Part 2

But one who has not for ever renounced the fulfillment of his inmost longings will rarely be capable of gratitude. His ego resents being indebted to anyone but himself. But this ego will never permit itself to face the naked brutal fact of its ingratitude. It seeks for causes and motives, for justification. In this case the proverb again proves true: “seek and you shall find,” the kindness is scrutinised from every side till a little point is found which reveals a bit of calculating egoism from which the kindness takes on a business aspect. And what human action does not permit of many interpretations? Our self-preservation impulse then chooses the interpretation that suits us best, the interpretation that relieves us of the oppressive feeling of gratitude. Such is the first step in the transformation of gratitude into ingratitude. Rarely does the matter rest there. Usually it requires also a transformation of the emotion into its opposite ere the galling feeling of gratitude can be eradicated. What execrable wretches would we not appear even to ourselves if we could not work out reasons for the changes in our feelings? And so we convert the good deed into a bad one; if possible, we discover stains and blots in our benefactor’s present life or pursuits that can blacken the spotlessness of his past. Not until we have done this are we free from the oppressive feeling of gratitude. Thus, with no further reason for being grateful left, our personal pride survives unshaken, the bowed ego again stands proudly erect.

This explanation of the psychology of ingratitude draws the veil from a series of remarkable phenomena which we pass by in our daily life without regard or understanding. We shall cite only a few instances from the many at our disposal: the ingratitude of servants and all subordinates,--a species of ingratitude that is so obvious that if an exception occurs the whole world proclaims it as an exception; the ingratitude of pupils to the teacher to whom they owe all (this explains the common phenomenon that pupils belittle the scientific attainments of the teacher,--a phenomenon that may almost be designated “the pupil’s neurosis”); the deep hatred with which artists regard those of their predecessors to whom they are most indebted; the tragedy of the distinguished sons whose fathers paved the way for them; the great injustice of invalids towards the physicians to whom they owe their lives; the historic ingratitude of nations to their great leaders and benefactors; the stubborn ignoring of the living great ones and the measureless overvaluation of the dead; the perpetual opposition to whatever administration may be in power, whence is derived a fragment of the psychology of discontent; the quite frequent transformation of a friendship into its opposite.

Verily, one who counts upon gratitude is singularly deficient in knowledge both of human nature and of his own nature. In this connection, we must consider also the fact that owing to an excessive overvaluation of the performance of our most obvious duties, we demand gratitude even when there is no reason for expecting it. I refer to only one example: Is there not an obvious obligation on parents to provide to the best of their ability for the child that they have brought into the world? Notwithstanding this we daily preach to our children: “You must be grateful to us for all that we do for you, for your food, your clothes, your education.” And is it not a fact that this insistence upon the duty of children to be grateful begets the opposite: ingratitude? Should we not rather strive to hold our children with only one bond, _love_?

Let us be just and also admit that really grateful human beings are to be found; persons whom life has not wearied and who lose none of their dignity though they are grateful. These are the spiritually pre-eminent individuals who have forced themselves to the recognition of the fact that no one is an independent unit, that our valuation of ourselves is false, individuals who have succeeded, by the aid of psychoanalytic self-knowledge, to reduce the normal person’s delusional greatness to the moderation warranted by reality.

Such persons are grateful because their valuation of themselves is fed by other springs. The knowledge of the frailties of humanity in general compensates them for the failing of the human in the individual. The greatest number of grateful persons will be found in the ranks of the geniuses, whereas talented persons are generally addicted to ingratitude. Genius can easily be grateful inasmuch as the frank recognition of one’s weaknesses and the secret knowledge of one’s achievements do not permit the suppression of the greatness of others. One who has so much to give need not be ashamed to have accepted something. And more especially as he knows with certainty that in life everyone must accept....

Truly great men are notably modest. Modesty is the knowledge of one’s own shortcomings. Vanity, the overvaluation of one’s endowments. Gratitude is the modesty of the great; ingratitude the vanity of the small. Only those are grateful who really have no occasion for being so. A genuine benefactor finds his thanks in good works. In dealing with this theme one must think of Vischer’s verses:--

“If poison and gall make the world bitter, And your heart you would preserve; Do deeds of kindness! and you will learn That doing good rejoices.”

UNPACKING ONE’S HEART

The average human being finds it helpful to free himself from his impressions by “pouring out his heart” to someone. Like a sponge, the soul saturates itself; like a sponge, it must be squeezed dry before it can fill itself up again. But now and then it happens that the soul cannot rid itself of its impressions. Such persons, we say, are soul-sick and we recognise those who suffer from soul-sickness by the fact that they sedulously shun new impressions. Every disease of the soul rests ultimately upon a secret.

