IT is not the rulers, politicians, or diplomats, but the scientists, who decide the future fate of mankind. Those who hold power are, in fact, only executives, or even rigid opponents, that is to say, mere puppets of the powers liberated by the ideas of the scientists, and ‘who knows’, asks Anatole France somewhere, ‘whether, somewhere in a little back room, some unknown research worker is not already engaged in a quest which one day will lift the world off its hinges?’
It is not only from the miracles of technique, from the ever-increasing harnessing of the forces of nature, that we may expect radical changes in the world, nor only from the experiments which attempt to make the life of the individual safer and more comfortable by a more equitable distribution of material goods, by better social organization; progress has a third possibility which is at least as promising, and this is the hope of developing man’s physical and mental powers and his adaptability. This is the aim of individual and social hygiene, and of eugenics, that ever-expanding movement which has as its aim the improvement of the race. A conspicuous phenomenon of this movement, however, is its marked onesidedness. The workers engaged in it are not able to detach themselves from the bias of the exact and natural sciences, i.e. physics, chemistry, and biology, and to look for improvement exclusively from that direction, that is to say mainly from better selection and better protection of the progeny.
Unfortunately those mental phenomena which can be measured, expressed in mathematical formulas, and made accessible to experiment, make up such a minimal and pedestrian part of mental life that under the influence of this materialistic tendency psychology sank to the status of a subordinate province, of the physiology of the senses, and we may say has now for some decades remained sterile. The very complicated mental phenomena for whose study the only method is self-observation have not been considered by scientists as worthy of their attention; professional research workers have not condescended to occupy themselves with questions of the biology of character, of mental conflicts, of the ways of coping with transitory and permanent consequences of emotional experiences. Only the poets, biographers and autobiographers, and perhaps a few historians, were interested in this field, but of course they were not able to build up a real science. The poet’s aim is not to teach, but to entertain; the historian’s interest is, above all, in events, and the biographer examines the mental life of one individual only, and does not consider it his duty to abstract from his experiences generally valid laws.
The study of one of the mental illnesses, hysteria, led psychology back to its true task. The researches of Charcot, Möbius and Janet made it clear that this illness should be viewed as a very instructive ‘experiment of nature’, demonstrating that the human mind is far from being that unified and indivisible something that the word ‘individual’ makes us think of. It is in fact a most complex structure, of which consciousness shows only the exterior façade, while the true motor forces and mechanisms are to be found in a third dimension, that is, in the depth of the mind behind consciousness. It is true that these scientists fought shy of drawing these general conclusions from the phenomena of hysteria; they continued to believe that divisibility and disintegration of consciousness is to be found only in a pathologically affected mind, which perhaps is congenitally too weak for the necessary synthesis, for integrating the forces of the mind. They did not notice that hysteria only shows in an exaggerated and distorted form what occurs in every human being, although not in such a conspicuous way.
Almost contemporaneously with these studies in hysteria the theory of the indivisibility of consciousness was attacked from another side. This attack was led by Liébeault, Bernheim and the doctors of the Salpétrière, who began to pay serious attention to the phenomena in hypnosis which until then had been looked upon as superstition and quackery. The state brought about by hysteria as a symptom of illness, the disintegration of the personality into two or more parts, could be produced deliberately by hypnotic experiments. In the Paris hospital where these experiments were performed the doctors literally ‘bred’ people who had two, or three, or even more, ‘egos’, ‘egos’ which did not know anything of the desires, intentions, and actions of the other ego components; the various ‘egos’ even represented personalities of entirely opposite characters and possessed completely separate memories.
