Part 3

Persons who suppress the inclination to laziness get sick. Their nerves fail soon and their capacity for work suffers serious diminution. And then we say that they had overworked. Not at all infrequently illness is only a refuge in idleness, a defence against a hypertrophied impulse to work. This is frequently observable in persons afflicted with nervousness. They are unfit for work, waste themselves away in endless gloomy broodings, in bitter self-reproaches, and in hypochondriacal fears. They do not tire of repeatedly protesting how happy they would be if they could get back to work again. But if their unconscious mental life is analyzed one discovers with astonishment that the greatest resistance to a cure is offered by their laziness, the fear of work. This is one of the greatest dangers for the nervous patient. If a neurotic has once tasted of the sweets of laziness it is a very difficult matter to get him to work again. All the varieties of fatigue “cramps” known to neurologists, _e.g._, writer’s cramp, pianist’s cramp, violinist’s cramp, typewriter’s cramp, etc., are rebellions on the part of the tendency to laziness. A return to work is possible only if, in the absence of an actual organic malady, the psychic element we have called “refuge in disease” (q.v.) is taken into consideration and given due weight.

This reluctance to work is most frequently noticeable in the puzzling “traumatic neuroses,” the so-called “accident or compulsion hysterias” in which the so-called “hunger for damages” plays the most important role. Since labourers have acquired the right to recover damages for accidental injuries, the number of traumatic neuroses has increased so tremendously that insurance companies can scarcely meet the claims. This is also true of the neuroses following railway and street car accidents. Only seldom can objective injuries be demonstrated in these cases. But notwithstanding this, the injured person becomes depressed, moody, sleepless, and utterly unfit for any work. Yet it would be very unjust to consider them simulators. They are really sick. Their psychic make-up has suffered a bad shaking-up. The pleasure in work has suffered a rude shock because of the unconscious prospect of pecuniary “damages,” _i.e._ of an opportunity for laziness. Repressed desires from childhood are re-animated. Why should you work, says the alluring voice of the unconscious, when you can lounge about and live on an income? Don’t be a fool! Get sick like the others who loll about idly and need not work! And consciousness, in its weakness, takes no note of the conflict in the unconscious, is frightened by the unknown restlessness and sleeplessness and gets sick.... It is an obstinate conflict between laziness and industry from which only too often the former emerges triumphant....

Finally, the need for laziness becomes overpowering in all of us from time to time. We long for a vacation. We want to recuperate from work. Well, there are a few sensible people. These go off into a corner somewhere and are as lazy as they can be. They lie in the grass and gaze at the heavens for hours; or they go fishing in some clear stream,--one of the best ways of wasting time; they sit in a rowboat, letting someone else do the rowing or just keeping the boat in motion with an occasional stroke. In this way day after day is spent in _dolce far niente_ until one wearies of laziness and an intense longing for work fills one’s whole being. Variety is the spice of life. Without idleness work loses its charm and value.

Others employ their vacation for new work. These are the eternally restless, industrious, indefatigable ones for whom idleness does not exist. The impulse to laziness which was once so strong, is suppressed and converted into its opposite. These are usually persons who had their fill of laziness in childhood and who thoroughly enjoyed their youth. (We may refer briefly to a few well-known instances of this: there was Charles Darwin who began to work only after he left college; Bismarck, whose student days were a period of riot and idleness; John Hunter was another striking example.)

These continue with their work even while they are on their vacation. They make work even of their visits to art galleries, museums, show-places, and of their breathless flying trips hither and thither. This is really not the kind of idleness that means a relaxation of tension. It’s only a variation in the kind of impressions. A sea-voyage would be a compromise between the two antagonistic tendencies. That is why Englishmen prefer a sea-voyage to other forms of rest. On board ship a person must be lazy. He sits on deck and stares at the waves. The vastness of the sea stands between him and his work. He must be idle. Impressions fly by him; he does not have to go in search of them.

The right to laziness is one of the rights that sensible humanity will learn to consider as something self-evident. For the time being we are still in conflict with ourselves. We shun the truth. We look upon laziness as something degrading. We still stand in too much awe of ourselves to be able to find the right measure. Our mothers’ voices still ring in our ears: “Have you done your lessons?”

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE

I am at the Circus with my children. They are laughing and clapping their hands in glee. They are delighted with the grotesque antics of the stupid clown. In vain I try to kindle my own enthusiasm at theirs as a means of banishing the unpleasant feeling of being bored. The peculiar odour of a menagerie pervades the great building and brings back to me, by way of the obscure paths that connect our thoughts, memories of days long since dead. I am myself a child again, my cheeks hot and flushed, sitting in the topmost gallery at the Circus, as excited as if I were beholding the greatest of all earthly wonders.