Children exhibit in clear and unmistakable ways the reactions of their elders. In the presence of a secret they behave exactly as the normal person ought to behave. They cannot keep it to themselves. I recall very distinctly that as a child I was unable to sit a quarter of an hour without speaking. Repeatedly my parents promised me large rewards if I would sit a quarter of an hour without asking them a question or making some remark. The promised reward was increased from day to day because I never was quiet for more than half of the allotted period. But the obligation to keep a “secret” was even more discomforting to me. On one occasion my brother was to be given a silver watch for his birthday. For three days I went about oppressed and restive as if something was seriously amiss. I prowled around him, watching him intently with suppressed excitement, so that he finally noticed my strange behaviour and demanded to know what I wanted. On the day before his birthday I could contain myself no longer and while we were at dinner I burst out with, “Oh, you don’t know that you are going to get a silver watch to-morrow!”

All children are, doubtless, like that. A secret is to them an unbearable burden. When the time comes that they must keep some matters secret from their parents because an inexplicable shyness makes them ashamed to talk everything over with them freely, they change their attitude towards their parents and seek out a companion of their own age, some friend with whom they can discuss their secret.

Adults are really as little capable of going about with a secret as children are. It tortures and oppresses them like a heavy burden; and they are happy to rid themselves of it one way or another. If they cannot speak of it openly and frankly then they do so in some hidden, secret, or symbolic way. I could cite numerous illustrations of this but shall content myself with only one. A woman who had committed the unpardonable sin became troubled with a remarkable compulsive action. She was continually washing her hands. Why? Because she was dominated by the feeling that she was dirty, that she had become unclean. She could not tell any one in the world what she had done; she would have loved to say to her husband and to the whole household: “Do not touch me! I am impure, unclean, an outcast!” She had found a means of making this confession, but she did so in a form which only the expert can understand. At every appropriate and inappropriate occasion she washed her hands. If she was asked why she washed her hands she answered, “Because they are not clean.” Such symbolic actions are extremely common and constitute a kind of “speech without words” (to use Kleinpaul’s apt words). But a symbolic action is nothing but a substitution, a compromise between antagonistic psychic currents. It bears, however, no comparison with the freeing effect of pouring one’s heart out in words to a person, a confidant one can trust.

We know from the statements of convicts that nothing is so hard to bear in prison as the impossibility of “getting things off their chest.” And why is it that when touring foreign countries we so readily make friends with our townspeople whom we happen to meet, though at home we are quite indifferent to them? Because they furnish the opportunity for a good talk, because to a certain extent they become receptacles into which we may empty our soul’s accumulations. The profound yearning that we all harbour for friendship, for a sympathetic soul, emanates from the imperative need for pouring our hearts out. By means of a good talk of this sort, we “abreact,” or throw off a part of our pent-up excitement. Children are much more fortunate than we in this regard. How easily they find a friend! The first-best playfellow becomes a friend and confidant within half an hour. But for us grown-ups the matter is much more difficult. Before we can take any one into our confidence, take him to our bosom, he must satisfy certain social and ethical requirements. But in reality we disclose only the surface and retain our most oppressive secrets deep down at the bottom of the soul unless a sudden storm of passion overcomes us; then the sluice-gates burst open and the dammed up waters pour out in turgid torrents, carrying everything before them.

The tremendous power of the Roman Catholic Church is even to-day due to the fact that it enables its members to confess their most secret sufferings from time to time and to be absolved. Dr. Muthmann calls attention to the fact that suicides are most frequent in Protestant countries, and least frequent among Roman-Catholic peoples, and he thinks that this is to be attributed to the influence of the confessional, one of the greatest blessings for numberless people.

The psycho-analytic method of treating nervous diseases has not only made the incalculable benefit of confession its own but has united with it the individual’s spiritual education inasmuch as it teaches him how to know himself and to turn his eyes into the darkest depths of his soul. But there is also a kind of speaking out that is almost equivalent to confession--self-communion. That is, one’s communings with oneself. For, as Grillparzer says, every heart has its secrets that it anxiously hides even from itself. Not all of us know how to detect such secrets. The poet has this gift. As Ibsen beautifully says: “To live is to master the dark forces within us; to write is to sit in judgment on ourselves.” But only a poet is able to sit in judgment on his own soul. Not every person has the capacity for self-communion. Most of the diseases of the soul depend upon the peculiar mechanism that Freud has called “repression.” This “repression” is a semi-forgetting of displeasing impressions and ideas. But only a half-forgetting. For a part of the repressed idea establishes itself in some disguised form as a symptom or as some form of nervous disease. In these cases the psychotherapeutist must apply his art and teach the invalid to know himself.

