Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/225

Rh impulses of the patient during the treatment, and what difference it makes whether these impulses are of an active (sadistic) or passive (masochistic) nature.

I hope that you gained the impression that if we knew all which we are now only surmising, and if we will have brought about all the improvements in the technique to which the deeper experience of our patients must lead us, that our medical activity will then attain a precision and successful confidence not to be found in all special branches of medicine.

I said that we had much to expect from the gain in authority that must fall to our share in the course of time. There is no need for telling you much about the meaning of the authority. Only the smallest number of civilized people are able to exist without the support of others, or to pronounce an independent judgment. You cannot form too bad a conception of the mania for authority and of the inner instability of humanity. The extraordinary increase in the neuroses since the depotentialization of religion may furnish you with a standard for the same. The impoverishment of the ego through the great expenditure of repression which civilization demands of every individual may be one of the chief causes of this condition.

This authority and the enormous suggestion emanating from it was hitherto against us. All our therapeutic successes were aimed at this suggestion. It is really surprising that under such circumstances there were any successes at all. I will allow myself to go so far as to depict to you the delights of those times when I was the sole representative of psychoanalysis. I recall the patients who when assured that I could bring them lasting relief looked around my unpretentious surroundings and thought of my little reputation and title and then looked upon me as a possessor of a sure system of breaking a bank. They argued with themselves that if this man could do all he pretends he would look different. It was really not pleasant to perform a psychic operation while the colleague whose duty it should have been to assist took special pleasure in spitting into the field of operation, and while the relatives threatened the operator as soon as they noticed blood or the restless movements of the patient. Yet an operation should produce manifestations of reactions; in surgery we are long accustomed to it. They simply did not believe me,