathic has a psychic scotoma. A man ill from a pathologic jealousy may emphatically and proudly insist that he does not know the feeling of jealousy. He will instinctively avoid everything which would permit one to infer this scotoma. Affects impossible to overcome through intellectual understanding have been mobilized against the making conscious of the wishes and thoughts which the analyzed person does not want to see. To meet such affect we play up the counteraffect of the transference. The patient wants to get well only for our sake; that is, because he loves us and is willing to do us a favor.

The same conflict between the different affects is present also in the dream, as I have shown at the beginning.

The dream submits likewise to a moral censorship; it conceals more than it expresses; it shows a quite extraordinary condensation. The associations can under favorable circumstances dissolve this condensation through revelation of the latent dream thoughts (Freud).

A correct dream analysis must in fact resolve a dream into many dreams and break up this combination of different dreams. The condensation distorts and confuses the dream pictures. Freud makes the fitting comparison with Galton pictures, which are laid one upon another to prove a family resemblance (the one in common). He relates this condensation to the individual persons. But it concerns the entire dream tissue. We may assume that ten or twenty different dreams are superimposed upon one another and give thus a common dream. The dream often appears very simple, yet it merely conceals the condensation.

The dream shows us the form and manner in which our waking thought proceeds. We really ought to be able through simplification to reduce every dream to a single thought. This thought represents, roughly speaking, the thought which in the waking state would be put into words.

Recent knowledge, therefore, tends to show that we are permanently dreaming. It is not true that the dream sets in at night when we go to sleep and is interrupted in the morning by the waking thought. We dream without intermission. Our waking life, too, is accompanied by dreaming.

The study of the dream thus makes possible for us the study of the entire thought process. It is interesting that we succeed in finding this mechanism in the dreams and are able clearly to demonstrate it.

I bring some examples which will illustrate for us the influence of the dream censorship, the conflict, and the condensation.

A twenty-six-year-old physician dreams:

I am standing opposite an old house, in which a gathering is taking place. It seems that a violent conflict is raging in the meeting. Suddenly a bomb seems to be exploded. Everybody wants to leave quickly. The door is very narrow. Only one person can get out. Besides, a police officer stands there, who, unconcerned at what is happening in the hall, stops each one and asks for identification papers. It is strange that the people before they come to the entrance are giants and in front of the watchman shrink to dwarfs.

The dream may be functionally interpreted as follows: The gathering takes place in the dreamer’s head. A violent struggle is going on between different interests. Suddenly it reaches a discharge of affect (explosion). The thoughts will out; that is, they would press into consciousness. But there stands the censorship of consciousness and sees to it that only one thought may appear. Besides, the gigantic thoughts shrink in the light of day to dwarfs; they become small and insignificant.

Still more significant are two dreams of a compulsive parapathic. The first one reads:

I find myself upon the street. A great panic rules there. The people are in flight, are hurrying; they press into the street cars; in short, there is a turmoil. Some one is trying to explain to me the mechanism of what is happening. He does it by means of a scheme which looks like a bright green bottle. He says: If the streams reach the narrow place, the pressure arises of itself. I believe that the some one was not Dr. Stekel.

This beautiful dream represents a flight from the analysis. The highly intelligent patient wants to escape his own thoughts. The streaming together of different tendencies creates a confusion in his brain. Now some one shows him how the thoughts press toward the narrow neck of the bottle, out of which only one thought may pass. This some one is not Dr. Stekel. He has discovered this truth alone.

He feels in life the disharmony in his thought and would gladly come to a unity of feeling and idea. He is always hearing a second voice, and this speaks contrary to the first. He is a typical doubter. I once called doubt the endopsychic perception of the bipolarity.⁴ The lower voices out of the harmony of thought make themselves heard in the doubter and often drown out the upper notes. The counterpoint is often too obtrusive, so that hate manifests itself with love, scorn with appreciation, defiance with submission.

