Unconscious Freud Quotes

The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind

When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

I never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member

The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.

And it is only after seeing man as his unconscious, revealed by his dreams, presents him to us that we shall understand him fully. For as Freud said to Putnam: "We are what we are because we have been what we have been.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.

The true hypocrite knows what he is doing, and does it to his own advantage. The unconscious hypocrite is simply man in civilization.

(James Joyce, in conversation with Carl Jung:)"Literary artists know more about the human mind than you fellers have a hope in hell of knowing. Ha. My craft is ebbing. I am yung and easily freudened. One of these days I'll show the lot of you what the unconscious mind is really like. I don't need any of you. In a sense I am Freud." Jung looked gloomily guilty at the name. "Yes?" "What's Freud in English?" "Joy." "Joy and Joyce. There's little enough difference. Except that I add C and E for Creative Endeavour. I spit in all your eyes.

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.

Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. The pain and suffering of shame generate automatic and unconscious defenses. Freud called these defenses by various names: denial, idealization of parents, repression of emotions and dissociation from emotions. What is important to note is that we can’t know what we don’t know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.

there is no such thing as an unconscious no.

The agony of this chronic stage of being cannot be endured for long. At the deepest level, toxic shame triggers our basic automatic defensive cover-ups. Freud called these automatic cover-ups our primary ego defenses. Once these defenses are in place they function automatically and unconsciously, sending our true and authentic selves into hiding. We develop a false identity out of this basic core. We become master impersonators. We avoid our core agony and pain and over a period of years, we avoid our avoidance.

Unconscious motivating forces play a central role in shaping our behavior, but they are also the primary cause of mental illness.

In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner "censor.

Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.

Modern neuroscience solidly supports Freud’s notion that many of our conscious thoughts are complex rationalizations for the flood of instincts, reflexes, motives, and deep-seated memories that emanate from the unconscious.

The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe

Our unconscious therefore does not believe in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.

Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.

Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.

Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness—that is, of the unconscious.

Human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.

The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish, which then allowed it, though already properly prepared, to "originate" for consciousness.

What indeed is madness but the orgasm between consciousness and unconsciousness; yet today psychology has passed this chaotic union between mind and soul: it is taking form, and one day it will be brought to the bed of a new priesthood. Already have the heralds of the last illusion blazoned forth the coming of the magicians. Freud and Jung and a host of followers have invented psycho-analysis, which today is still pure black magic, the anatomization of the mind by thought potientized by theories in place of panticles, mantras and spells.

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.

Women have been so thoroughly oppressed that they have accepted unconsciously the role that the ruling sex, man, gave to them. They have even believed in male propaganda, which is very much the same as the propaganda in other wars, wars against colonial people, etc. Women have been considered to be naive: Freud said that they were narcissistic, unrealistic, cowardly, inferior to man anatomically, intellectually, morally. The fact is that women are less narcissistic than men, for the simple reason that there is almost nothing that man does which has not some purpose of making an impression. Women do many, many things without this motive and in fact what you might call women's vanity is only the necessity to please the victors. As far as the lack of realism in women is concerned, what should we say about male realism in an epoch in which all western governments, consisting of men, are spending their money building atomic bombs, instead of taking care of threatening famine, instead of avoiding the catastrophes which threaten the whole world...

In this scheme, the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘preconscious’ are agencies or authorities (Instanzen) which the wish has to satisfy; the unconscious is more tolerant, and helps the wish to smuggle itself past the censorship of the preconscious. As a result, psychical energy is discharged without disturbing sleep.

Before the beginning of this century, Freud and Josef Breuer had recognized that neurotic symptoms—hysteria, certain types of pain, and abnormal behavior—are in fact symbolically meaningful. They are one way in which the unconscious mind expresses itself, just as it may in dreams; and they are equally symbolic.

Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one-tenth, of the human mental and emotional organization is conscious. Our main response to this discovery has been to reject the nine-tenths unconscious more completely and more systematically than ever before. The ghost story makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.

A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not bring forward openly or consciously.

often has no suspicion of the causal connection between the precipitating event and the pathological phenomenon.

Freud had also ended up discovering this when he wrote: “Whatever is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once it is freed, it too falls to ruin.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

There is no doubt that it is comic if someone can ‘waggle his ears’, and it would certainly be still more comic if he could move his nose up and down.

