Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/46

 in 1910 and the congress at Weimar, 1911, the second took place after this, and came to light in Münich in 1913. The disappointment which they caused me might have been avoided if more attention had been paid to the mechanisms of those who undergo analytical treatment. I was well aware that any one might take flight on first approach to the unlovely truths of analysis; I myself had always asserted that any one's understanding may be suspended by one's own repressions (through the resistances which sustain them) so that in his relation to psychoanalysis he cannot get beyond a certain point. But I had not expected that any one who had mastered analysis to a certain depth could renounce this understanding and lose it. And yet daily experience with patients had shown that the total rejection of all knowledge gained through analysis may be brought about by any deeper stratum of particularly strong resistance. Even if we succeed through laborious work in causing such a patient to grasp parts of analytic knowledge and handle these as his own possessions, it may well happen that under the domination of the next resistance he will throw to the winds all he has learned and will defend himself as in his first days of treatment. I had to learn that this can happen among psychoanalysts just as among patients during treatment.

It is no enviable task to write the history of these two secessions, partly because I am not impelled to it by strong personal motives—I had not expected gratitude nor am I to any active degree revengeful—and partly because I know that I hereby lay myself open to the invectives of opponents manifesting but little consideration, and at the same time I regale the enemies of psychoanalysis with the long wished-for spectacle of seeing the psychoanalysts tearing each other to pieces. I had to exercise much control to keep myself from fighting with the opponents of psychoanalysis, and now I feel constrained to take up the fight with former followers or such as still wish to be called so. I have no choice; to keep silent would be comfortable or cowardly, but it would hurt the subject more than the frank uncovering of the existing evils. Any one who has followed the growth of scientific movements will know that quite similar