The effort to unite these voices in harmony finds expression in another dream:

I go with a crowd, in which are both men and women, upon a path along the surging sea. The way goes up and down. My comrade A. was in the crowd. The latter is singing a chorus, and I am taking the second part with rare precision. I intone very skillfully, and it sounds wonderfully under the open sky. My feeling of shame that I usually have before strangers has disappeared. My comrade looks toward me and bestows upon me such a glance of satisfaction as a pleased master gives his pupil.

Let us turn to his associations. First, he confesses that he has a passion to accompany and never can do this. He would be happy if he could sing the second part in a duet or chorus, but he does not do it. His friend A. was famous for being able to sing the second part in any song. A. appears in a number of meanings. A. and his older brother were his teachers in sexuality. They had explained to him the great riddle of procreation and birth. This was preceded by an ugly scene. There was in their village a cretinous person, a girl thick and bearded as in myxedema. All three watched this girl at urination in order to see her vagina. The children of the village used to play the cruel joke of secretly giving her food made filthy with feces, dust, or urine, which she would then greedily eat. Comrade A. in later years looked up to our patient as to an authority. Only as the patient developed into a Don Juan did he reproach him seriously.

A. stands in his dreams for a definite characteristic, the infantile sexuality, which has been successfully sublimated. Now we understand the dream. A multitude of thoughts are whirling in his brain. Men and women. (He often identifies himself with a woman, reveals a tendency to transvestism; also has pregnancy fantasies, and so on.) The sea symbolizes the music of his soul, the storming and the rise and fall of his passions and hopes. This ebb and flow is represented again in the path, as it were to strengthen the image.

A repetition of the figure (rise and fall of the waves of the sea) occurs in the chorus, the melody of which also ascends and descends. This has to do with the different voices of his psyche, which seem here joined in unison. In life he seeks in vain to sing the second part. He has never succeeded. Here in the dream he leads the second part; it is in harmony with the other voices and in tune with the infinite. It resounds nobly under the open heavens. He has in life a free world philosophy; he has overcome his infantile religion. It is only an apparent victory. Within, he remains devout. He has committed innumerable sins. The association of the cretinous person whom he so horribly mistreated serves as the symbol of these sins. In the dream he is good again. He is no longer ashamed before strangers.

This affect needs explanation. In the analysis, this colleague learned to know many of my pupils. Infantile sexuality was openly discussed. The patient had for the first time the courage to speak before others of his youthful sins. He felt himself saved and saw a new era dawning. The second voice is no longer dissonant; it finds its place in the structure of his character and the polyphony of his thought. The polyphony becomes a harmony.

It is necessary to lay emphasis upon the extraordinary condensation of the dream. The entire development of his sexuality has taken place with A.: A. has become a harmonious individual. Now he has found a second teacher—me. I am the master. I have shown him the universal-human in his errors and pointed out the way to him to overcome also the feeling of guilt of the parapathy. He is now so far on that he can accompany me and sing the second part. The dream shows a strong prospective tendency, while at the same time the retrospective tendency is clearly expressed.

The accompanying has still another meaning. In life he is always seeking a definite situation: a pair with whom he can play the third. He wants to accompany another man. This goes far back into the infantile. It discloses to us the constellation mother, father, son, and still another constellation which appears from his family history. He had in his early years an affair with his sister. He often crept into bed with her and performed coitus with her. One time his brother, about three years older, came into the room just as he lay upon the sister. Without saying a word, the brother left the room. But after a while he returned and had intercourse with the sister, who, sleeping, behaved toward him just as toward the younger brother.

Such experiences impress a lasting mark upon the love life. The patient is always seeking the same situation, a second man whom he can accompany or one who can play this part for him. Since, however, he is impotent, he cannot carry out these requirements. In the dream he is potent again, and the master bestows upon him a look of satisfaction.

