Part 10

There are innumerable aphorisms, the crystallised precipitations of thousands of years, experience, that express this truth. “Every man has his little crack, his dross and his sliver.” (In the German saying the overvalued idea is compared to a splinter in the brain. An excellent metaphor!) “If you see a fool take hold of your own ears.” “You cannot name a wise man who was not guilty of some folly.” (The reader will find ample material on this subject in Dr. Moenkenmöller’s book on ‘mental disease and mental weakness in satire, proverb, and humour,’ published in 1907.) In other words: We all suffer from a false and subjective valuation of our ideas. We all drag overvalued ideas about with us.

It is the dream of all great minds to revise these overvalued ideas. Nietzsche’s life work was a struggle with overvalued ideas. While so engaged, he himself became the victim of an overvalued idea, and his superman will forever remain a literary myth. But if the twilight of Gods could once set in for the overvalued ideas then only could we do full justice to his rhapsodies in “Beyond Good and Evil.” For in no other sphere is there such luxuriance of overvalued ideas as in the ethical. All progress has been brought about by the suppression of the natural impulses. All our education, using the word in its true sense, consists in investing our instincts and impulses with don’ts. The sum total of these inhibitions we call morality. Progress consists in getting pleasure out of the inhibition, in converting the displeasure of being inhibited into ethical pleasure. The striving for this goal results in a kind of ethical burdening. One who has had the opportunity to study neurotics will be amazed at the many agonizing conscious pangs they suffer from owing to their ignorance of man’s true nature. These times pant under the burden of morality as an overvalued idea. They are in danger of asphyxiating under the ethical burden. A false and hypocritical morality, by disseminating an unhealthy conception of our dispositions (instincts), has turned our views on what constitutes sin topsy-turvy. The consequences are only too evident. On the one hand, we behold, as evidences of suppression, indulgence in frivolities, pleasure in the piquant, a delight in indelicate jokes, which forcibly intrude into life and art; on the other hand, as the natural reaction to this, an over-luxuriance of scientific and pseudo-scientific sexual literature. And all because morality became a ruinously overvalued idea. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Morality will always remain the goal of noble souls, but only that kind of morality which harmonizes with man’s nature. Where morality does violence to nature it becomes natural, and brings about not ethical freedom but ethical burdening.

But morality is not the only overvalued idea that turns the half of mankind into fools. If we survey the chaos of modern social life we shall easily find everywhere evidences of the endless disputes and irritating conflicts caused by overvalued ideas. Scientists may prove that the theory of races is no longer tenable, that the asserted purity of races is a fable, etc. Notwithstanding all that, the German Workurka and the Czech rustic are always at each other’s throats. Why cite other examples? In racial, religious, national, and other discords it is always an overvalued idea that makes a harmonious evolution impossible. Verily, the whole world is an insane asylum because the essential factor in delusions, an overvalued idea, pervades the air like infectious psychic germs.

Will the world ever be better? From a survey of the past we are justified only in being coldly sceptical and discouragingly dubious. A conflict of ideas will continue as long as there are dissensions between human beings. Ideas to wage a war for existence. A few survive longer than others, are highly esteemed till their course is run and are discovered to have been overvalued. But as long as they have the mastery they change credulous men into foolish children.

From this endless round there is no escape. And folly and wisdom lead the never-ending dance until the dark, wide open gates of the future swallow them.

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS

The last few years the child has become the centre of interest. Funny as it may sound, it may almost be asserted that we had just rediscovered the child. Congresses are held, artists devote their talents to portraying the life of the child, expositions acquaint us with the many aspects of the advances that have been made in the new knowledge. Is it any wonder then that we have suddenly been made acquainted with the abuses of children? That we have shudderingly learned that there are children who are tortured by their own mothers? There were loud cries of horror. The fountain of humanity became a broad stream which must drive the mills of a new social organization in the interests of the defenceless child. Who would withhold his approval of this movement? Who would oppose it? For truly there is no sadder spectacle than a child tortured to death by its own parents. The whole instinct for race preservation cries out against it....