The ego is always alert to the dangers that the unconscious may over-throw it. It may try to intellectualize away unconscious urges, inhibit them, project them onto others, or deny them. Freud

The normal sequence is that energy is prompted at the perceptual system, passes into consciousness, and thence to the motor system, where it is discharged by action. (I feel an unpleasant sensation, realize that I have been bitten by a mosquito, raise my hand, and swat the insect.) But in dreaming energy flows the other way. Barred by the censor from consciousness, and hence from discharge through action, wishes flow back, collecting unconscious memories on their way, and present themselves once again, now transformed by the dream-work, to the sleeper’s lowered consciousness.

Hence, it is quite conceivable that even the sense of guilt engendered by civilization is not recognized as such, but remains for the most part unconscious, or manifests itself as an unease, a discontent, for which other motivations are sought. The religions, at least, have never ignored the part that a sense of guilt plays in civilization. Moreover - a point I failed to appreciate earlier - they claim to redeem humanity from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. From the way in which this redemption is achieved in Christianity - through the sacrificial death of one man, who thereby takes upon himself the guilt shared by all - we drew an inference as to what may have been the original occasion for our acquiring this primordial guilt, which also marked the beginning of civilization.

his understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential-—popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature (Kafka), film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. Source: Wikipedia

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon.

Here, indeed, we encounter a curious phenomenon: the relevant mental processes, when seen in the mass, are more familiar, more accessible to our consciousness than they can ever be in the individual. In the individual only the aggression of the super-ego makes itself clearly heard, when tension arises, in the form of reproaches, while the demands themselves often remain unconscious in the background. When brought fully into consciousness, they are seen to coincide with the precepts of the current cultural super-ego. At this point there seems to be a regular cohesion, as it were, between the cultural development of the mass and the personal development of the individual. Some manifestations and properties of the super-ego can thus be recognized more easily by its behaviour in the cultural community than by its behaviour in the individual.

After his break with Freud, Jung pursued the connection between the unconscious and the occult and found example after example of ancient mystical and occult symbols in the dreams of people who had never encountered those symbols in waking life. He came to believe that below the repressed memories of individual life, there exists a collective unconscious full of archaic images that appear in myths, legends, and the traditions of occultism. By bringing those images into consciousness, it is possible to achieve individuation: a state of psychological balance and wholeness as far above ordinary sanity as neurotic conditions are below it.

Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end. Rather as Newton discovered the invisible forces known as the laws of gravity, and Freud laid bare the workings of an invisible phenomenon known as the unconscious, so Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.

[Viktor E. Frankl] joked that in contrast to Freud's and Adler's "depth psychology," which emphasizes delving into an individual's past and his or her unconscious instincts and desires, he practiced "height psychology," which focuses on a person's future and his or her conscious decisions and actions...His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.

Freud believed human beings to be wholly driven by the stirrings of the unconscious mind, but Adler saw us as social beings who create a style of life in response to the environment and to what we feel we lack. Individuals

In my view, if you don’t understand how repression operates, real growth is nearly impossible since you’re unlikely to come into contact with that pain you’re warding off. Even if you’re able to overcome some kind of maladaptive behavior or thought pattern, you’re likely to develop another equally maladaptive strategy to keep the repressed at bay. Freud always insisted that unconscious material is “indestructible.” Just because you’re not consciously aware of how much anger you feel toward your father, that doesn’t mean the anger has disappeared. It will inevitably continue to make its presence known in covert ways – humorous little digs, for instance, or sarcasm.

While Freud is an investigator and interpreter, Adler is chiefly an educator. In refusing to leave the patient in a childish condition, helpless for all his valuable understanding, and in trying by every device of education to make him a normally adapted person, Adler modifies Freud's procedure. He does all this apparently in the conviction that social adaptation and normalization are indispensable—that they are even the most desirable goals and the most suitable fulfillment for a human being. The widespread social influence of Adler's school is a consequence of this outlook—as also its neglect of the unconscious, which on occasions, it seems, amounts to complete denial.

CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.” This

In Fromm’s view, the unconscious is a social creation, maintained because of the deep abhorrence each of us has of our own freedom and the social isolation we fear may result from a fuller expression of our authentic, personal experience.