Goethe knew the value of confession. He reports that he once cured a Lady Herder by confession. On September 25th, 1811, he wrote to Mrs. Stein: “Last night I wrought a truly remarkable miracle. Lady Herder was still in a hypochondriacal mood in consequence of the unpleasantnesses she had experienced in Carlsbad, especially at the hands of her family. I had her confess and tell me everything, her own shortcomings as well as that of the others, in all their minutest details and consequences, and at last I absolved her and jestingly made her understand that by this ritual these things had now been disposed of and cast into the deeps of the sea. Thereupon she became merry and is really cured.” Here we have the basic principles of modern psychotherapy. Unconsciously, by virtue of the hidden power of his genius, the poet accomplished what modern therapeutists also attempt.

Nietzsche, too, fully understood the value of confession. We are accustomed at once to associate with Nietzsche the concept of the Antichrist. That he has accurately conceived the essence of the true priest he shows in his description of the priestly temper in his book, “The Joyful Wisdom.” He says, “the people honour a wholly different kind of man, ... They are the mild, earnest, simple, and modest priestly natures ... before whom one may pour out one’s heart with impunity, upon whom one may unload one’s secrets, one’s worries, and what’s even worse.” (The man who shares himself with another frees himself from himself; and one who has acknowledged, forgets.)

It would be impossible to state the value of confession more beautifully and more clearly. It will not be long ere this view which knocks commandingly at the door of science and which has already been productive of good will be generally accepted. It will not be long ere it will furnish us a deep insight into the genesis of the “endogenetic mental diseases,” excepting, of course, those “exogenetic” maladies that follow some of the infectious diseases. We shall look upon the “endogenetic” diseases, even delusions, as a disturbance of the psychic circulation, and it will be our task to ascertain the causes that bring these maladies about.

There are numbers of substitutes which are equivalent to a kind of confessing to oneself. These are art, reading of newspapers, music, literature, and, least but not last, the theatre. The ultimate effect of a dramatic presentation depends, in reality, upon the liberation in us of affects that have been a long time pent up within us. It is not without good reason that humanity throngs to witness tragic plays during the performance of which it can cry to its heart’s content. When the spectators are apparently shedding tears over the unhappy fate of a character on the stage they are really crying over their own pain. And the woman who laughs so heartily at the awkward clumsiness of a clown, that the tears run down her cheeks, is perhaps laughing at her husband, who, though she will not acknowledge it, appears to her just as stupid and clumsy; she is thereby excusing to herself her own sins which she has possibly committed only in fantasy. The theatre serves as a kind of confessional; it liberates inhibitions; awakens many memories, consoles, and perhaps renews in us hopes of secret possibilities as to whose fulfillment we have long since despaired.

We have become accustomed of late to suspect sex-motives behind friendship. Even if we accept the theory that these motives are present, but hidden in the unconscious, it is a far from adequate explanation for the longing for friendship. The unconscious sex-motive unquestionably co-operates in a significant measure in the choice of a friend. It may be the determining factor in what we call sympathy and antipathy, although it would have to be proved with regard to the latter, and the theme is deserving of separate consideration, for it is quite possible that our antipathies are only reactions to an excessive attraction and therefore are evidence of repression. Looked at from this point of view, sympathy and antipathy are one feeling, one affect, having in the former case a positive sign and in the latter a negative sign. This secret tendency may be the deciding factor in the choice of a friend. But the need for a friend surely is in direct relation to the need for confession.

It is customary to ridicule the Germans’ passion for forming clubs, and societies of all kinds. But do these founders of fraternal associations seek for anything but an opportunity to fraternise, to have a good talk, something from which they are barred at home? The innumerable speeches that are delivered during the course of a year, and which are being poured out every second in an endless stream in some house at some meeting are apparently being spoken only for the benefit of the auditors. But every speech is a kind of relief to the speaker’s “I,” and people who have the craving to speak before the whole world are very often the keepers of a great secret which they must conceal from the world and which they are imparting in this indirect way in homœopathic doses. Just as a dye that is dissolved in a large quantity of fluid is so completely lost that the naked eye can detect no trace of it, so do occasional particles of the great secret which must forever remain hidden find their way into the elocutionary torrent.

