Freud, Sigmund (1919-062/1931): Preface

PREFACE

By PRroFrEssoR SıcM. FREUD

originated in the need of helping the victims of

nervous disease to whom rest, hydropathy or elec-
trical treatment could bring no relief, A striking case
recorded by Joseph Breuer had aroused the hope that
the amount of help that could be given to such patients
might vary directly with the extent to which it might be
possible to understand the genesis, hitherto unfathomed,
of their symptoms. Psycho-analysis, therefore, though
originally a matter of purely medical technique, was
directed, from the first, towards new research, towards
the discovery of mechanisms whose nature was con-
cealed but whose effects were far-reaching.

Its further progress led away from the study of the
physical conditions of nervous illnesses in a degree sur-
prising to the physician, and gradually the whole mental
content of human life came within its sphere, including
the healthy—the normal as well as the super-normal. It
had to concern itself with affects and passions, and above
all, with those constant subjects of the poet’s art and
enthusiasm, the emotions of love: it learnt to recognise
the potency of memories, the unsuspected significance
of the early years of childhood in shaping the conduct of
later life, and finally the strength of those wishes which
lead men’s judgements astray and prescribe the paths of
human endeavour.

For a time it appeared to be the fate of psycho-
analysis to be incorporated into the field of psychology

5

PP: was born of medical necessity. It

6 RITUAL! PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDIES

without being able to indicate in what way the mind of
the sick patient differed from that of the normal person.
But in the course of its development it came upon the
problem of the dream, which is an abnormal mental
product created by normal people under regularly re-
curring physiological conditions. And in solving the
enigma of dreams it found in unconscious mentality
the common ground in which the highest as well as the
lowest mental impulses are rooted, and from which arise
the most normal mental activities as well as the strange
products of a diseased mind. The picture of the mental
mechanisms of the individual now became clearer and
more complete: it was seen that obscure impulses arising
in his organic life were striving to fulfil their own aims,
and that controlling them was a series of more highly
organised mental formations, acquired and handed on
by man under the pressure of his cultural development,
which had taken possession of parts of these impulses,
developed them or employed them in the service of
higher aims—had bound them fast, at all events, and
utilised their energy for its own purposes. This higher
organisation, which we know as the ego, had rejected
another portion of the same elementary impulses as
useless, because these impulses could not accommodate
themselves to the organic unity of the individual, or
because they conflicted with its cultural aims. The ego
was not powerful enough to exterminate those mental
forces it could not control. Instead, it turned away from
them, leaving them on the most primitive psychological
level, and protected itself against their demands by
means of energetic defensive or reactive mechanisms, or
sought to compromise with them by means of substitute-
gratifications. Unsubdued and indestructible, yet in-

PREFACE 7

hibited in every direction, these repressed impulses,
together with their primitive mental content, form the
underworld, the kernel of the true unconscious, ever on
the alert to urge their claims and to find any means for
gratification. Hence the insecurity of our proud psychical
superstructure, the nightly emergence of proscribed and
repressed things in dreams, and our proneness to fall ill
with neuroses and psychoses as soon as the distribution
of power between the ego and the repressed is altered to
the disadvantage of the former.

It requires but little consideration to realise that such
a view of the life of the human mind cannot possibly be
limited to the sphere of dreams and nervous diseases. If
it be a justifiable view, it must apply also to normal
mental phenomena, and even the highest achievements
of the human mind must have some relation to the
factors recognised in pathology—to repression, to the
strivings for mastery of the unconscious and to the possi-
bilities of gratification which are open to the primitive
impulses. And now it became an irresistibly tempting
task, indeed, a scientific duty, to extend the psycho-
analytical methods of investigation from their original
field to more distant and diverse spheres of mental
interest. The psycho-analytical treatment of patients
also pointed insistently in this direction, since it became
evident that individual forms of the neuroses showed a
marked correspondence with the most highly valued
products of our civilisation. The hysteric is undoubtedly
a poet, though he represents his phantasies essentially
by mimicry, without considering whether other people
understand them or not. The ceremonials and prohibi-
tions of obsessional patients force us to conclude that
they have created a private religion for themselves; and

8 RITUAL: PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDIES

even the delusions of the paranoiac show an unwelcome
external similarity and inner relationship to the systems
of our philosophers. We cannot get away from the im-
pression that patients are making, in an asocial manner,
the same attempts at a solution of their conflicts and an
appeasement of their urgent desires which, when carried
out in a manner acceptable to a large number of persons,
are called poetry, religion and philosophy.

