Part 9

There are so many things that we seek all our life and that, alas! we can never find. One is on the hunt for a friend who will “understand” him; another for a beloved whom he can comprehend; the third for a place where he may find the people he has dreamed of. Which of us has not his secret, dark desires and longings which really belong to “the other one” within us and not to the outer personage on whom the sun shines? What is denied us by the environment may possibly be found somewhere beyond. What withers here may bear luxuriant blossoms somewhere beyond....

The deepest-lying, repressed desires are the driving power in the fever for travelling. We are infected--infected by the seeds that have been slumbering within us for years and which have now with mysterious power engendered the ardour that drives us on to travel. Behind every journey there lies a hidden motive. It will, of course, be a difficult matter to discover in every case this deeply hidden motive, this innermost spring of action. In some cases one succeeds, however, and lights upon most remarkable things. One may hit upon some exciting touring experience of earlier days, upon a strange fantasy, upon some sweet wish that seems to be too grotesque to be spoken of openly. No one has yet fathomed just what constitutes happiness. It is never the present, always the future. A trip is a journey into the future, a hunting after happiness.

The best light on the psychology of the “touring neurosis” is thrown by a consideration of the opposite phenomenon--the “fear of travelling.” There are many persons who are afraid of every journey, for whom a railroad trip is a torture, for whom going away from home is a punishment. There are persons who have compromised with the present and have given up all hope of a future; who have no happiness to lose and therefore have no wish to achieve any; who fear any great change and who have become wrapped up in themselves. They are the great panegyrists of home, the enthusiastic patriots, the contemners of everything foreign. They behave exactly like the fox for whom the grapes were too sour. Because their fears won’t let them travel they prove to themselves and to the world at large that travelling is nonsensical, that the city they live in is the best of all places to live in. The fear of travelling also has a hidden motive which not rarely is fortified by justifiable and unjustifiable consciousness of guilt. Why we do not travel is often a much more interesting problem than why we do travel.

Fear and desire are brother and sister and emanate from the same primal depths. The wish often converts to fear and fear to wish. One who is incapable in his heart to fly from himself and his environment bears a heavy and unbreakable chain within his soul. So do we all. But we break it now and then. The future may perhaps create free human beings. Then there may perhaps be no abysms of the soul. Just at present darkness surrounds us. The mysteries of the soul are barred to us. Its depths are unfathomable. Even if we have illumined some hidden corner and brought something that was long concealed to the light of consciousness, it is only like a drop snatched from the infinity of the ocean. The real reason why we travel can be told us only by our “other self,” that “other one” whom we buried in our remote youth. Whither we travel is quite clear. Large and small, young and old, fools and wise men--all journey to the realm of youth. Life takes us into the kingdom of dreams, and the dream takes us back again into life, into that life to which we have been assigned and to which our deepmost desires belong. What desires? Those are the secrets we anxiously conceal from ourselves.

MOODY PERSONS

A beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly, rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over mounds after a gilded butterfly....

Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?

How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butterfly with his green net. Why did this scene excite me so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.

Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”

It really was an “unconscious” thought, then, that transformed my mood from _dur_ into _moll_. And the truth dawns on me that all our “incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things are not in order. Their consciousness is split up into numerous emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask, but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and “sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe; commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon “nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their employment, and what not.

In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!” But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of our excited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into grey shadows and disappears for ever.

Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it. Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface, so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in motion.

But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life. A woman is suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance. Now she lives in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest affection--in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does love her husband, she is as happy with her finery and wealth as a child with a toy; she can assign no cause for her melancholy.

Notwithstanding this, her depression was of psychic origin. When we investigated carefully the experiences and excitements that ushered in one of these attacks it became clear that subterranean bridges led to secret (suppressed) desires. Quite often the immediate occasion was of a trifling nature. She had seen a poor woman pass her in the street. Alone? No--with a young man, very happy, care-free, their arms affectionately intertwined. On another occasion she had been reading of a pair of lovers who had drowned themselves. Suicide was a subject, beyond all others, which she could not bear to hear. At the theatre she once sat in a box on the third tier. Suddenly she looked down into the orchestra and was seized with horror. That was a yawning abyss! What if her opera glass fell down there! Or if she lost her balance and toppled over! A shudder passed through her. She put the opera glass aside and became greatly depressed.

The mystery surrounding her melancholy was soon solved. Her husband, fifteen years her senior, is not adapted to her temperamentally. In secret she longs for a life rich in emotions, full of sin and perhaps also of vice. Nature probably intended her for a fast woman, not for an eminently respectable lady. Alluring melodies beckon her to the metropolis. She would rather lose her breath in an endless dance in the tight embrace of a pair of coarse arms than ride sedately down the main avenue. She loves her husband, but sometimes she hates him. He’s the obstacle. She knows how terribly jealous he is. He was very sick once; just then the wicked thought entered her mind: “If he died now I’d be rich and free!” The reaction was not long in coming. She saw herself as a dreadful sinner. Life had no more interest for her. Since then she has been suffering from periodical attacks of depression.

What happened in this case in the wake of powerful repressions happens a little in all moody persons. An unconscious motive for the depression can always be demonstrated. In most instances it is secret reproaches that provoke the change in mood. In young people they are the sequel of exaggerated warnings about not injuring their health. Sins against religion and morality. Reproaches for too readily yielding to one’s impulses. But also the opposite! Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.