It is just when one of the star attractions is being given. A skilled athlete is vaulting over very great obstacles. He leaps over ten men in a row, five horses, a little garden. His faultless dress-suit shows scarcely a wrinkle after this feat. This too must be counted among the advances made by modern art. In my boyhood days athletes still wore a gay uniform and “worked” in costume. To-day every juggler and prestidigitator is a pattern of a drawing-room gentleman. Some may be making a virtue of necessity and gladly escape the exhibiting of their none too handsome bodies.

These reflections are suddenly interrupted by a blare of noisy music. Everybody is excited, for this seems to indicate that the athlete’s most wonderful trick is coming. True; something out of the ordinary is happening. Through a wide gate an old-fashioned comfortable, drawn by a weary nag, is brought into the arena and our valiant athlete leaps over horse and rider amidst the thunderous applause of the enthusiastic youngsters and of those of their elders who have remained children in spirit.

The easy-going driver turns his vehicle towards the exit. Again the portals open wide. Bands of bright daylight pour into the half-darkened amphitheatre. In the glare one catches sight, for a moment, of a little section of the life that swarms round about the fringe of the Circus. There is the soda-water vendor with his gay-coloured cart, a labourer, a few servant girls, and some twenty little children staring with big eyes eagerly into the darkness of the arena in the hope of catching a glimpse of all this magnificence.

I shall never forget the sight. Those children’s eyes, opened so tremendously wide, longing to catch a bit of happiness! How they envy the fortunate ones sitting in here and beholding real fairy-tale wonders!

I lapse into a day-dream again. I too am one of those little ones standing out there; I count the richly-caparisoned horses that are being led in; for the twentieth time I read the large placard announcing an “élite performance”; I am so happy as the beautiful equestrienne passes right by me; the muffled sounds of the music penetrate to my ears; I hear the animated applause and the bravos. One thought possesses me: I must get in! Cost what it may, I must go in!

Oh, I could have committed a theft to enable myself to get in there and share in the applause! And I thought to myself, if I am ever a rich man I shall go to the Circus every day. How excitedly I go home then, talking about all the wonderful things I have seen, and how in my dreams all my wishes are realized--all these things take on a tangible shape before my mind’s eye.

I note that it was the most beautiful period of my life, the time when I used to stand outside. In those days I still had a sense of the wonderful. There was a touch of secret magic about everything. Even dead things had a message for me. Before me was an endless wealth of possibilities; and there stretched before me kingdoms of the future over which my childish wishes flew like migratory birds.

Verily--happiness is only anticipating possibilities, denying impossibilities. Life is filled up with dreams of the future. What we know seems trivial when measured by the knowledge we would like to acquire. Possession kills desire; realization slays fantasy and transforms the wonderful into the commonplace.

All the beauty of this world lies only in the fantasies which reality can never approximate. The marvels of the present are seen only by those who stand outside.

Every time that one of the portals that had been locked from our youthful eyes opened, every time longing became fulfilment, we became one pleasure poorer and one disappointment richer. Only with the aid of the stilts supplied us by philosophy can we rise above the depressing disillusionment of experience. Or, in playing our part in the great drama of life, we cling to the one role we have studied and keep on repeating it to ourselves until we, too, almost believe it. Then we succeed again in seizing a fringe of the magnificent purple mantle with which we aspired to adorn our life.

Those outside see everything on a much larger scale, finer, and grander. That is why we envy others their possessions, their realities, their calling. Because we project the inevitable disappointments of life upon the thing that is readiest at hand--and that is unquestionably our vocation. Our wishes circle around others’ possibilities.

Involuntarily an experience from my youth occurs to me. I had for the first time in my life made the acquaintance of a poet. He was a well-known lyrist of that day and his delightful verses had charmed me for years. He did not in any way come up to the ideal that I had conceived of what a poet ought to be. The edges of his eyelids were red, his face was commonplace, and he had a large paunch. The manner in which he drank his coffee disgusted me. A little coffee dripped down on his dirty grey beard and with the movements of his big upper jaw some cake crumbs danced up and down on his moustache.

And that was the poet who wrote those passionate little lyrics! Overcoming my disappointment, I entered into conversation with him and let him perceive something of my admiration. He was to be envied for possessing the gift of transforming his moods and experiences into works of art!

To my astonishment the poet began to describe with palpable resentment the shortcomings of his calling. If he had only become an honest craftsman ere he had devoted himself to writing! He was sick of the hard struggle. To be ever at loggerheads with the public, the critics, the publishers, and editors--those were the compensations of his calling. He envied me for being a physician. That’s a great, a noble, an ideal calling. A physician can do something for humanity! If he were not too old he would at once take up the study of medicine. To mitigate the pains of an invalid is worth more than writing a hundred good lyrics!

