Most of Freud's ideas on sex development can be traced to, the one four-and-a-half-years-old child he analyzed, who was as representative of normal childhood as the little chess champion of nine years now astounding the world is representative of the chess ability of the average child. Moreover, the basis of the technique is the free association, an association released from inhibitions of all kinds. There isn't any such thing, as Professor Woodworth has pointed out. All associations are conditioned by the physical condition of the patient, by his mood, by the nature of the environment he finds himself in, by the personality of the examiner and his powers of suggesting, his purposes and (very important) by the patient's purposes, which he cannot bid "Disappear!" As for the results of treatment, every neurologist meets patients again and again who have been "psychoanalyzed" without results. Moreover, psychoneurotic patients get well without treatment, as do all other classes of the sick, and the Christian Scientist, the osteopath and the chiropractic also have records of "cures."
This is not the place to discuss in further detail the Freudian ideas (the wish, the symbol, the jargon of transference, etc).
The leading follower of Freud, Jung, has already broken away from the parent church, and there is an amusing cry of heresy raised.
Soon the eminent Austrian will have the pleasure of seeing a half-dozen schools that have split off from his own,--followers of Bleuler, Jung, Adler and others.
There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness.
There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial structure that accomplish great functions without any but the most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them, it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary, but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely means that introspection is not sagacious.
Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been; then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud was born,--in vain. Think how the poor, misguided subconsciousness has labored for nothing,--and how grateful it should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of function that a stomach-ache has.
Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with surprising ease.
The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and because of which there is conflict.
Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended consideration.
Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been the greatest of man's struggles. Internal warfare between opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud's work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great deal through no other method than by arousing it to action against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.
