Part 11

We know that every collector is an unconscious Don Juan who has transferred his passion from an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. But we also know that the passion with which the collected objects are loved emanates from the erotic domain. And what did our psychoanalysis of the above case bring out? Remarkably enough a rivalry between the two brothers which went back all the way to their youth. The older one had the privileges of the first-born and was a good-for-nothing. The younger one was a pattern of what a child ought to be. From their childhood they had been rivals for the affection of their parents, and more especially of the mother. We encounter here the so-called “Oedipus motive,” a son’s love for his mother--a motive whose instinctive force and urge are still too imperfectly appreciated. The two had been rivals, the older one being jealous of the parents’ preference for the younger one, and the younger jealous of the older one’s privileges. In this we have the first of the deeper motives for the quarrel. Further investigation brought a second and a third motive to light. The older had, very naturally, married first, and repeatedly boasted in the presence of his younger and unmarried brother of his wife’s charms and virtues. In fact, he had even led him into his wife’s bedroom that he might see for himself what a treasure he possessed. (You see the motives of such stories as “Gyges and his Ring” and “King Candaules” occurring even nowadays.) At that moment a great passion for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger brother’s breast. Here we have then a second cause for dissension. But other factors are also involved. Our pious young man married a beautiful woman and would have been happy if he had not been the victim of a jealous passion. Jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge of one’s inferiority. He thought he noticed that his older brother was too devoted to his wife. And during an excursion into the country they had been in the woods a little too long, as he thought, and it occurred to him--and here we have the fourth motive--to tempt his sister-in-law. He is a Don Juan who runs after every petticoat and wants to drain life in large draughts. N. S. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to turn his sinful cravings to good account for the success of his business and to bad account as far as his health was concerned. The brother whom he despised openly he envied in secret. But we could mention still other motives for their quarrel if Mrs. Grundy considerations did not bar the way....

Unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many quarrels, one might almost say behind most quarrels. We have already hinted that dissensions between brothers or sisters are due to rivalry. But even in the quarrels between parents and children we may frequently enough demonstrate the identical undertone for the disharmony. The infant son sees in his father a rival for the mother’s favour. The reverse also occurs, though not so frequently. I was once the witness to a violent quarrel between a father and his son. The father had, as it seemed to me, not the slightest cause for grievance against the son, and yet a little trifle led to a violent altercation that ended in a tragic scene. At the height of the row the father screamed to his wife: “You are to blame for it all! You robbed me of my son’s love!”

Naturally one would think that this lava stream belched forth in a great burst of passion from a volcano would contain the truth in its torrid current. And so it does, but in a disguised form. The true reproach should have been directed at the son, and should have been: “You have robbed me of my wife’s love!”

We see in this a “transference” of a painful emotion from one person upon another. Such transferences or “displacements” are extremely common in everyday life, and it is only with their aid that we can account for the many domestic conflicts. A man will rarely admit that he erred in the choice of a wife. The feeling of hatred that his wife engenders in him he transfers upon others. Upon whom? The answer is obvious. Upon her next of kin. Most frequently upon her mother, the most immediate cause of her existence. This is the secret meaning of the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing and inexhaustible and perpetual theme for wits.

So that, for example, if we hear a young woman complain that she cannot bear her husband’s family but that she loves him beyond bounds we may with perfect safety translate this in the language of the unconscious thus: “I would not care a rap about my husband’s family if I did not have to love my husband.”

The rows with servants, well-known daily occurrences, become intelligible only if we know the law of transference. An unfaithful wife, who had been betrayed and deserted by her lover, suddenly began to watch her servant girls suspiciously, and to strike them on the slightest provocations. The woman had for years employed “help” without having had more than the customary quarrels with them. After a short sojourn with her husband the rage of the abandoned woman, who would have loved to give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true southern fashion, was transferred upon her servants. And exactly like this the resentment of many a housewife is discharged through these more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is brought about the phenomenon so common in modern large cities which may be designated as “servant-girl neurosis.”

Obviously the deeper motives slumber in the unconscious, and if they ever become conscious they are looked upon as sinfulness and bad temper. Freud has become the founder of a wholly new psychology by virtue of his discovery of the laws of repression and of transference--a psychology which will be indispensable to the criminologist of the future. What is nowadays brought to light in our halls of justice as the psychological bases for conflicts is generally only superficial psychology.

