Page:Freud - The history of the psychoanalytic movement.djvu/60

 psychoanalysis originated in the intention of setting aside all that is objectionable in the family complexes, in order that these objectionable features may not be found again in religion and ethics. The sexual libido was replaced by an abstract idea, of which it may be said that it remained equally mysterious and incomprehensible alike to fools and to the wise. The Œdipus-complex, we are told, has only a "symbolical" sense, the mother therein representing the unattainable which must be renounced in the interests of cultural development. The father who is killed in the Œdipus myth represents the "inner" father from whose influence we must free ourselves in order to become independent. No doubt other portions of the material of sexual conceptions will, in time, receive similarly new interpretations. In place of the conflict between erotic strivings adverse to the ego and the self-assertion, we are given the conflict between the "life-task" and the "psychic-laziness." The neurotic guilty conscience corresponds with the reproach of not having put to good account one's life-task. Thus a new religio-ethical system was founded which, exactly like Adler's, was obliged to give new interpretations, to distort or set aside the actual results of analysis. As a matter of fact they have caught a few cultural higher notes from the symphony of the world's by-gones, but once again have failed to hear the powerful melody of the impulses.

In order to hold this system together it was necessary to draw away entirely from the observations and technique of psychoanalysis. Now and then the enthusiasm for the higher cause even permits a total disregard for scientific logic, as for instance, when Jung maintains that the Œdipus complex is not "specific" enough for the etiology of the neuroses, and ascribed this specificity to laziness, that is, to the most universal quality of animate and inanimate bodies! Moreover, it is to be remarked that the "Œdipus complex" only represents a capacity on which the psychic forces of the individual measure themselves, and is not in itself a force, like the "psychic laziness." The study of the individual man has shown and always will show that the sexual complexes are alive in him in their original sense. That is why the study of the individual was