But this theme may also be regarded from another angle, and I purpose showing from the point of view of the physician and the pedagog that the reverse of abuse, viz., excessive affection, has a dark side, that it, too, is capable of ruining a child’s life and condemning an innocent being to lifelong suffering.

At a private gathering of physicians not long ago the subject of the last congress for the protection of children was discussed from its more serious as well as lighter aspects. A Viennese neurologist ventured the following remark: “I regard it as a great misfortune if a woman’s affection for her husband is expended upon her child. A misfortune for humanity, for, in this way, the number of nervous persons will be incalculably increased.”

One is strongly inclined at first energetically to attack this opinion. What! A tender, affectionate bringing up will make a child neurotic? Who can prove that a happy childhood results in an unhappy life? Shall parents be afraid to show their children love? To hug them, kiss them, pet them? Is not nervousness rather the sequel to draconic sternness, tyrannical compulsion?

Nonsense! Nonsense! I shall attempt to answer these obtrusive questions seriatim.

But, first, one remarkable fact has to be postulated. Parents are really becoming more and more affectionate from year to year. Such fanatically affectionate parents as are quite common now were formerly the exception. To-day the parents’ thoughts all centre around the child: How to feed it, bring it up, dress it hygienically, harden it, how to instruct it in sexual matters.... A flood of books and magazines scarcely suffices to meet the tremendous concern about these matters. Can this emanate solely from the fact that the pressing movement for emancipation of woman has displaced the woman’s interest from the man to the child? I think that herein the neurologist is in error. That cannot possibly be the sole cause.

The cause for the hypertrophied love of the child is adduced from the consideration of those cases which even in former times offered instances of an exaggerated parental affection amounting to doting love. The over-indulged child was almost invariably an only child whom popular speech designates a “trembling joy.”

It is to be regretted that most modern families are made up of such “trembling joys.” “Neo-Malthusianism” has infected the whole world. In consequence of the employment of innumerable and more or less generally employed anti-conceptives the birth rate is steadily declining. “Two-children families” is the rule, and families with many children--especially among the well-to-do--the exception. Even the vaunted fecundity of the Germans which is always being held up as a model to the French will soon be a thing of the past. In former decades 1,000 married women in Berlin gave birth to 220 children and from 1873 to 1877 the number even rose to 231. Since then the birth rate is declining from year to year, so that in 1907 1,000 women only had 111 children. In other large cities matters are even worse than in Berlin in this regard. But it would be decidedly wrong to infer that there is a diminution in the number of marriages. In Prussia the number of marriages from 1901 to 1904 was at the rate of 8 per 1,000, whereas in 1850 it was somewhat less, to wit: 7.8 per 1,000. Sociologists have detected in this state of affairs a great danger for the mental prospects of the race inasmuch as matters in this regard are much better in the country and, consequently, they say, the progeny of the farmer class will in a not remote period tremendously exceed the intelligent descendants of urban people in number. The country will get the best of the city and not vice versa. But we must not wander away from our subject. Let us take this fact for granted: The “two-children system” is the cause for the excessive parental affection we have described. But wherein is this dangerous?

I shall not attempt here a detailed statement of the well-known dangers. We all know that coddled children very often become helpless, dependent persons, that they cannot find their place in life, and do not seem to be armed against adversity. It seems superfluous to dwell at greater length on this. Of greater significance is the phenomenon that the exaggerated affection lavished on the child creates a correspondingly large need for affection in it. A need for affection that is tempestuous in its demand for gratification. As long as these children are young so long is this demand fully satisfied. The parents, and especially mothers, are so overjoyed at their children’s manifestations of love that out of their overflowing hearts they reward them by overwhelming them with caresses. Thus the measure of affectionate demonstrations rises instead of gradually sinking. And now the time comes for the child to go to school. And for the first time in its life it stands in the presence of the will of a stranger who demands neither petting nor love, only work done without grumbling. How easily this situation gives rise to conflict! The child thinks it is not loved by the teacher, it is terrified by a harsh word and begins to cry. School becomes odious to it; it learns unwillingly. It asks for another school and for other teachers. If its wish is gratified the same thing is soon repeated.