Nor have I any reason for wishing to eliminate this evidence of my initial views. Even to-day I regard them not as errors but as valuable first approximations to knowledge which could only be fully acquired after long and continuous efforts.

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—Frazer’s depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung’s description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious—as

It was through the discovery and exploration of the unconscious that Freud made his major discoveries, chief among them that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don't want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions---anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate---yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with. Our very suffering is a source of both pain and reassurance. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients was the resistance to being cured.

Positive transference is then further divisible into transference of friendly or affectionate feelings which are admissible to consciousness and transference of prolongation of those feelings into the consciousness and transference of prolongations of those feelings into the unconscious. As regards the latter, analysis shows that they invariably go back to erotic sources. And we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious

Haffner32 (p. 19): "First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day.

Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception. For him, memories of traumatically troubling events were unconsciously banished to perdition in the unconscious, where they rattled around and caused trouble, like poltergeists in a dungeon.

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.

We have all found by experience that it is especially difficult for an obsessional neurotic to carry out the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. [...] While he is engaged in thinking, his ego has to keep off too much—the intrusion of unconscious phantasies and the manifestation of ambivalent trends. It must not relax, but is constantly prepared for a struggle.

Don’t you think it’s a bit weird that when you’re dreaming, you can scare yourself? Really, how can you not know that someone’s going to leap out from behind the bushes, when it’s you who put them there? Conscious, unconscious, Freud, something something? I gues it’s the same thing with desires. They similarly exist inside you but can still take you by surprise.

Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.

Sigmund Freud notably saw in the Oedipus myth a playing out of his theory that infant sons long for a close and exclusive relationship with their mothers, including an (unconscious) sexual one, and hate their fathers for coming between this perfect mother–son union. It is an oft-noted irony that, of all men in history, Oedipus was the one with the least claim to an Oedipus Complex. He left Corinth because the idea of sex with his mother Merope (as he thought) was so repugnant. Not only was his attraction to Jocasta adult (and the incestuous element wholly unwitting), but it came after the killing of his father Laius, which itself was accidental and entirely unconnected to any infant sexual jealousy. None of which put Freud off his stride.

Zwei Juden treffen sich im Eisenbahnwagen einer galizischen Station. 'Wohin fahrst du?, fragt der eine. 'Nach Krakau,, ist die Antwort. 'Sieh' her, was du für Lügner bist, , braust der andere auf. 'Wenn du sagst, du fahrst nach Krakau, willst du doch, dass ich glauben soll, du fahrst nach Lemberg. Nun weiss ich aber, dass du wirklich fahrst nach Krakau. Also warum lügst du?,

There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay’s excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: “Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape” (italics added).

The will-to-power, when it can find no outlet, is directed inwards; the frustrated impulse plays havoc with the sufferer’s own nerves. Before puberty, Mary had not infrequently had convulsive seizures and had given other signs of excessive nervous excitability. When it became obvious to her that such attacks aroused sympathy and attention, she began consciously or unconsciously (the border line is hard to define) to cultivate these hysterical fits.

Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we should continue calling it the unconscious—so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma—because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken. The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology’s saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology implies or unveils as its limits—by its latent content or its unconscious—that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject man; their agreements, rather, precisely in describing man as a timber yard, in order to discover, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain: man’s relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his finger at the Id and the Superego. Husserl, in his last writings, speaks of historical life as of a Tiefenleben. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency.

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.

The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various factors. The most important of these is whether there has been an energetic reaction to the event that provokes the affect. By ‘reaction’ we here understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes - from tears to acts of revenge - in which, as experience shows us, the affects are discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of the affect disappears as a result.

One criticism of Freud still sometimes heard on the political Left is that his thinking is individualist — that he substitutes ‘private’ psychological causes and explanations for social and historical ones. This accusation reflects a radical misunderstanding of Freudian theory. There is indeed a real problem about how social and historical factors are related to the unconscious; but one point of Freud’s work is that it makes it possible for us to think of the development of the human individual in social and historical terms. What Freud produces, indeed, is nothing less than a materialist theory of the making of the human subject. We come to be what we are by an interrelation of bodies — by the complex transactions which take place during infancy between our bodies and those which surround us. This is not a biological reductionism: Freud does not of course believe that we are nothing but our bodies, or that our minds are mere reflexes of them. Nor is it an asocial model of life, since the bodies which surround us, and our relations with them, are always socially specific.

CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.” This is no fancy, it is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds, “Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say.” There has to be a dialogue, an interaction between the seer and the community. The seer who sees things that people in the community don’t want to hear is just ineffective. Sometimes they will wipe him out.

The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic’ effect if it is an adequate reaction - as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g. a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone to begin with.

It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical. Why people do this to themselves? Because we pull towards that feeling of "home" makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parents who in some way hurt them. In the beginning, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar - but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

These stories are real, the dreams are real, yet the dilemmas each person faces are founded on the presences that haunt from their past. We see again the twin mechanisms present in all relationships: projection and transference. Each of them, meeting any stranger, reflexively scans the data of history for clues, expectations, possibilities. This scanning mechanism is instantaneous, mostly unconscious, and then the lens of history slips over one's eyes. This refractive lens alters the reality of the other and brings to consciousness a necessarily distorted picture. Attached to that particular lens is a particular history, the dynamics, the script, the outcomes of which are part of the transferred package. Freud once humorously speculated that when a couple goes to bed there are six people jammed together because the spectral presences of the parents are unavoidable. One would have to add to this analogy the reminder that those parents also import their own relational complexes from their parents, so we quickly have fourteen underfoot, not to mention the persistence of even more ancestral influences. How could intimate relationships not be congested arenas? As shopworn as the idea seems, we cannot overemphasize the importance of primal imagoes playing a domineering role in our relational patterns. They may be unconscious, which grants them inordinate power, or we may flee them, but they are always present. Thus, for example, wherever the parent is stuck—such as Damon's mother who only equates sexuality with the perverse and the unappealing, and his father who stands de-potentiated and co-opted—so the child will feel similarly constrained or spend his or her life trying to break away (“anything but that”) and still be defined by someone else's journey. How could Damon not feel depressed, then, at his own stuckness, and how could he not approach intimacy with such debilitating ambivalence?

Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.

If anxiety is a reaction of the ego to danger, we shall be tempted to regard the traumatic neuroses, which so often follow upon a narrow escape from death, as a direct result of a fear of death (or fear for life) and to dismiss from our minds the question of castration and the dependent relationships of the ego. [...] In view of all that we know about the structure of the comparatively simple neuroses of everyday life, it would seem highly improbable that a neurosis could come into being merely because of the objective presence of danger, without any participation of the deeper levels of the mental apparatus. But the unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any content to our concept of the annihilation of life.

Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of the mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of brain does not exist.

(P170) In his passion to malign moneymaking, Keynes even resorted to calling on psychoanalysis for support. Fascinated like most of the Bloomsbury circle by the work of Sigmund Freud, Keynes valued it above all for the “intuitions” which paralleled his own, especially on the significance of the love of money . In his Treatise on Money, Keynes refers to a passage in a 1908 paper by Freud, in which he writes of the “connections which exist between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation” and the unconscious “identification of gold with faeces.” This psychoanalytical “finding”— by the man Vladimir Nabokov correctly identified as the Viennese Fraud— permitted Keynes to assert that love of money was condemned not only by religion but by “science” as well.

Freud eventually developed his theory of transference, one that would play a key role in his method of treating emotional disorders and that still today gives us some insight into how we choose both our friends and the person we marry. Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood—particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past. An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us—strong attraction or strong aversion—totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer. We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person—the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh, or some other feature—recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure. *

Winnicott’s key word was “mothering,” Lacan’s was “desire.” For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something. Whereas Winnicott’s tropes tended toward the organic–he spoke of “growth,” “development,” and “maturity”–Lacan’s imagery was more somber. (“The cipher of his mortal destiny” is characteristically Lacanian.) For Win-nicott, only in illness was the self divided, while for Lacan human subjectivity was necessarily divided, because of the existence of the unconscious. No matter how successful we become, no matter how much we are loved, we will always be vulnerable to irrational fears and capable of the most self-defeating acts. As Freud said, we can never be “master of our own house.

