Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/51

 in consequence of some real change, is one of the mechanisms in the cure of the symptom. On these relationships which can be verified and understood without difficulty, Adler's theory puts the greatest emphasis. It entirely overlooks the fact that innumerable times the ego makes a virtue out of necessity in submitting to the most undesired symptom forced upon it, because of the use it can make of it, e.g., when the ego accepts anxiety as a means of security. Here the ego plays the absurd part of the Pierot in the circus, who, through his gestures, wishes to convey to the spectators the impression that all changes in the menage are taking place at his command. But only the youngest among the spectators believe him.

For the second part of Adler's theory psychoanalysis must stand security as for its own possessions. For it is nothing but psychoanalytic knowledge which the author had from all the sources opened to him during ten years of our joint work, but which he later marked as his own after changing the nomenclature. For instance, I myself consider "security" a better word than "protective measure," which I used; but cannot find in it any new meaning. Similarly one will find in Adler's statements a great many long-known features if one will replace the expressions "feigned" (fingiert) fictive and fiction, by the original words "to fancy" and "phantasy." This identity would be emphasized by psychoanalysis, even if the author had not for many years participated in our common work.

The third part of Adler's theory, which consists in giving new interpretations to, and in distorting the disagreeable facts of psychoanalysis, contains that which definitely severs the actual "Individual Psychology" from psychoanalysis. As is known the principle of Adler's system states that it is the object of the self-assertion of the individual, his "will to power" in the form of the "masculine protest," to manifest itself domineeringly in the conduct of life, in character formation and in the neurosis. This "masculine protest," the Adlerism motor, is nothing else, however, than the repression set free from its psychological mechanism, and what is more, it is sexualized and thus hardly in keeping with the vaunted expulsion of sexuality