This is strikingly illustrated by one of the saddest of legal proceedings of last year. I mean the trial for murder in the Murri-Boumartini case, in consequence of which an innocent victim--so I am convinced--the Countess Linda Boumartini is languishing in prison. Her brother Tullio, who had murdered his brother-in-law, was accused of an illicit relationship with his sister, for otherwise the murder would have been inexplicable. One who has carefully read Linda’s memoirs and her letters, which are now before the public, as well as the confessions of the imprisoned Tullio, will be sure to laugh at the accusation, which unquestionably owed its origin to a clerical plot. What may have really happened is that unconscious brotherly love which deep down under consciousness in all likelihood takes its origin from the sexual but whose flowers appear on the surface of consciousness as the loftiest manifestations of ethical feeling. It was brotherly love, the primal motive which Wagner immortalised in his “Valkyrie,” that forced the dagger into Tullio Murri’s hand. He saw his sister suffer and go to pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his brother-in-law. What lay hidden behind his pure fraternal love may never have entered his consciousness.

Oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blindness! What we see of the motives of great conflicts is usually only the surface. Even in the case of the little domestic quarrels, the irritating frictions of everyday life, the vessel of knowledge sails only over the easily excited ripples. But what gives these waters their black aspect is the deep bed over which they lie. Down there, at the bottom of the sea which represents our soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed monsters--our instincts and desires--emanating from the beginnings of man’s history. When they bestir their coarse bodies the sea too trembles and is slightly set in motion. And we stupid human beings think it is the surface wind that has begot the waves.

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

It was getting late. The last guests had left the café. The waiters, tired and sleepy, were prowling around our table with a peculiar expression in their countenances which clearly challenged us to call for our checks....

We took no notice of them. Or rather, we refused to take notice. The sudden death of one of our dearest friends had aroused something incomprehensible in us which made us very restless. We were speaking about premonitions, and that peculiar intangible awe which one feels in the presence of the incomprehensible, the supernatural, which at certain times overcomes even the most confirmed sceptic, sat at our table.

The journalist--who could not deny a slight tendency to mysticism--was of the opinion that he would certainly not die a natural death. That was all we could get him to say on the subject at this time. Finally however he confessed, with pretended indifference, that he has the certain premonition that he will one day be trampled to death by frightened horses.

“Nonsense!”--“Nursery tales!”--“Superstition!” several voices exclaimed simultaneously.

But the physician shook his head gravely. “Strange! Very strange! Do you put any stock in this looking into the future?”

The journalist blushed so slightly that it could hardly be noticed, the way men blush when they fear that they had betrayed a weakness. Cautiously he replied: “And why not? Can you prove the contrary? Have we not until only a few years ago pooh-poohed the idea of telepathy and called it superstition? But nowadays that the X-rays, wireless telegraphy and other marvels have revolutionised our ideas about matter and energy and even space, we no longer laugh pityingly at the poor dreamers who, like Swedenburg, the northern magician, see things that are beyond the field of vision of their bodily eyes. Why then should I doubt the possibility of somebody some day finding an explanation for the ability to ‘look into the future’?”

“Bosh!” exclaimed the lawyer. “That’s all fantastic piffle! I can cite you an example from my own experience which is as interesting as it is instructive. I was very sick and confined to bed. Suddenly I awoke, my heart palpitating, and heard a loud voice screaming these words right into my ears: ‘You will live fourteen days more! Take advantage of this period!’ Just fourteen days later I was sailing on the ocean. A frightful sirocco wind was tossing our little steamer from right to left and from left to right so violently that we could not retain our upright positions. And suddenly my prophecy--which I had almost completely forgotten--came back to me. But I remained very cool, like a scientist who is on the eve of making a great discovery and risking his life to do so. As you see I did not die, and the ship came safely into port. But had I accidentally perished, and if my prophetic dream--the outward projection of my unconscious fear--my unpleasant hallucination had been known to the people about me--the matter would have been construed as a new confirmation of the truth of premonitions. We have so many premonitions that are never fulfilled that the few that happen accidentally to come true do not really matter. Lots of things in life are that way. We speak of our ‘hard luck’ because we forget the times when we have been lucky. Luck rushes by so swiftly! Bad luck creeps, oh, so slowly! And, coming down to facts, I do not know of a single instance of an undoubted fulfillment of a prophecy. For I must confess that all these American and Berlin prophets who have recently given such striking proofs of their ‘second sight’ do not impress me. They have not uttered a single prophecy precisely and accurately, and oracular speeches delivered in general terms are as elastic as a rubber band, and can be applied to almost anything. A great conflagration, a destructive earthquake, or a cruel war will rarely disappoint a prophet. Somewhere or other in this wide world there is a conflagration some time during the year, the earth rocks somewhere, and somewhere machine guns are being fired. I therefore do not believe that our friend will be trampled to death by frightened horses. At the most what will happen will be that his pegasus, growing tired of being abused by him, will suddenly throw him down.”

