Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/271

 experience is the same, even men engaged altogether in practice. It is scarcely to be supposed that a method altogether contemptible would meet with so much support.

When once psychoanalysis has been applied in a suitable case, it is imperative that rational solutions of the conflicts should be found. The objection is at once advanced that many conflicts are intrinsically incapable of solution. That view is sometimes taken because only an external solution is thought of—and that, at bottom is no real solution at all. If a man cannot get on with his wife he naturally thinks the conflict would be solved if he were to marry some one else. If such marriages are examined they are seen to be no solution whatsoever. The old Adam enters upon the new marriage and bungles it just as badly as he did the earlier one. A real solution comes only from within, and only then because the patient has been brought to a new standpoint.

Where an external solution is possible no psychoanalysis is necessary; in seeking an internal solution we encounter the peculiar virtues of psychoanalysis. The conflict between “love and duty” must be solved upon that particular plane of character where “love and duty” are no longer in opposition, for indeed they really are not so. The familiar conflict between “instinct and conventional morality” must be solved in such a way that both factors are taken satisfactorily into account, and this is only possible through a change of character. This change psychoanalysis can bring about. In such cases external solutions are worse than none at all. Naturally the particular situation dictates which road the doctor must ultimately follow, and what is then his duty. I regard the conscience-searching question of the doctor’s remaining true to his scientific convictions, as rather unimportant in comparison with the incomparably weightier question as to how he can best help his patient. The doctor must, on occasion, be able to play the augur. Mundus vult decipi—but the cure is no deception. It is true there is a conflict between ideal conviction and concrete possibility. But we should ill prepare the ground for the seed of the future, were we to forget the tasks of the present, and seek only to