What actually happens in these incest and womb fantasies is that the libido immerses itself in the unconscious, thereby provoking infantile reactions, affects, opinions and attitudes from the personal sphere, but at the same time activating collective images (archetypes) which have a compensatory and curative meaning such as has always pertained to the myth. Freud makes his theory of neurosis—so admirably suited to the nature of neurotics—much too dependent on the neurotic ideas from which precisely the patients suffer. This leads to the pretence (which suits the neurotic down to the ground) that the causa efficiens of his neurosis lies in the remote past. In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.

Whereas directed thinking is an altogether conscious phenomenon,39 the same cannot be said of fantasy-thinking. Much of it belongs to the conscious sphere, but at least as much goes on in the half-shadow, or entirely in the unconscious, and can therefore be inferred only indirectly.40 Through fantasy-thinking, directed thinking is brought into contact with the oldest layers of the human mind, long buried beneath the threshold of consciousness. The fantasy-products directly engaging the conscious mind are, first of all, waking dreams or daydreams, to which Freud, Flournoy, Pick, and others have devoted special attention; then ordinary dreams, which present to the conscious mind a baffling exterior and only make sense on the basis of indirectly inferred unconscious contents. Finally, in split-off complexes there are completely unconscious fantasy-systems that have a marked tendency to constitute themselves as separate personalities.41

My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable. […] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.

fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retain an impression of the past in unconscious memory traces. The case of the individual seems to be clear enough. The memory trace of early events he has retained, but he has retained it in a special psychological condition. One can say that the individual always knew of them, in the sense that we know repressed material. We have formed certain conceptions—and they can easily be proved by analysis—of how something gets forgotten and of how after a time it can come to light again. The forgotten material is not extinguished, only " repressed " ; its traces are extant in the memory in their original freshness, but they are isolated by " counter-cathexes." They cannot establish contact with the other intellectual processes; they are unconscious, inaccessible to consciousness. It may happen that certain parts of the repressed material have escaped this process, have remained accessible to memory and occasionally reappear in consciousness, but even then they are isolated, a foreign

I have made several comparisons... between modern and primitive man. Such comparisons... are essential to an understanding of the symbol-making propensities of man, and of the part that dreams play in expressing them. For one finds that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rites. These dream images were called "archaic remnants" by Freud; the phrase suggests that they were psychic elements surviving in the human mind from ages long ago. This point of view is characteristic of those who regard the unconscious as a mere appendix of consciousness (or, more picturesquely, as a trash can that collects all the refuse of the conscious mind)... Further investigation suggested to me that this attitude is untenable and should be discarded. I found that associations and images of this kind are an integral part of the unconscious, and can be observed everywhere whether the dreamer is educated or illiterate, intelligent or stupid. They are not in any sense lifeless or meaningless "remnants." They still function, and they are especially valuable.

If it were true that the unconscious consists of nothing but contents accidentally deprived of consciousness but otherwise indistinguishable from the conscious material, then one could identify the ego more or less with the totality of the psyche. But actually the situation is not quite so simple. Both theories are based mainly on observations in the field of neurosis. Neither Janet nor Freud had any specifically psychiatric experience. If they had, they would surely have been struck by the fact that the unconscious displays contents that are utterly different from conscious ones, so strange, indeed, that nobody can understand them, neither the patient himself nor his doctors. The patient is inundated by a flood of thoughts that are as strange to him as they are to a normal person. That is why we call him “crazy”: we cannot understand his ideas. We understand something only if we have the necessary premises for doing so. But here the premises are just as remote from our consciousness as they were from the mind of the patient before he went mad. Otherwise he would never have become insane.

What about the practical value of such study someone may ask, for psychic knowledge and for the discovering of the secret peculiarities of individual character? Have not the unconscious feelings revealed by the dream the value of real forces in the psychic life? Should we take lightly the ethical significance of the suppressed wishes which, as they now create dreams, may some day create other things? I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have not thought further upon this side of the dream problem. I believe, however, that at all events the Roman Emperor was in the wrong who ordered one of his subjects executed because the latter dreamt that he had killed the Emperor. He should first have endeavored to discover the significance of the dream; most probably it was not what it seemed to be. And even if a dream of different content had the significance of this offense against majesty, it would still have been in place to remember the words of Plato, that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the opinion that it is best to accord freedom to dreams.