A girl suffers from violent (psychically), apparently wholly unmotived crying spells. The last one lasted half a day. I inquired whether she had excited herself in some way. Had she any reason for being depressed? No! Was she sure? A trifling matter--“of no particular significance”--occurs to her. On one of the city bridges a very elegant, young gentleman had addressed her. Would she permit him to accompany her? Indignantly she repelled him. What did he think she was! But he persisted in his role; he painted in glowing colours the delights of a rendezvous, till finally she found the courage to exclaim: “If you do not leave me at once, I shall call a policeman!” Then, flushed, bathed in perspiration, she rushed home, ate her meal in silence and soon thereafter gave vent to an almost unending crying spell.

And now I discover that her first attack of crying followed a similar occurrence. She was coming home from the country and had to travel at night. She asked the conductor to point out the ladies’ coupé. To her horror a tall, blonde lieutenant entered her coupé at the next station. She at once protested vigorously at the intrusion. The officer very politely offered his apologies, explaining that the train was full and that he would be quite satisfied with a modest corner. He would be greatly obliged to her for her kindness. But so anxious was she about her virtue that she was proof against his entreaties. She appealed to the conductor and insisted on her rights. The spruce officer had to leave the coupé and for the rest of the night she was not molested. But the occurrence had so excited her that she could not fall asleep and she lay awake till dawn. The following day she had the first attack of depression and crying. She bewailed her cruel fate that compelled her to be virtuous while all the hidden voices within clamoured for a gay life. She did not find herself strong enough to conquer her ethical inhibitions. She was too weak to sin and not strong enough to be really virtuous.

I could cite many such examples. They all show convincingly that there are no “inexplicable” psychic depressions, that consciousness does not embrace all the psychic forces that govern and direct us.

The classification of human beings into those that are free and those that are not was determined by a social or ethical canon. But in reality most human beings are the slaves of their unconscious complexes. Only he can be free who knows himself thoroughly, who has dared to look unafraid into the frightful depths of the unconscious. Most persons are under the yoke of their “other self” who, with his biting whip, drives them to pains and to pleasures, compels them to leave the table of life and goads them into the arms of crime.

The greatest happiness in life is to have achieved one’s inner freedom. This thought is still expressed in an old aphorism. “Everyone may have his moods; but his moods must not have him.”

Moody persons are the slaves of their past, masters of renunciation and assuredly bunglers in the art of life. Their only salvation is in learning the truth or in the art of transforming their depression into works of art. Most of the time they glide through life’s turbulence like dreamers. Their ears are turned inward and thus it comes about that life’s call is perceived but faintly by them. They are chasing butterflies in cemeteries....

OVERVALUED IDEAS

Ideas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin. One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently worthless piece of paper....

There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto neglected or even unknown idea and cause it to be generally accepted or to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation to topple from their thrones?

Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the “overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no emphasis. Coloured ideas are richly endowed with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.

As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above, and between them--owing to stimuli from within and without--the sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom. This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of modern psychotherapeutists.

This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.

A very old example--if one may so call it--of physiological insanity is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.” But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled precisely to define the conception of an overvalued idea. Like an example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.

But as regards being in love it is quite a different matter. As to this the environment does not accept the exaggerated valuation of the emotions. Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing with one who is in love about common sense, religion, education, station, or politics will not affect him in the least. He is dominated solely by the love-complex. This alone determines the resonance of his thoughts and feelings. The attraction to the chosen object has attracted all the other affects to it, has placed all the impulses at the service of one overvalued idea. He loves life but only if he be together with his beloved; he is jealous, but only with reference to the love-object; he is interested only in such matters as are in some way related to that object. The fool who is being dominated by an overvalued idea acts exactly in the same way. The lunatic who imagines himself the king of the world, and in whom a childhood wish had overpoweringly established itself as a fact in his consciousness, has interest only for such things as find access to this wish; the victim of ideas of persecution discovers in the news items of the daily papers the important communication that his enemies are laying traps for him; the unfortunate love-sick youth who imagines that Princess X wants to give him her hand in marriage sees in all sorts of advertisements of love-hungry ladies secret communications from his princess.

These poor fools bring everything they see and everything they feel into relationship with the overvalued idea which, projected outward in the shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears like a spiritual echo and blinds their eyes like a vision.

A lover acts essentially like this. That is why the world says of a person in love that he makes himself ridiculous. A handkerchief or a glove, or anything belonging to the beloved, becomes a fetich which can evoke the most ecstatic emotions. Anything that can be associated with love is overvalued.

Another question involuntarily presents itself. Is love, in the form known as “being in love,” the only overvalued idea with which a normal person may be afflicted? Are there any other forms of “physiological insanity”--if we may use the term coined by Lower and subsequently imitated by Moebius?

The answer to these questions is not difficult. A backward look teaches us what unspeakable evils overvalued ideas have wrought in man’s history. For overvalued ideas are sources of great danger. They are richly endowed with emotions and consequently lend themselves to suggestion more readily than almost any other idea. Bleuler has proved that suggestion is nothing but the transference of an emotion. And such overvalued ideas can be hurled with great suggestive force among the multitude and change the individual--and even whole communities--into a fool. That is how the psychoses of whole nations have arisen. The tremendous power of overvalued ideas can be understood if one thinks of the crusades, the witchcraft persecutions, hysterical epidemics, the Dreyfus affair, anarchism, etc.

It is a sad fact that none of us can be free from overvalued ideas. In this sense there is really no difference between fools and healthy persons. Everyone of us bears within himself a hidden quantity of neurosis and psychosis. What saves us from the insane asylum is perhaps only the circumstance that we hide our overvalued ideas or that so many persons share our folly and that the multitude accepts it as wisdom.