Matters get much worse when these children grow up. They have an unquenchable craving for caresses. From them are developed the women who kill their husband’s love by their own immoderate love. Every day they want to be told that their husbands still love them. Daily--nay, hourly--they wish to be the recipients of sweets, loving words, private pet names and kisses without number. The men, on the other hand, who had been so coddled in their childhood, are only in the rarest instances satisfied with their wives; sooner or later they seek to compensate outside of the home for the insufficient affection shown by the wife; or they transfer this requirement upon the children who thus become seriously (though not congenitally) burdened. But even this is not the worst.

The greatest dangers of excessive affection are known to only very few persons. They consist in a premature excitation of the erotic emotions. We are so prone to forget unpleasant experiences. Hence comes it that most adults have no recollection of their own youthful erotic experiences. Parents especially are very forgetful in this regard--so much so that their forgetfulness amounts almost to a pathological condition bordering on hysterical amnesia. Thence comes it that most mothers will take an oath on their daughters’ innocence and fathers on their sons’ purity. They talk themselves into the belief that their children are exceptions, that they are incredibly simple, still believe in the stork myth and other similar stupidities.

That the sexual enlightenment of the child is an important problem and of far-reaching significance for its whole life is proved in numberless books and essays dealing with the subject. We are told that open scientific instruction should take the place of secret knowledge obtained from turbid channels. Very fine! But the world must not believe that the child’s first erotic knowledge is awakened as a result of such instruction. That is a widespread superstition. The sexual life of the child does not begin with puberty, the old books to the contrary notwithstanding, but with the day of its birth.

On the occasion of a sad criminal trial in which children were charged with being prostitutes, public opinion was horrified at the wickedness of these poor creatures. And yet most of them were victims of their environment. Does any one really believe that such occurrences are rare exceptions? That is a myth. We talk ourselves into the belief that the little child that is still unable to speak is not receptive to erotic impressions. How do we know this? The brain of a child is like a photographic plate that greedily catches impressions, independently of whether they are intelligible or not, impressions whose influence may be operative throughout its life. As we know, there is a large group of investigators which traces all perverse manifestations of the sexual impulses back to a fixation of the earliest erotic experience. Erotic stimulation can subsequently be brought about only by way of an association with this early impression. This explanation certainly does seem to fit the curious phenomenon known as fetichism. In this way children’s experiences influence their whole life. In sexual matters human beings behave with incredible naïveté. They close their eyes and will not see. Frank Wedekind is perfectly right in deriding a world that has secrets even from itself. So infantile sexuality is a secret which every intelligent person knows.

If parents only kept this in their mind’s eye! Then it would not happen that children ten years of age and older would be permitted to sleep in their parents’ bedrooms that the anxious father and mother might watch over the gentlest breath of their precious darlings. These parents do not want to consider the possibility that the children may in this way receive impressions which may prove very injurious to them. Many a case of obstinate insomnia in childhood or of nocturnal attacks of apprehension is explained in this way. I have repeatedly cured sleepless children by the simple remedy of ordering them to sleep in separate bedrooms.

Let us assume then that all children are susceptible to erotic stimuli and that such stimulation may harm them. For the later a person’s conscious sexual life begins the greater the prospects of his becoming a healthy, mentally well-balanced individual. Among the factors capable of permanently arousing erotic emotions we must include excessive affection. Between the affections of one who loves and of a mother there are really no differences. Both kiss, caress, fondle, hug, embrace, pet, etc. That the excitement is transmitted to the same central organs is obvious.

In this way the child receives its first erotic sensations from its nurse. Interpret it as we may the nurse, the attendant, the mother, the father are the child’s first love, the first erotic love, as our psychoanalysis has convincingly demonstrated. But this must not be interpreted to mean that I wish to condemn the affectionate management of children. On the contrary! A certain quantity of affection is, as a matter of fact, essential to the normal development of the individual. But the affection lavished on them must not be excessive. For if it is the child will be prematurely brought into a condition of erotic overstimulation. It grows older and begins to feel the power of education. To restrain and curb the force of the natural impulses powerful inhibitions are erected. As a reaction to the premature sexual stimulation there begins a remarkable process which may be designated as “sexual repression.” This repression may succeed so well that even the child forgets its early experiences or the repression does not succeed and the individual’s erotic requirements grow from year to year. In the latter case there develops in the child a serious psychic conflict between sexual longing and sexual renunciation and thus the soil in which a neurosis may grow is prepared. Perhaps the conflict is the neurosis.