For a little while there was silence. We had the feeling that the counsellor’s malicious witticism was out of place at this time. The doctor broke the silence. “What will you say, my dear friends, if I tell you that a prominent scientist and psychologist has reported a case which seems to prove the possibility of looking into the future. I say ‘seems’ only because there is an explanation which re-transforms the supernatural into the natural. The physician in question, the well-known Dr. Flournoy, had frequently been consulted by a young man who was suffering from peculiar attacks of apprehension. Day and night he was haunted by the idea that he would fall from a high mountain into a deep precipice, and so be killed. Logic and persuasion were of no avail in dealing with this obsession. It was easy enough for Flournoy to point out that all the young man had to do was to keep away from mountains, and there would be no possibility of his meeting such a frightful end. The patient grew very melancholic, and could not be persuaded to enjoy life as formerly. Imagine this experienced psychologist’s amazement on reading in his newspaper one day that his patient had been instantly killed by accidentally falling from a steep but easily passable ridge while he was taking a walk in a sanitarium in the Alps.”

The journalist exclaimed triumphantly: “Doctor, you’ve disproved your own theory. If what you’ve just told us doesn’t prove the power to look into the future, then nothing does.”

“Pish! Pish!” replied the physician. “Haven’t I said that the explanation is to follow?”

We were all very curious to hear how such a strange occurrence could be explained without the aid of the supernatural. The physician lit another cigar and continued: “What, coming down to facts, is fear? You all know what it is, for I have told you often enough: fear--anxiety--apprehension--is a repressed wish. Every time that two wishes are in conflict as to which one is to have mastery over the individual the wish that has to yield is perceived in consciousness as apprehension. A young girl is apprehensive when she finds herself for the first time alone in a room with her sweetheart. For the time being she is afraid of what later on she may wish for. Dr. Flournoy’s melancholic young man was clearly tired of life. The wish may have come upon him once to make an end of his life by throwing himself from a great height--from such a height as would make failure of the suicidal attempt impossible. This wish may have come to him at night in a dream, or perhaps just before he fell asleep, while he was in a state between sleep and waking. Who knows? But it must have prevailed before the will to live had repressed it and converted it into apprehension. And his prophetic premonitions were nothing but the misunderstood voice from within. And his mysterious death was nothing but--suicide. I have forgotten to tell you that, according to the newspaper reporters, he had sat down on the edge of a precipice and fallen asleep. He had fallen down while asleep. As if the voices in his dream had whispered to him: ‘Come! do what you so earnestly yearn to do! Die! Now you have a fine opportunity!’ The moment had come when the fear had become the stronger wish.”

The journalist was pale. The doctor’s explanation seemed to have stirred up something in the deepest layers of his soul. His voice box was seen to make that automatic movement which we all make when we are embarrassed, as if we wished to speak but could not find the right word. Finally, after he had coughed a little several times, as if to clear his vocal cords, he remarked in a somewhat heavy voice: “That would throw a peculiar light upon many accidental falls in the mountains. You recall, no doubt, that a short time ago a well-known tourist had fallen from a relatively safe cliff. He carried a lot of insurance, and the insurance companies were very anxious to prove it a case of suicide. Is it possible that in this case, too, an ‘unconscious power’ co-operated?”

“Certainly!” exclaimed the physician. “Certainly! At any rate, it is my conviction that many persons seek nothing but death in the mountains. I have certainly met many tourists who had nothing more to hope for from life. One who does not fear death no longer loves life, or, at any rate, no longer loves it to such an extent as not to be willing to gamble with it. Have any of you an idea how many of our actions have their origin in ‘unconscious’ motives? All our life our shadow, our other self, walks by our side and has its say in everything we do. As long as it is only a shadow it is not dangerous. But, woe, if the shadow materialises, as the spiritualists say. The tourist makes a false step and falls into an abyss. Who or what guided his foot? Was it chance--or the unacted wish that slumbered so long beyond the threshold of consciousness? Or shall we say that while one was climbing up a steep mountain path his strength failed him, and he was precipitated into the depths below? Who can decide in such a case as to just what happened? For a little moment the climber must have had the thought ‘if you are not careful now you will fall and be killed.’ The next moment there may have issued from the repressed ‘complexes’ the command: ‘Do it! Then you are free and rid of all your troubles!’ So our young man could have continued to live on the even ground, as Flournoy had advised him to do. But he preferred to go to the mountains. Perhaps it would be better to say that something drew him to the mountains. It was the same power that precipitated him into the abyss: his life-weariness. The trip he took to the country for the sake of his health was from the very beginning a flight into the realm of death. He pursued his shadow just as----”

He did not finish his sentence. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again, and with wide open eyes gazed into the distance as if he had more to say but could not find the right word.