Let us think of this dream as the preparation of a thought that is to be put into words. We see here a series of different affects striving for expression. (All stream toward the narrow neck of the bottle.) The entire dream shows first a euphoric mood, which undoubtedly will force itself through in the thought that is coming to expression. He is clear in himself; he knows that he will conquer his parapathy. He is potent (he can!); he will be my assistant (second part!); I will give him love and show him recognition. Yet in the background of this dream lurks the sense of inferiority. He cannot in fact accompany! There skulks the consciousness of guilt, which brings before his eyes the many hateful deeds of the past, for it is precisely A. which it selects, toward whom in life he feels very inferior. A. can sing the second part gloriously and has overcome his infantilisms, while the patient is still deep in his. And, moreover, he is only a Don Juan of love letters and mental conquests up to the moment when he should show himself a man. But then he is impotent. Nevertheless, it is clear that the euphoric mood will break through when the thought reaches words. The dream might be reduced to this formula: Despite my past, I hope to get well.

I have passed over many, many details in this analysis. I have not mentioned the homosexual attitude toward A., relations to his wife, homosexual relations to his own brother, which are all contained in this dream. Nevertheless, it has taken an apparently simple and harmonious dream form. The analysis would have to reveal still further how this dream arose through the piling of various dream pictures upon one another.

I will break off this analysis. I will some time in another place publish a detailed dream analysis, demonstrate the stratification and condensation, and try to point the analogy to conscious thinking.

Thus I believe that a complicated dream is the forerunner of the process of putting thought into words. Besides, the fate of the verbalization depends upon the strength of the affect, whereby an affect of suppression is combined with one of release of a thought (law of bipolarity).

I find that most analysts give too much attention in dream analysis to the content and neglect the affect. A proper dream interpretation has to proceed from the affect. The disguise of the affect may vary. But two apparently different dreams can mean the same thing, inasmuch as both serve to express the same affect. The processes of identification and differentiation also are not intellectual but affective ones.

This fact is most evident in two phenomena which have greatly occupied psychologists and so far have been considered puzzling: déjà vu (the sense of having already previously experienced a certain thing) and the feeling of strangeness.

A woman who comes to me for treatment is pursued the whole day long by the sense of strangeness. She asks herself why the world seems so strange to her. She seeks proof of reality. She reads one of Goethe’s poems and says to herself: He must have lived; that poem is actual! The first attack appeared in a summer vacation upon a definite path, which seemed to her quite new and altered. Such a state of mind arises, as I have already shown in my book The Language of the Dream, in the chapter The Feeling of Strangeness in Life and in the Dream, if we alter one great affect, perhaps the greatest of which we are capable, love. On this road the patient once walked with her husband in the springtime of love. Everything seemed wonderful as in a dream. She will not admit at the present time that her feeling is changed; that she no longer loves her husband, but another, who just now is far away. The relation to the friend is ostensibly merely platonic. Her husband neglects her, remains cold, and ignores her charms, while the friend pays court to her and woos her favor. She is almost ready to yield to his solicitations. Nevertheless, she holds stubbornly to the fiction of her great love to her husband. What is the result?

The way seems to her strange because her husband is strange to her, because the lower voices and the counterpoint have been altered.

She goes along this road with the thought: I will still follow this beautiful meadow path with which such happy memories are bound. She even believes that she detects a warm feeling for her husband. But the polyphony is quite changed. The counterpoint longs to have the platonic friend there; the middle voices tell of the faithlessness and the faults of her husband; the warm affect of love, which once made the way appear so beautiful, is wanting. And now this process spreads itself over her entire thinking. The fiction of her love to the husband is maintained; the fiction of a platonic friendship is also conserved; all the contrary voices are repressed into the preconscious. The accords do not sound as of old. The world is changed because her own feeling and her whole thought have changed.

This new situation is still more interesting for the phenomenon of déjà vu.

