Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/27

 distinctly noticeable in the working tendencies of the two schools. Already in 1897 I had published the analysis of a case of schizophrenia, which showed, however, paranoid trends, so that its solution could not have anticipated the impression of Jung's analyses. But to me the important element had not been the interpretation of the symptoms, but rather the psychic mechanisms of the disease, and above all, the agreement of this mechanism with the one already known in hysteria. No light had been thrown at that time on the difference between these two maladies. I was then already working toward a theory of the libido in the neuroses which was to explain all neurotic as well as psychotic appearances on the basis of abnormal drifts of the libido. The Swiss investigators lacked this point of view. So far as I know Bleuler, even today, adheres to an organic causation for the forms of Dementia Præcox, and Jung, whose book on this malady appeared in 1907, upheld the toxic theory of the same at the Congress at Salzburg in 1908, which though not excluding it, goes far beyond the libido theory. On this same point he came to grief later (1912), in that he now used too much of the stuff which previously he refused to employ at all.

A third contribution from the Swiss School, which is to be ascribed probably entirely to Jung, I do not value as highly as do others who are not in as close contact with it. I speak of the theory of the complexes, which grew out of the "Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien" (1906-1910). It itself has neither resulted in a psychological theory nor has it added an unconstrained insertion to the context of the psychoanalytic principles. On the other hand, the word "complex" has gained for itself the right of citizenship in psychoanalysis, as being a convenient and often an indispensable term for descriptive summaries of psychologic facts. None other among the names and designations, newly coined as a result of psychoanalytic needs, has attained such widespread popularity; but no other term has been so misapplied to the detriment of clear thinking. In psychoanalytic diction one often spoke of the "return of the complex" when "the return of the repression" was intended to be conveyed, or one became accustomed to say "I have a