[W]ar cannot be abolished; as long as the conditions of existence among races are so varied and the repulsions between them are so vehement, there will have to be wars. The question then arises whether we shall be the ones to yield and adapt ourselves to it. Shall we not admit that in our civilized attitude towards death we have again lived psychologically beyond our means? Shall we not turn around and avow the truth? Were it not better to give death the place to which it is entitled both in reality and in our thoughts and to reveal a little more of our unconscious attitude towards death which up to now we have so carefully suppressed? This may not appear a very high achievement and in some respects rather a step backwards, a kind of regression, but at least it has the advantage of taking the truth into account a little more and of making life more bearable again. To bear life remains, after all, the first duty of the living. The illusion becomes worthless if it disturbs us in this. We remember the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish peace, prepare for war. The times call for a paraphrase: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you wish life, prepare for death.

As to the contents of the unconscious, no generalization is possible. But one statement can be made; it always represents the whole man, with all his potentialities for darkness and light; it always contains the basis for the different answers which man is capable of giving to the question which existence poses...But man, in any culture, has the potentialities within himself; he is the archaic man, the beast of prey, the cannibal, the idolater, and he is the being with a capacity for reason, for love, for justice. The content of the unconsciousness, then, is neither the good nor the evil, the rational not the irrational; it is both; it is all that is human. The unconsciousness is the whole man minus that part of him that corresponds with society. Consciousness represents the social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the cosmos; it represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past, down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future up to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be naturalized

Freud’s incest theory describes certain fantasies that accompany the regression of libido and are especially characteristic of the personal unconscious as found in hysterical patients. Up to a point they are infantile-sexual fantasies which show very clearly just where the hysterical attitude is defective and why it is so incongruous. They reveal the shadow. Obviously the language used by this compensation will be dramatic and exaggerated. The theory derived from it exactly matches the hysterical attitude that causes the patient to be neurotic. One should not, therefore, take this mode of expression quite as seriously as Freud himself took it. It is just as unconvincing as the ostensibly sexual traumata of hysterics. The neurotic sexual theory is further discomfited by the fact that the last act of the drama consists in a return to the mother’s body. This is usually effected not through the natural channels but through the mouth, through being devoured and swallowed (pl. LXII), thereby giving rise to an even more infantile theory which has been elaborated by Otto Rank. All these allegories are mere makeshifts. The real point is that the regression goes back to the deeper layer of the nutritive function, which is anterior to sexuality, and there clothes itself in the experiences of infancy. In other words, the sexual language of regression changes, on retreating still further back, into metaphors derived from the nutritive and digestive functions, and which cannot be taken as anything more than a façon de parler. The so-called Oedipus complex with its famous incest tendency changes at this level into a “Jonah-and-the-Whale” complex, which has any number of variants, for instance the witch who eats children, the wolf, the ogre, the dragon, and so on. Fear of incest turns into fear of being devoured by the mother. The regressing libido apparently desexualizes itself by retreating back step by step to the presexual stage of earliest infancy. Even there it does not make a halt, but in a manner of speaking continues right back to the intra-uterine, pre-natal condition and, leaving the sphere of personal psychology altogether, irrupts into the collective psyche where Jonah saw the “mysteries” (“représentations collectives”) in the whale’s belly. The libido thus reaches a kind of inchoate condition in which, like Theseus and Peirithous on their journey to the underworld, it may easily stick fast. But it can also tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life.

If the ego succeeds in protecting itself from a dangerous instinctual impulse, through, for instance, the process of repression, it has certainly inhibited and damaged the particular part of the id concerned; but it has at the same time given it some independence and has renounced some of its own sovereignty. This is inevitable from the nature of repression, which is, fundamentally, an attempt at flight. The repressed is now, as it were, an outlaw; it is excluded from the great organization of the ego and is subject only to the laws which govern the realm of the unconscious. If, now, the danger-situation changes so that the ego has no reason for fending off a new instinctual impulse analogous to the repressed one, the consequence of the restriction of the ego which has taken place will become manifest. The new impulse will run its course under an automatic influence—or, as I should prefer to say, under the influence of the compulsion to repeat. It will follow the same path as the earlier, repressed impulse, as though the danger-situation that had been overcome still existed. The fixating factor in repression, then, is the unconscious id's compulsion to repeat—a compulsion which in normal circumstances is only done away with by the freely mobile function of the ego.