A lawyer returns home from a journey and sees his wife sitting with the children at the table, reading. The sound of the church bells is heard through the window. One child rushes toward him with a cry of joy. At this moment it flashes through him: I have already experienced this! The very same thing; the wife, the children, the church bells, the cry of joy. It was, however, the first time that he had been separated for four weeks from the family. He had never before experienced this reunion. But he knew that the situation could lay claim to a feeling of something secret, concealed. As it were: Oh, how sweet it is to be home again! And now there occur to him a number of scenes which have the same feeling tone: How good it is to be home again! He sees himself coming home as a student; he sees his mother approach him, the dog leaping, and he says to himself: No, it is not the same situation. I was a child at that time. But it is the same feeling.

A similar identification of scenes through the feeling tone may be proved in every case of déjà vu. We might express it thus: It has to do with a similar sort of tone and harmony of affect. It is not therefore the scene in question which is the object of identification, but only the affect. It is a matter of the same feeling tones.

Let us return to the starting point of our observations. We shall be able now to comprehend more easily the resistances of many patients. Analysis makes these undertones, the second parts, audible. They seek for words, strive as it were for expression. He who remains in the analysis at the upper voice will seldom have opportunity to resolve the disharmony. The analyst’s art consists in bringing the middle parts to verbal form. It is precisely his task to overcome the resistances and tear down the inhibitions which hitherto have prevented the patient himself from attaining insight. There are things of which one does not speak and things of which one does not think. The analyzed person must learn to think what he does not want to think. In the analysis, the complete polyphony of thought must allow itself to be read like a score. This is attained only if the intuition of the analyst points the way.

The greatest resistances appear when the patient manifests the primordial reactions, which I have discussed in detail in Peculiarities of Behavior (Translated by Van Teslaar). I understand by these the primitive attitude of man toward the world about him and the impulses which spring from this primitive attitude. There are a number of reactions, compulsive in character, of which civilized man is no longer conscious. One of these primitive reactions is the testing of another individual upon his sexual valuation, the answer, so to say, to the question, What pleasure can I seize from you? Later this active principle changes into the more passive question, What pleasure can you give me?

We must conceive of primitive thinking as simple thinking, which roughly corresponds to the thinking of the uninstructed (untrained) animal. Impulse controls, and all thought is devoted to the satisfaction of instinct (hunger and love). Through education and the influence of culture, this upper voice is turned into the lower voice. That which opposes the satisfaction of instinct is looked upon as hostile. The primitive attitude of man is hatred. Love is indeed a cultural product. It is originally directed merely to one’s own ego. Every being was primarily narcissistically oriented. This narcissism becomes the source of altruistic feelings. I love you because you provide me with pleasure (love of the infant to mother and nurse). If this pleasure is withdrawn, hate makes itself known (trauma of weaning, the important withdrawal complex, which the Freudians have changed into the castration complex). The advance of culture depends upon the fact that this love is carried over to a community. The ego finds itself magnified in the community, which becomes the root of nationalism and again permits hatred to be transferred to other associated groups.

The readiness of mankind to hate is extraordinarily great. Jealousy, revengefulness, lust for power, suspicion, and the like are characteristics which have their origin in this disposition to hate, and they reveal the individual in conflict over his feeling of personality; that is, over his right to love himself. Civilization compels us to renounce this tendency to hate and exchange it for a readiness to love, which, as conventional courtesy, as tact, as kindness, takes the feelings of others into consideration. More hypocrisy than truth hides in the relations of mankind to one another. Indeed, these relationships are built upon the capacity for simulation. Such pretense leads finally to hypocrisy for its own sake. The primordial reactions are more and more forced into the background; social forms become automatized and lose their feeling tone. Truth is in most cases forbidden by good manners or is even an offense.

The parapathic behaves with the analyst as he is accustomed to conduct himself in society. He hides his primitive reaction and all thoughts which are painful to him or would be painful to the analyst. But he is instructed to be straightforward. This imperative and also the need for release require a wholly different language from that to which he has been used. He shall no longer dissemble; he shall likewise acknowledge his primitive reactions. He shall give account of his hatred, without which no parapathy comes into being. Hatred forms the counterpoint of the polyphony.