LAZINESS

There are commonplace maxims which people go on repeating thoughtlessly, and in the light of which they determine their conduct without once stopping to consider whether the assumed truth, looked at in the light of reason, may not turn out to be a lie. We know, of course, that there are many “truths” which may under certain circumstances prove to be falsehoods. Everything is in a state of flux! Truth and falsehood are wave crests and wave troughs, an endless stream driving the mills of humanity.

Such notorious maxims as the following are trumpeted into our ears from the days of our youth: “Work makes life sweet”; “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do”; “the life of man is three-score-and-ten, and if it has been a happy one it is due to work and striving.” These truisms are beaten into us, drummed into us, and hammered into us from all sides; we hear them wherever we go, till finally we accept them, completely convinced.

And it is well that it is so. What would the world look like if everybody pressed his claim to laziness? Think of the hideous chaos that would ensue if the wheels of industry came to a stop!

The admonition to work has its origin in humanity’s instinct of self-preservation. It does not spring from one’s own needs but only from the needs of others. Apparently we all work for ourselves, but in reality we are always working for others. How very small is the number of those who do their work gladly and cheerfully! How very many give vent to their aversion to work by means of apparent dissatisfaction with their calling! And where can we find a man nowadays who is contented with his calling?

Let us begin our study of man with that period of his life in which he was not ashamed to show his impulses to the light of day, in which repression and education had not yet exerted their restraining influences,--in other words, let us begin with the observation of childhood. With astonishment we note, first, that the child’s impulse to idleness is stronger than the impulse to work. Play is for a long time the child’s idleness as well as its work. A gymnast who proudly swings the heaviest dumb-bells before his colleagues would vent himself in curses, deep if not loud, if he had to do this as work; the heavy-laden tourist who pants his way up steep mountain paths would curse his very existence if he had to travel these difficult trails in the service of mankind in the capacity of--let us say--letter-carrier; the card player who works in the sweat of his brow for hours in the stuffy café to make his thousand or ten thousand points would complain bitterly at his hard lot and at the cruelty of his employers if he had to do an equivalent amount of work in the office. Anything that does not bear the stamp of work becomes in the play-form recreation and a release from almost unbearable tyranny.

The child’s world is play. Unwillingly and only on compulsion does it perform imposed tasks. (It would have even its education made a kind of play.) Many parents worry about this and complain that their children take no pleasure in work, seem to have no sense of duty, forget to do their school work, and have to be forced to do their exercises. Stupid parents! If they only stopped to think they would realise that this frank display of an impulse to laziness is a sign of their children’s sanity. For we often enough observe the opposite phenomenon. Children who take their duties too seriously, who wake too early in the morning lest they should be late for school, who are always poring over their books, scorning every opportunity to play, are usually “nervous” children. Exaggerated diligence is one of the first symptoms of neurosis.

One who can look back upon his own childhood must admit that the impulse to indolence is stronger than any other childhood impulse. I recall how unwillingly I went to high-school. Once I read in a newspaper that a high-school had burned to the ground and that the pupils would not be able to go to school for several weeks. For days I and my friends were disappointed as we looked at our own grey school building that stood there safe and sound. Had it not burned down yet?! Were we not to have any luck at all?!

Who is not acquainted with the little sadistic traits that almost all children openly manifest? Such a sadistic motive was our secret hope that this or that teacher would get sick and we would be excused from attendance at school. What a joy once possessed the whole class when we discovered that the Latin teacher was sick just on the day when we should have had to recite in his subject! That was a grand prize!

And how the child detests always being driven to work! Always the same disagreeable questions: “Have you no lessons to do to-day?” “Have you done all your lessons?” The profoundest wish of all who do not yet have to provide for themselves is once to get a chance to be as lazy as their hearts might desire.

But we adults, too, who know the pleasure of work and of fulfilled obligations, long for idleness. For us, too, the vice of laziness is an exquisite pleasure. We find it necessary continually to overcome the tendency to laziness by new little resolutions. In the morning laziness whispers; stay a little longer in your warm bed; it’s so comfortable. Another few seconds and the sense of duty prevails over the desire for idleness. In the afternoon we would love to spend an hour in pleasant day-dreams. Work conquers this wish too. And with what difficulty we get out of the performance of some task in the evening! It is an everlasting conflict even though it is in most cases a subconscious conflict with the sweet seducer of mankind: laziness.

That is why the lawgivers have ordained days on which the urge for laziness may be gratified. These are called holidays. Religion has made of this right to laziness a duty to God. The more holidays a religion has, the more welcome must it appear to labouring humanity. That is why the various religious systems so readily take over one another’s holidays. The Catholic Church appropriated ancient heathenish feasts, and Jews bow to the Sunday’s authority just as the Christian does.