We shall mention only in passing that such exaggerated affection begets in many children the habit of securing for themselves a certain amount of pleasurable sensations by way of certain auto-erotic actions. It is not possible, nor necessary, to enter into a detailed discussion of these matters here. For most people know that our experiences in childhood influence our whole life. But it is a tragic commentary on human strivings that excessive parental love may bring sickness upon the child, that a happy present is replaced by an unhappy future, that the roses a mother strews in her child’s path only later show their thorns.

We cannot say it too often: We fuss too much with our children. There is too much theory in this matter of bringing up children. We pay too much attention to our children. Let us leave them their peaceful childhood, their merry games, the wondrous product of their untiring phantasy. Let us clearly realize that with our excessive affection we give ourselves a great deal of pleasure but that at the same time we are doing the children a great injury. Let no one discourage mothers from being affectionate to their children, from expending loving attentions on them, from making their youth as pleasant as possible. But the parents’ affection should not expend itself mechanically. It should be a uniformly warm fire that only warms, kindles no fire, and bursts into a bright flame only on life’s great holidays.

WHY THEY QUARREL

When a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no thunder-storms and no lightning flashes I accept it as self-evident, but to myself I think: they are lying. When two friends assure me that they have never quarrelled I think the same thing. I know that they have not been telling the truth. That is, they are liars without the consciousness of lying. They are firmly convinced that they were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. And thus it comes to pass that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them, and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. We do not quaff the lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. No, we sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses.

There are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worth while if it runs along smoothly. These are the everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their dreams. They project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon all their daily experiences. That is why they so often appear to be overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement is incomprehensible to us. For it is a fact that they fly into rages about trivial matters. But it is this very intensity of emotion that shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper source than appears on the surface.

It has struck many observers that the external provocation to quarrelling is often very trivial. Of course we frequently hear a man or his wife declare that they would gladly avoid a quarrel if it were possible to do so. Either one says something that seems to be quite innocent, and yet it will be the occasion for a heated altercation, a great domestic scene with all its unpleasant consequences.

This is due to the fact that most persons do not distinguish between cause and provocation. The provocation to a quarrel is easily found if hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a deeper cause, acting as a driving power, sets the wheels of passion in motion.

A somewhat careful investigation of every quarrel easily brings the conviction that it is invariably the secret, unconscious emotions that bring about the conflict of opinions. Where this deep resonance of the unconscious is lacking we playfully pass over differences. Unfortunately there are probably no two human beings whose souls vibrate so harmoniously that there never occurs a discord. This phenomenon is altogether too deeply rooted in human nature for an exception ever to occur. And paradoxical as it may sound, it is lovers who love each other most who cause each other the greatest pain. The great intensity which their emotions attain is due only to the fact they have repressed a series of experiences and feelings. They are blind to the faults of the beloved because they do not wish to see these faults. But the suppressed forces have not yet lost their power over the soul. These bring about the quarrel, and are capable, even if only for a few seconds, to transform love into hatred.

But a few practical examples will do more to make this subject clear than all our theoretical explanations. Mr. N. S., a pious, upright man, asserts that his present ailment dates from a quarrel that had been frightfully upsetting him for months. He had inherited from his father a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also succeeded him in his position. One day his brother came to him and stormily demanded the return of the books. But inasmuch as he was the older he felt himself entitled to be the sole heir. A violent quarrel ensued, during which he exclaimed: “I’ll die before I give up any of these books!” After the quarrel he became very neurotic. He tortures himself with self-reproaches; he is convinced that with that exclamation he had been guilty of an act of impiety; he is very unhappy and finds no rest, no peace, either at home or in his office.

Many persons may be satisfied with the superficial explanation offered by the patient himself that he is an ardent bibliophile and collector of ancient manuscripts. But the physician who treats sick souls must not be so easily satisfied.