Since childhood a reverse stratification has been taking place; the upper voice has become the bass. The child may manifest his hate. He strikes his father or mother unexpectedly, a blow which the astonished parents cannot understand. He betrays his primitive reaction. He soon learns, however, to conceal this primitive reaction, for he notices that it angers his parents, and he is even punished for it by the withdrawal of their love.

We know, however, that there are conditions in which regression into childhood takes place. I am not speaking of the various forms of psychosexual infantilism, as I have discussed them in detail; I mean the regressions of normal persons. Such a regression occurs in sleep. In sleep man turns back to his childhood. (Freud even affirms that sleep signifies a return to embryonic life.) In sleep there is at once a readjustment of the polyphony. The middle voice and the counterpoint become the upper parts. We have already dwelt upon the fact that man dreams by day as well; that means, that primitive reactions and the suppressed wishes endeavor unceasingly to press forward as images or thoughts and are driven back.

Falling asleep, as I showed in my little book Der Wille zum Schlaf [The Will to Sleep], corresponds to an active wish. We do not go to sleep because we are tired, but because the unconscious is weary of enduring reality. Where reality has strong pleasurable qualities, it is impossible to fall asleep.⁵ Going to sleep is an affective process and rests upon the fact that the affect charge of the dream is stronger than the affect charge (the interest) of the waking world. One may therefore speak of the narcotizing effect of an affect intoxication. To be sure, there is a contradiction to be explained. It is in truth well known that strong affects prevent sleep. We see again a bipolar phenomenon, the investigation of which is very difficult, inasmuch as we know too little of the location of the change of current (sleep center). Evidently a slight affect stimulus excites the center, while an overstrong stimulus is able to produce a paralysis (Verworn’s law). There is no doubt that the conditions may be organically explained also on the basis of the close relations between affect and sleep. Perhaps the entire process will be easier to comprehend if we consider it as a constant struggle between dream life and waking life. Dream and consciousness strive for control of the psyche. The dream attempts to gain the ascendancy (symptoms: yawning, giddiness, petit mal, absences, and so on). The middle voices and the counterpoint, the opposing voices, want to lead. They are no longer satisfied with the secondary rôle of harmonizing. Suddenly the lower voice springs forward and takes over the conducting of the psychic orchestra, yet without having silenced the upper voice. This can be drowned out, but not completely suppressed. That explains the inhibiting influence of morality in the dream.

Various attacks, like fainting, narcolepsy, epilepsy, and the borderland condition which has formerly been designated as hysteria come into existence through an excess of affect and express flight from reality. The affect charge of the middle voices and of the counterpoint become stronger than that of the upper voice. This transition from waking condition to dream seems to be extremely easy. The dream now merely lies in wait for the opportunity to take possession of the brain.

Inasmuch as the dream draws its affective energy from the instinctive life, that is, from the spinal cord, we may formulate this situation as a permanent struggle between spinal cord and brain. Parapathies are in fact the result of this conflict. The spinal cord represents the past, primitive man, the original beast; the brain, the future, civilized man, superman.

The former picture of a working together of all the organs in the human body can no longer be retained. We must conceive of an ever-persisting struggle of cells and of organs. Each organ strives for dominion in the brain. We know how the stomach or the sexual organ expresses itself in terms of desire, but we still know very little as to how the liver and the spleen think. We are familiar with the organ language of the psyche, but not with the psychic language of the organs. It is certain that demands are made by all the organs (muscles, skin, and so on). The polyphony of thought fundamentally considered is a polyphony of the organs, in which brain and spinal cord represent the most important parts, which struggle alternately for leadership, while the other organs are to be looked upon as accompanying them.

The more recent tendency in analysis concerns itself with the psychic cure of organic diseases. Every organic disease is to be compared to a passive resistance of the organ or a complete strike, with the secret intention of obtaining a greater affective charge (attention). Freudians would say the organ thirsts for libido; it wants to be libidinized. The conception of the Freudian school represents the organ as something secondary which merely serves to satisfy the needs of the psyche. Groddeck, for example, suffers from a goiter because he has a pregnancy fantasy and wants to show to all the world a gravid abdomen. According to my notion, the thyroid is protesting against some sort of neglect or oppression. It emancipates itself from the common social function; it no longer feels itself as a province; it makes itself independent. Neoplasms would be the open revolution of the organs or of the cells within the organ.