Jung told the Society that apparitions (ghosts) and materializations were “unconscious projections” or, as he spoke of them to Freud, “exteriorisations.” “I have repeatedly observed,” Jung told his audience, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.” This sounds scientific enough, but a year later20 when Jung was again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. Jung spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury outside of London rented by Maurice Nicoll, and while there was serenaded by an assortment of eerie sounds—dripping water, knocks, inexplicable rustlings—while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted, and one particularly bad night, Jung opened his eyes to discover an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. Jung leaped out of bed, lit a candle, and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be shaken by a fairly standard English ghost, but the experience rattled him.

But the basis of Freud's ideas aren't accepted by all philosophers, though many accept that he was right about the possibility of unconscious thought. Some have claimed that Freud's theories are unscientific. Most famously, Karl Popper (whose ideas are more fully discussed in Chapter 36) described many of the ideas of psychoanalysis as ‘unfalsifiable’. This wasn't a compliment, but a criticism. For Popper, the essence of scientific research was that it could be tested; that is, there could be some possible observation that would show that it was false. In Popper's example, the actions of a man who pushed a child into a river, and a man who dived in to save a drowning child were, like all human behaviour, equally open to Freudian explanation. Whether someone tried to drown or save a child, Freud's theory could explain it. He would probably say that the first man was repressing some aspect of his Oedipal conflict, and that led to his violent behaviour, whereas the second man had ‘sublimated’ his unconscious desires, that is, managed to steer them into socially useful actions. If every possible observation is taken as further evidence that the theory is true, whatever that observation is, and no imaginable evidence could show that it was false, Popper believed, the theory couldn't be scientific at all. Freud, on the other hand, might have argued that Popper had some kind of repressed desire that made him so aggressive towards psychoanalysis. Bertrand

A case arises for our consciousness, just as it did for primitive man, in which the two opposite attitudes towards death, one of which acknowledges it as the destroyer of life, while the other denies the reality of death, clash and come into conflict. The case is identical for both, it consists of the death of one of our loved ones, of a parent or a partner in wedlock, of a brother or a sister, of a child or a friend. These persons we love are on the one hand a part of our inner possessions and a constituent of our own selves, but on the other hand they are also in part strangers and even enemies. Except in a few instances, even the tenderest and closest love relations also contain a bit of hostility which can rouse an unconscious death wish. [...] The layman feels an extraordinary horror at the possibility of such an emotion and takes his aversion to it as a legitimate ground for disbelief in the assertions of psychoanalysis. I think he is wrong there. No debasing of our love life is intended and none such has resulted. It is indeed foreign to our comprehension as well as to our feelings to unite love and hate in this manner, but in so far as nature employs these contrasts she brings it about that love is always kept alive and fresh in order to safeguard it against the hate that is lurking behind it. It may be said that we owe the most beautiful unfolding of our love life to the reaction against this hostile impulse which we feel in our hearts.

If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has extraordinarily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility towards the dead there may still exist without any special psychic effort on our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice and demands : De mortuis nil nisi bene.Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought about, and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here. But this example would lead us to assume that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings. Withthe decline of this ambivalence the taboo, as the compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly disappeared. Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an atavistic remnant in the form of an archaic constitution the compensation of which in the interest of cultural demands entails the most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.

There are, however, yet other possibilities. We have seen that the empty state of consciousness, the unconscious condition, is brought about by the libido sinking into the unconscious. In the unconscious feeling-toned contents lie dormant memory-complexes from the individual’s past, above all the parental complex, which is identical with the childhood complex in general. Devotion, or the sinking of libido into the unconscious, reactivates the childhood complex so that the childhood reminiscences, and especially the relations with the parents, become suffused with life. The fantasies produced by this reactivation give rise to the birth of father and mother divinities, as well as awakening the childhood relations with God and the corresponding childlike feelings. Characteristically, it is symbols of the parents that become activated and by no means always the images of the real parents, a fact which Freud explains as repression of the parental imago through resistance to incest. I agree with this interpretation, yet I believe it is not exhaustive, since it overlooks the extraordinary significance of this symbolic substitution. Symbolization in the shape of the God-image is an immense step beyond the concretism, the sensuousness, of memory, since, through acceptance of the “symbol” as a real symbol, the regression to the parents is instantly transformed into a progression, whereas it would remain a regression if the symbol were to be interpreted merely as a sign for the actual parents and thus robbed of its independent character.98