Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/110

 364 AUGUST STARCKE

own scientific work.^ Just where science appears gratifying to our mind we are to mistrust its results, if we wish to obey the law of necessity — the reality-principle.

Science was faced with the problem of admitting the existence of mental diseases as an unpleasant fact. Since it was not at the time in the position to cure mental diseases, i. e. to change reality itself so that it became endurable, science had to add to reality sufficient intellectual gratification to serve as a support for the impulse to investigate mental diseases (a compensation that is found in every kind of science, including psycho-analysis), or else to exclude so much from reality that at least the idea of reality thus created became endurable. This was the path taken by the pre-Freudian psychiatry. It allowed the investigator to regard the mental diseases without too great discomfort and without having to relinquish the over-estimation of his own ego. But it crippled itself at the same time as far as its real purpose was concerned. It had to replace the excluded part of reality — in this object, as chance would have it, the principal part — by matters of secondary importance. And where it would not wish to give up its particular object, the mental disease, it had to fill up the existing paucity of thoughts with foreign words, authors' names, literary references, repetitions, and considerations loaded with the virtus dormitiva. Thus in an extreme development of this nature it conveys the impression of glossolaha.

Freud, on the other hand preferred to forego a piece of nar- cissism from the start and thereby obtained the increase of the object libido which he used for breaking through the obstruction. In psycho-analytical literature the following are found as external signs of this essentially different standpoint: the absence of in- flation with references to the literature, etc., the absence of the taboo of one's own language, the working with the nuclei of concepts instead of limits of concepts, and with a fluid instead of a fixed system of working theories, the absence of 'replies to the preceding reply', the replacement of the antithesis, 'either-or by 'and-and'.

Medical psycho-analysis thus appears as the psychiatry of a group

of observers who have all, following the lead of a single individual,

made mobile a part of their own narcissistic portion of libido.

The remaining fixations can be broken up after this keystone has

' See also Hegel, Nietzsche, Bolland, etc.