We return to reality after this excursion into the fantastic, which perhaps conceals a profound truth. The polyphony of thought draws its energy out of the organs. In the parapathic, the psychic and physical equilibrium is disturbed. Disharmonies make life unbearable for him. He belongs more to the dream than to reality. He hearkens to the middle voices. The purpose of analysis is to uncover the specific polyphonies and to resolve the disharmonies. In this sense, every psychoanalysis is a psychosynthesis.

II

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HATRED AND OF CRUELTY

Nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic. It is a sum of forces each one of which can be brought to yield through a still greater force.

REMY DE GOURMONT.

Poets and philosophers have written many books about love. It forms the nucleus of a religion that controls the universe. If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal, writes the apostle to the Corinthians. One would believe that love constitutes the central force of existence, did not a deeper insight into life teach us that hate is the really great motive power of all that happens. There are special reasons why we confess our love and conceal the hatred. Religion, culture, and society demand that we shall be good; that means, that we shall love our neighbor as ourselves (an impossible task). Our ideal ego knows only love. We ought to love God even when He punishes us; He bids us refrain from deeds of hatred. But God is merely the projection of our ideal into infinity. He is that which we might be. He is the fulfillment of the impossible. Close to God the Devil reigns. Near the heaven of love, the hell of hate. The Devil as the symbol of evil is also the symbol of hatred. He who hates professes himself the disciple of the Devil. Since every one strives for likeness to God and tends to develop beyond his actual ego to the ideal ego, he plays the part of a good man. The hatred is concealed; love is simulated if it is not present. As a result, we see a lying picture of the world, which exaggerates the significance of love and undervalues the importance of hate.

We have taken a long time to grasp the law of bipolarity in its fundamental meaning: There is no love without hate! This principle is still easier to comprehend than its converse: There is no hatred without love.

It is due to the possibility of reversing and displacing the affect that these two facts could remain so long unrecognized. We learned to know the phenomenon of displacement and loading of affect upon a substitute in the earlier volumes of this present work. We saw that there is an unconscious love. Analytic experience shows how the important phenomena of hate are concealed, and that there is just as much an unconscious hatred as an unconscious love. Indeed, we often notice that the hate objects of consciousness serve to conceal the much more important hate objects of the unconscious. Hatred as well as love belongs to life. Love and hate are expressions of the life impulse.

We have hitherto learned to know only love as the expression of the life force. Originally the sexual impulse, it splits into many components, which all have this in common, that they strive for union or separation, whether a physical one or a spiritual. What I love, becomes mine. What I hate, I thrust from me. Hatred seeks ultimately to remove the hated object from the subject who hates. Hate has the relation to love that disgust has toward desire. Disgust is the dread of contact, desire the wish for it.

We may divide our feeling into attractive and repellant. Distrust, suspicion, malice, hostility, antipathy, animosity, resentment, disgust, repugnance, envy, jealousy, hatred, would be examples of the repellant feelings; while sympathy, trust, consideration, compassion, desire, friendship, affection toward, and love belong to the attractive emotions. Therefore love enriches us, while hate impoverishes. (When I hate, says Schiller, I take away something from myself; when I love, I am richer by that which I love.)

We must see in hate a phenomenon of self-preservation. Whatever appears hostile or dangerous to our ego is hated. In hate, the sense of personality is struggling for its right to existence. Hate is a reaction of the ego feeling.

I have long ago answered the important question, which is primary in man, love or hate, in favor of hatred; and Freud after long resistance has confirmed this opinion. We must conceive that the life impulse primarily moves toward pleasure. Life would be meaningless if it were not built upon pleasure. Men are unhappy because they have lost the capacity for permanent pleasure, or, better expressed, the happy feeling of the rhythmic alternation between pleasure and pain. For every pleasure is founded upon the removal of pain as well as upon positive values.

