Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/59

 Perhaps the storm began to rage in their own bosoms. The previous theological history of so many of the Swiss workers is as important in their attitude to psychoanalysis as is the socialistic record of Adler for the development of his "psychology." One is reminded of Mark Twain's famous story about the fate of his watch and to the speculative remark with which he closed it: "And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him."

I will encroach upon the realm of parables and will assume that in a certain society there lived a parvenu who boasted of descent from a very noble family not locally known. But it so happened that it was proved to him that his parents were living somewhere in the neighborhood and were very simple people, indeed. Only one way out remained to him and he seized upon it. He could no longer deny his parents, but he asserted that they were very aristocratic by origin but much come down in the world, and secured for them at some obliging office a document showing their descent. It seems to me that the Swiss workers had been obliged to act in a similar manner. If ethics and religion could not be sexualized, but must be regarded as something "higher" from the very beginning, and as their origin from the family and Œdipus complexes seemed undeniable, then there was only one way out; namely, that these complexes themselves, from the beginning, could not have the significance which they appeared to express, but must have that higher "anagogic" sense (to use Silberer's nomenclature) with which they adapt themselves for proper use in the abstract streams of thought of ethics and religious mysticism.

I am quite prepared to be told once more that I have misunderstood the contents and object of the theory of the New-Zürich School, but here wish to protest against being held responsible for those contradictions to my theories that have arisen as a result of the publications of this school. The burden of responsibility rests on them, not on me. In no other way can I make comprehensible to myself the ensemble of Jung's innovations or grasp them in their associations. All the changes which Jung has perpetrated upon