In an extremely brilliant and suggestive monograph,!
O. Rank and H. Sachs have collected the results which
have so far been accomplished by the application of
psycho-analysis to the fields of mental interest. Mytho-
logy and the history of literature and religion appear to
furnish the most easily accessible material. The final
formula which shall assign to the myth its particular
province has not yet been found. But in a large work on
the incest complex, O. Rank? reaches the remarkable
conclusion that the selection of subject matter, particu-
larly in dramatic poetry, is limited chiefly by the
range of the Oedipus complex, as it is called in psycho-
analysis. Through the elaboration of this complex into
the most manifold variants, distortions and disguises,
the poet seeks to elucidate his most personal attitude to
this effective theme. It is in the mastery of his Oedipus
complex, i.e. his affective attitude towards his family,
and in its narrower sense his father and mother, that the
individual comes to grief, and therefore it is this com-
plex which regularly forms the kernel of his neurosis. It
owes its significance not to any unintelligible concatena-
tion of events. The importance of the parental relation-
ship springs naturally from the biological fact of the

1 Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Geisteswissenschaften, 1913.
3 O. Rank, Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage, Leipzig und Wien, 1912.

PREFACE 9

long helplessness and slow maturing of the young human
being, and the complicated development of his capacity
for love; and furthermore guarantees that the lines on
which the Oedipus complex is overcome shall run parallel
with those on which the archaic and animal inheritance
of mankind is most successfully brought under subjec-
tion. In this inheritance are contained all the energies
necessary for the later cultural development of the
individual, but they have first to be sorted out and
elaborated. In the form in which the individual brings it
with him into the world it is useless for the purposes of
social life.

One step more is necessary before we reach the start-
ing point for a psycho-analytical consideration of re-
ligious life. What is now the heritage of the individual
was once, long ago, a newly acquired possession, handed
on from one generation to another. The Oedipus complex
itself must therefore have its own process of develop-
ment, and the study of prehistory can help us to find out
something about it. Such a study leads us to assume
that the human family as we know it to-day was
organised differently in remote primitive times, and this
surmise is supported by data obtained from primitive
races of the present day. If we submit the prehistoric
and ethnological material relating to this archaic herit-
age to psycho -analytical elaboration, we come to an
unexpectedly definite conclusion—namely, that god the
father at one time walked incarnate on the earth and
exercised his sovereignty as leader of the hordes of
primitive men until his sons combined together and slew
him; and further, that the first social ties, the basic
moral restrictions, and the oldest form of religion—
totemism—originated as a result of, and a reaction

10 RITVAL. PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDIES

against, this liberating misdeed. Later religions are filled
with the same content and with the endeavour to
obliterate the traces of that crime, or to expiate it by
substituting other solutions for the conflict between
father and sons; while, on the other hand, they cannot
refrain from repeating anew the removal of the father.
As a result we can recognise in myths the echo of that
occurrence which throws its gigantic shadow over the
whole development of mankind.

This hypothesis, founded on the views of Robertson
Smith, and developed by me in my Totem und Tabu in
1912, has been taken by Th. Reik as the basis for his
studies on the problems of the psychology of religion, of
which this is the first volume. In accordance with psycho-
analytical technique he begins by considering details of
religious life that have not been previously understood,
and in elucidating them throws light upon the funda-
mental presuppositions and ultimate aims of religion.
He keeps steadily in view the relationship between pre-
historic man and primitive man of to-day, as well as the
connection between cultural activities and neurotic
substitutive formations. For the rest, the reader may be
referred to the author’s own introduction. It is to be
hoped that his work will commend itself to the attention
of those who are most competent to appreciate it.