Primitive man must have enjoyed life in this sense as endless pleasure. We have taken over certain years from this prehistoric period of life. The nursling represents for us primitive man with his striving after permanent pleasure. But this uninterrupted delight is an impossible ideal. Pleasure presupposes pain. It creates its greatest strength from the effect of the contrast. Indeed, pain is unconditionally necessary as a contrast effect for the heightening of pleasure. But inasmuch as the child has as yet no philosophical training and knows nothing of the value of pain for enhancing pleasure, he reacts to everything painful with hatred. The first pain awakes the first hate. The child at first loves only himself. But he learns to love the individuals who afford him pleasure. He instinctively hates all those who are hindrances in the way of his satisfactions. The withdrawal of the pleasure becomes pain. (Withdrawal of the breast awakens hunger, and hunger causes distress.) The child very early learns the mechanism of projection. He wishes all his displeasure upon others, all pleasure upon himself. The pleasure for me and the pain for you! is the first formula. Or still more plainly, For me the love, for you the hate!

The child therefore confonts the world with hostility. Slowly the mother wins the love of the child. But everything strange frightens him. The stranger is an enemy. Anxiety is fear of the pain which the stranger may cause him. The mother becomes a part of the ego. It is much more difficult for the father to gain the child’s love. He has to employ small artificial means, while the mother, nourishing him and caring for him, is looked upon as the source of pleasure. The father dances him, rocks him, sings, thinks up all sorts of games, and is gradually fitted into the ego complex. Thus the family becomes the school of love.

Soon, however, the child notices that outside influences disturb him in his striving for pleasure. There is the strange woman who calls the mother away from the cradle. The father, too, is felt as a disturber of the peace and later the children who follow, the wicked rivals, who then also lay claim to the love objects.

At this time the child manifests that attitude toward life which I have described in Peculiarities of Behavior as belonging to the primordial reactions. It behaves like primitive man. Its reactions are primitive. Primitive man likewise hates whatever opposes his will to pleasure and power. Hate is the will to power and love the will to submission. While the will to power is inborn, the will to subjection seems to us a product of culture: in truth, it is perhaps the first and most important requirement for culture. Culture and social feeling presuppose the submission of the individual to the common weal.

As is known, I consider parapathics phenomena of reversion. They manifest the instinctive life of the past. The further back the reversion goes, the more pronounced is the attitude of hate and the less the capacity for love. In marked forms of degeneration, which however are no longer to be considered as parapathy, the ability to love is totally wanting. These forms are in consequence asocial, for love is the fundamental condition for the social feeling, which radiates from the family to the larger associations. To be able to obey signifies already a higher form of primitive man. It implies a renunciation of one’s own. Education and culture are the control of the other over one’s own. The outsider is primarily hated and repulsed. Not until we incorporate the strange into ourselves, make it a part of our ego, can we love it. Only then does submission lose its depressive character, for it represents something voluntary; that is, something of one’s own. The whole problem of education rests upon the neutralizing of hatred toward what is without and the incorporation of the latter by the child as his own. Therefore not only external knowledge, but conscience from without, becomes a part of the child. Conscience is the endopsychic perception of hatred, felt as guilt, valued according to the morals of others, a victory of the external over one’s own.

Every child at first defends himself against conscience and seeks to overcome it by the means at his disposal. He stands in fact beyond good and evil; he knows no sin. Sin is the offspring of hate. Without implanted conscience, the child would not adjust himself to the laws of civilization. It is the sense of guilt that bows the neck of the independent. The feeling of guilt arises through the endopsychic perception of hatred and its psychic configuration. Every hatred is deadly, says Swoboda. And death wishes are the first source of the consciousness of guilt. An inversion of the hatred comes about through this sense of guilt: the hatred directs itself against one’s own ego. The formula, For me the pleasure, for you the pain! is then reversed: "For me