It is characteristic of the inertia of the human mind that although these hypnotic experiments could be carried out not only on hysterics but also on normal people, science could not arrive at the self-evident conclusion that the disintegration of consciousness is not a scientific curiosity, not a teratological lusus naturae, but an essential quality of the human mind. So it came about that psychology, instead of investing a good deal of its energy in the study of these completely new problems of very wide perspective, obstinately continued its sterile psychophysical experiments, starting with the erroneous idea that the objects of psychology are exclusively phenomena associated with consciousness, and assuming a priori that the layer under the consciousness cannot be understood except physiologically. The experience obtained in hysteria and in hypnosis argued in vain against this conception. There remained unnoticed the empirical fact that, under the threshold of consciousness, there existed highly complicated abilities which—apart from the quality of consciousness—are of practically equal importance with the conscious ones. The attempt was made to cope with this contradiction either by degrading these complicated mental phenomena simply to ‘brain functions’, i.e. to the physiological level, or it was decreed in the face of the facts that the functions under consciousness must still possess some small amount of consciousness; science clung to the assumption of ‘half consciousness’ or ‘under consciousness’, even where the only reliable judge, i.e. the subject in question, neither knew nor felt anything of the existence of these functions. In short, it was again the facts which were worsted because they dared to get into conflict with petrified theories. Tant pis pour les faits.
This was the state of affairs when, in 1881, the Viennese physician, Breuer, was led by a talented patient to the conclusion that in hysterics it is possible, under certain conditions, to bring back to consciousness and to make conscious memories long submerged under the threshold of consciousness and causing disturbances from there. In addition to the fact that this procedure has proved its value as a therapeutic measure with neurotic patients, we must attribute to these events a very high importance for psychology in general. It was the first time that anyone had succeeded with a predetermined method in recognizing the content of the ideas hidden in unconsciousness, and the nature of the effects associated with them.
Amazingly enough, this discovery was not followed by a feverish investigation of the riddles of the unconscious mental world. For ten long years this case history lay untouched in the files of the Viennese physician, until at long last Freud recognized its general importance.
From that time on, the exploration of the underworld of the mind has been connected solely with the name of Freud. It was he who developed and perfected the method of analytic research into the healthy and the sick mind, thereby creating a new basis for our knowledge of mental life. Since Freud we have known that individual development of the human mind is not to be compared with the growth of a spherical surface, but to that of a tree, whose trunk when sawn through shows up the annual ring of each year lived through by the individual. In the unconscious layers of the mind live on all the uncivilized amoral instincts which we are wont to think of as long superseded, all the primitive complexes of childhood and youth. All these, as they are beyond the moderating, controlling, and directing power of consciousness, often disturb considerably the logical, ethical, and aesthetical harmony of the conscious ‘ego’, causing outbursts of passion, senseless or compulsive actions, mental illnesses, and much unnecessary worry and suffering.
Now let us return to our starting-point. Moderation of human tensions, decreasing mental burdens, prevention of psychiatric illnesses: these are no longer questions of an abstract science, but pointers in a new and hopeful direction, towards the development and thriving of mankind. Moreover, we can speak of ‘freedom of thought’ in the strict sense of the word only when thinking no longer moves merely on the surface of consciousness, when it is not subordinated to the directives of unconscious ideas; when thinking it is able also to take into consideration the deeply hidden ideas and tendencies in conflict with the present moral tenets, that is to say all the determinants hitherto unconscious, in order to have sovereign power to direct them purposefully to the welfare of the individual and of society.
The achievements of psycho-analysis to date in helping mentally ill persons justify the hope that the same research methods will be able to fathom the true causes of the many serious mental illnesses of our civilization and perhaps even to contribute towards their cure.
The not too distant future will moreover present us with a radical reform in the education of the human soul, and bring up a generation which will no longer sink into the unconscious natural instincts and desires, in conflict with civilization will no longer try to deny their reality and ward them off automatically, but will learn to tolerate them consciously and to direct them sensibly. So will be signified the end of an epoch characterized by hypocrisy, by blind adoration of dogmas and authorities, and by an almost complete lack of self-criticism.
1 Published in Hungarian in 1912. German translation in Bausteine III. First English translation.