Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/47

 and dissensions took place in all of them. It may be that elsewhere they are more carefully concealed. However, psychoanalysis, which denies many conventional ideals, is also more honest in these things.

Another very palpable inconvenience lies in the fact that I cannot altogether avoid going into an analytic elucidation. Analysis is not, however, suitable for polemical use; it always presupposes the consent of the one analyzed and the situation of a superior and subordinate. Therefore he who wishes to use analysis with polemic intent must offer no objection if the person so analyzed will, in his turn, use analysis against him, and if the discussion merges into a state in which the awakening of a conviction in an impartial third party is entirely excluded. I shall, therefore, make here the smallest possible use of analysis, thereby limiting my indiscretion and aggression against my opponents, and I will also add that I base no scientific criticism on this means. I have nothing to do with the possible substance of truths in the theories to be rejected nor am I seeking to refute the same. This task may be left to other able workers in the field of psychoanalysis, and some of it has already been done. I only desire to show that these theories deny the basic principles of analysis—I will show in what points—and for this reason should not be known under this name. I shall, therefore, use analysis only to make clear how these deviations from analysis could take place among analysts. At the parting places I am, of course, obliged to defend the just rights of psychoanalysis with purely critical remarks.

Psychoanalysis has found as its first task the explanation of the neuroses; it has taken the two facts of resistance and transference as starting points, and by bearing in mind the third fact of amnesia in the theories of repression, it has given justification to the sexual motive forces of the neuroses and of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has never claimed to give a perfect theory of the human psychic life, but has only demanded that its discoveries should be used for the completion and correction of knowledge we have gained elsewhere. But Alfred Adler's theory goes far beyond this goal. It pretends to explain with one stroke the behavior and character