There was silence for a time, and finally the counsellor ventured to say: “Very interesting case! I wonder if its psychology could not be generalised? Isn’t it possible that a large number of the other daily fatal accidents could not be instances of ‘unconscious suicide’? There is, for example, the case of the man who is run over by a cable-car because he did not hear the bell, the unlucky swimmer who is overcome by cramps, the victim of the fellow who did not know the revolver was loaded. Haven’t all these little and big accidents their shadowy motivation?”

“Of course they have,” replied the physician. “Of course! We really know so little of the things we do and even less why we do them. Our emotions, our feelings, are really only the resultants of numerous components; they are only tensions giving shadowy testimony of ripening forces. We think we are directing these forces, but we are being driven by them; we think we make our decisions, but we only accept the decisions of ‘the other fellow’ in us. Professor Freud has assured himself a place amongst the immortals with his psychological theory concerning so-called ‘symptomatic acts.’ He has substituted a ‘secret inner will’ for ‘blind chance.’”

“And what about looking into the future?” inquired the journalist.

“Why, that’s only looking backward. We can easily predict for ourselves anything we long for, and can easily have presentiments about what we do not wish to avert. The facts which permit us to glimpse the future are gleaned from our yesterdays. Our childhood wishes determine our subsequent history. All of us could readily read our future could we call into new life our childhood emotions. What we dreamed of in childhood we wish to experience as adults. And if we cannot experience it we are drawn back into the realm of eternal dreams. This is as true of humanity as a whole as of man individually. Only when we study our past can we see the future of our present, then can we predict that our modern, ultra-modern time with its innumerable stupidities, with its conflicts and ideals, with its strivings and discoveries, will be as far outstripped as we imagine ourselves to have outstripped our ancestors. Science and art, politics and public life--all a perpetual circle tending towards an unknown future....”

“So then, to return to my glimpse of the future,” the journalist interrupted, “that I shall be crushed by runaway horses?”

The physician smiled superiorly. “Just try to think back and see whether your presentiment has not its roots in the past!”

“Something now occurs to me,” exclaimed the mystic; “my mother used to prophesy that I would not die a natural death. I was a very wild youth, and managed to spend a lot of time with the horses in our stable. In great anger my dear little mother would then launch all sorts of gloomy predictions concerning my destiny.”

His mysterious look into the future was now explained. The doctor ventured to remark that this “case” also illustrated how intimately superstition and a consciousness of guilt are linked together. The imaginary glimpse into the future was in his friend’s case also only a glimmer out of the past. He referred to the remarkable fact that our earliest recollections represent a reflection of our future....

“There are facts”--he said slowly, hesitatingly, as if the words had to be forced out of his interior--“which one can hardly explain. I once loved a woman with such an intense love as I have not felt for any woman since. We spent a wonderful day together. Then we bade each other good-night. I remained standing, looking after her. She was walking through the high reeds in a meadow. Her graceful figure was getting smaller and smaller. With a slight turn in the road she disappeared from my view but soon reappeared. Then for a while I saw her shadowy outline until a clump of trees again hid her from my view. Then I saw her again, but very small. I saw something white--her handkerchief. At this moment a shiver went through me, and I thought: that’s how you will lose her; gradually you will cease to see her; twice she will re-appear, and then she will be gone for ever!--Nonsense, said I to myself, and spun bold plans for the future.... But the future proved that my presentiment had been true. Everything happened as I had felt it that evening. A glimpse into the future! And yet! Sometimes I think to myself that I had only realised the impossibility of a union between us. What I felt as a presentiment may have been only clearer inner comprehension.”

The waiter yawned loud. This time we took the hint and paid. We went home, and something oppressive, unspoken, weighed us all down. As if we were not quite satisfied with the solution of the mystery--as if the shuddering sweetness of a superstitious belief in supernatural powers, a belief in a something above and beyond us would be more to our liking. Silently we took our way through the quiet streets. We felt, for all the world, like children who had been told by their mother that the beautiful story was only a story--that the prince and the princess had never really lived.

We had been robbed of one of life’s fairy tales. Fie! Fie on this naked, sober, empty reality! How much nicer it would be if we could look into the future!

LOOKING BACKWARD