In those days I was not a little proud of the profession I had chosen. The poet was only saying openly what I thought in secret. “The physician is mankind’s minister.” How often later on have I heard these and similar words which were calculated to add fuel to the flame of idealism.

Ye gods! In real life how sad is the physician’s lot! Those outside cannot conceive it. The first thing to realize is the rarity of the instances in which the physician really snatches the victim from the clutches of Death; how rarely he eliminates suffering; how frequently, discouraged and bewildered, he fails to halt the ravages of disease. How his idealism makes him suffer! He is painfully aware that the craftsman comes nearer to his ideals than the artist. He becomes familiar with man’s limitless ingratitude and realizes that unless he is to go into bankruptcy he must adopt the “practical” methods of the business man. He is the slave of his patients, has no holidays, not a free minute in which he is not reminded of his dependance. He sees former colleagues and friends who have accumulated fortunes in business or in the practice of the law, whereas he has to worry about his future and, with but few exceptions, live from hand to mouth. But he must continue to play the role of the “idealistic benefactor” unless he is to lose the esteem of those who--stand outside.

Not long ago I read a fascinating description of a “sanatorium.” How within its walls fear blanches the cheeks of the inmates, how Death lurks behind the doors, how even the physicians avoid speaking above a whisper and glide with solemn and noiseless steps through the house of pain! Very pretty and sentimental; but utterly false,--as false as the observations of a littérateur who stands outside can make it. From within the thing looks quite different! While the surgeon is scrubbing and sterilising his hands someone is telling the latest joke, the assistants converse lightly and merrily, not at all as if a matter of life and death were going to be decided in a few minutes. And it is well for the patient that it is so. The surgeon and the assistants need their poise; they must not be moved by timidity, fear, or sympathy--emotions which cloud the judgment. Where one needs all one’s senses, there the heart must be silent. The public feels this instinctively. I have found that those physicians who practised their profession in a plain matter of fact way, as a business, were the most popular and the busiest. And, on the other hand, I know learned physicians who are all soul, whom everybody praises, esteems, heeds, but whom no one calls. The more highly the physician values his services, from a material point of view, the more highly he is regarded as an idealist, and vice versa.

That is how the idealism of the medical profession looks in real life. For many physicians their ideals are superfluous ballast. It often takes years before they find the golden mean between theory and practice, between ethics and hard facts.

And how is it with other vocations? In every case in which it is possible to look behind the curtains it will appear that the envious natures of those who stand outside magnify the advantages and overlook the unpleasant aspects.

All life is a continual game between hope and fulfilment, between expectation and disappointment. And therein lies our good fortune--that we can still be deceived. Were we in possession of all truth and all knowledge, life would lose its value and its charm. Only because, in a certain sense, we all stand outside, because the fullness of life and “the thing itself” will continue to be a riddle, are we capable of continuing on our journey and approaching erectly the valley of death in which the shades dwell.

“Father, the show is over!” A child’s sweet voice wakes me from my revery. Outside I again look at the children still standing there and staring with large, hungry eyes into the Circus....

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO

Who can say when the first wish opens its pious eyes in the child’s soul? The child probably sleeps away the first few weeks of its existence without a single wish, all its behaviour being probably only manifestations of its inherited instincts. Suddenly the first wish awakens and the humanization of the little animal has begun. And with it begins the wild succession of desires, mounting ever higher and higher and finally aspiring even to the stars. How few of the things we have been dreaming of does life fulfil! Wish after wish, stripped of its purple mantle, sinks to the ground in a state of “looped and windowed raggedness,” till the last wish of all--the longing for peace, eternal peace--puts an end to the play.

Our childhood wishes determine our destiny. They die only with our bodies. They go whirling through our dreams, are the masters of our unconscious emotions, and determine the resonance of the most delicate oscillations of our souls. It certainly seems worth while taking a closer look at these wishes. Unfortunately we are deprived of the best source of such knowledge: the observation of ourselves. For we forget so easily, and our earliest desires lie far behind us, hidden in thick mist. Only the dream pierces the thick veil and brings us greetings from a long forgotten era.

From the study of our children we can learn of only one kind of desire. A desire that can be easily observed, that the child betrays most easily in the games it plays.

“And what are you going to be?” That is the question one most often puts to children and which they very seldom allow to go unanswered.

Right here we must draw a distinction between boys and girls. The girl’s first wish almost invariably betrays the influence of the sexual instinct. All little girls want to be “mothers”; some would be content with being “nurses.” The phylogenetic law of the biologist applies also to desires. The desires of individual human beings reproduce the evolution of mankind in this regard. Just as, according to recent researches (Ament), the first speech attempts of children depict the primitive speech of man, so the first wishes of human beings depict the primitive wishes of humanity. Children’s wishes may therefore be said to be the childhood wishes of humanity and to manifest unmistakeably the primitive instincts of the sexes.

The little girls want to become “mothers.” They play with dolls, rocking, fondling, and petting them as if they were children. In this way they betray their most elemental qualification. My little daughter once said: “Mother! I want to be a mother, too, some day and have babies.” “I would be so unhappy if I could not have any babies!” Being asked whether she would not like to be a doctor, she replied: “Yes! I would love to be a doctor[1]! But only like mamma.” That is, only the wife of a doctor.

[1] To understand what follows, the English reader should know that the German word for a female physician (“Doktorin”) is also the title whereby a physician’s wife is addressed.

In marked contrast with this is the fact that boys never wish to be fathers. That is: their fathers are often enough their ideals and they would like to be like them, to follow the same profession or vocation. But it’s only a matter of vocation, not of family. I have never yet heard a boy express a wish for children. There is no doubt however, that there are boys who like to play with dolls and whose whole being has something of the feminine about it. They have feminine instincts. They love to cook and prefer to play with little girls. In the same way one also encounters girls who are described as “tomboys.” These girls are wild, unruly, disobedient, boisterous, and like to play at soldiers and robbers. One cannot go wrong in concluding that a strong, perhaps even an excessive homosexual element enters into their psychic make-up. At any rate the biographies of homosexuals invariably make mention of these remarkable infantile traits. They are boys with female souls and girls with a masculine soul. Such boys may even manifest various disguised indications of the instinct for race preservation.

The first stage of girlish wishes does not last long. Usually the process of repression begins rather early. The little girls notice that their desires are a source of mirth to their elders, and that their remarks evoke a kind of amused though embarrassed smirking in the people about them. So they begin to conceal and to repress the nature of their desires and to disclose only what is perfectly innocent. And they tell us they want to become “maids of all work,” housewives. That does not sound as bad as wanting to be “mother.” One can be a housewife without having children. As such they go marketing, manage the home, cook, order the servants about, etc. Then they are attracted by the splendours of being a cook. A cook is the goddess of sweets and delicacies and can cook anything she likes. On the same egoistic principle they then want to be store-keepers, proprietresses of candy stores, pastry shops, and ice cream parlours. As such they would have at their sole disposal all the sweets and delicious things a child’s palate craves for. To possess a store in which one can sell these wonderful delicatessens and weigh them out to customers is one of the most ardent wishes of little girls.

Of course as soon as they go to school a new ideal begins to take possession of the childish soul. Up there in her tribunal sits the teacher, omniscient and omnipotent, invested with such authority that the parental authority pales into insignificance in comparison with it. Parental authority extends only to their children. But the teacher’s! She has command over so many children! With sovereign munificence she distributes her gracious favours. She designates one child to act as “monitor” (oh, what exalted pre-eminence!); another may carry her books home; the third is permitted to restore the stuffed owl into the teacher’s cabinet, or to clean the blackboard; the fourth has the rare privilege of being sent out to purchase the teacher’s ham sandwich! And then there are the various punishments the teacher can inflict upon the children entrusted to her. Oh, it’s just grand to be a teacher!

But, above all, the desire is to rule over many. Have I omitted to mention the “princess”? Incredible! Only few children are so naive as to betray this wish. But all would love to become “queens,”--ay, with all their hearts. The fairy tales are full of them. How the proud prince came and helped the poor girl mount his steed, saying: “Now you’ll sit by me and be my Queen!” Innumerable Cinderellas in the north and in the south, in the east and in the west, sit at their compulsory tasks and dream of the prince who is to free them.

All have one secret dread: To be lost in the vast multitude. They want to accomplish something, want to stand out over the others. Vanity causes more suffering than ambition. Soon, too soon, they learn that, these sober days princes do not go roaming about promiscuously as in the golden days of fairydom. But hope finds a way and soars on the wings of fantasy into the realm of the possible and yet wonderful. Are there not queens in the world of arts? Do they not rule like real queens their willingly humble subjects? Haven’t they everything that a queen has: Gold, fame, honour, recognition, admiration, envy? Almost every girl goes through this stage. She wants to become a great artist. A prima donna such as the world has never yet known; a danseuse, who shall have the tumultuous applause of houses filled to the last seat; a celebrated actress whose finger-tips princes shall be permitted to kiss; a violinist whose bow shall sway the hearts of men more than the golden sceptre of a queen ever could.