1. Some Types of Character from the Psychoanalytic Work.— Freud brings before the reader some of the deeper hidden traits of character which arouse the physician's interest in the course of a psychoanalytic treatment and which act as sources of deepest resistance or which show as, traits of unsuspected intensity. One comes upon persons who strive with a special motive against that passing over from the pleasure principle of childhood to the reality principle which is the goal of the psychoanalytic work. They consider themselves exceptions because of their past sufferings, of injury done them or because they are specially favored and therefore claim the privilege of not submitting to the demands of reality. Such a state of mind can be altered only by investigation into the deeper sources of the feeling. These may lie in early infantile injury in which the individual himself was innocent, perhaps in a congenital organic affliction. Freud passes on to the illustration of this situation in the character of Richard III as created by Shakespeare. Sympathy is aroused for him by a profound earnestness underlying his apparently merely frivolous choice of evil. The earnestness lies in the bitterness suggested in the thought of the injustice he has suffered at the hands of nature, which has denied him those things which would make him an object to be loved. He has an exceptional right, he claims, to do evil because evil was done him. This is an exaggerated form of a feeling common in lesser degree to all. It is manifested, Freud suggests, in a special form in the present demands of women, perhaps there based upon the deeply rooted grievance that woman was not born a man.
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Another aspect of character is illustrated in some of the great conceptions of literature. There are those who, instead of becoming neurotic as one would expect because their needs are denied gratification, fall ill rather when the granting of some deeply rooted wish is in sight. Thus they prevent the longed-for fulfilment of the wish. Freud distinguishes sharply here between nonfulfilment because of external hindrance and that which arises because the ego may not permit what it has longed for. So long as the wish is only a phantasied one it is permitted, but with the possibility of realizing it a defence must be set up against it, the conflict appearing when change in outward circumstances makes the fulfilment possible.
Lady Macbeth offers such an example. She manifests at first no evidences of inner conflict but relentlessly pursues her ambitious goal. Once her wishes are attained she begins to waver. Finally, in the sleepwalking scene she has assumed the very fears for which she formerly chided her husband. She had expressed at first her willingness to sacrifice her womanliness to achieve their end; now it seems that this insulted womanliness avenges itself upon her. Freud points out the involvement of this drama in the motivation of childlessness, both in its relation to the accession of James to succeed the childless Elizabeth and in its inner content in the father-child aspect of the murders and the relation of the murders to Macbeth's own childlessness. Freud suggests a split in the motif between the two characters. Macbeth represents in the end the triumph over his former fears as he presses on toward his goal, while Lady Macbeth is driven from within to succumb to the fears which find their place for development in her.
Clearer evidence of this inability to accept a deeply desired end is found in Ibsen's Rebecca West. Here Freud finds the motivation for the rejection to lie plainly in the incest complex. Rebecca had intrigued to remove Rosmer's wife in order finally to succeed to her place. When this becomes possible through Rosmer's desire to marry her, even to forgive her part in his wife's death, Rebecca is compelled from within to refuse that which she had so long desired and for which she had even prepared herself by the change in her nature which association with him had brought about. The deeper reason for her refusal is brought subtly to light when it is disclosed to her that the man with whom in the past she had lived in sexual relation was in fact her father. This brings home to her inner feeling, as Freud suggests, the revelation that she has been carrying out a similar œdipus situation in the home of Rosmer. Therefore the marriage cannot take place, for from the circumstances within her, in spite of outward conditions made favorable, the situation is a forbidden one.
This profound œdipus conflict as the source of such inhibition before outward circumstances perhaps generally underlies a consciousness of
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guilt. Freud's experience has taught him that certain crimes are committed as a means of relief for such a deeper burden of guilt. He suggests the importance of such a fact in the understanding of motives for otherwise inexplicable crimes.
2. A Poet and His Father.— Hitschmann examines briefly some indications that the poet's psychic activity stands in close connection with the œdipus complex. He shows that in the life and phantasy creation of Dauthendey the overstrong personality of the father and the tender memories of a mother who died young gave a rich background for phantasy creation. This may be read most plainly from the poet's autobiographical work, written under the title “Der Geist meines Vaters.” There is an ambivalent attitude shown. There is the need to resist the overshadowing father authority, which kept the young man for a time as only the assistant to the father in his work. One finds also, however, the marked inclination toward the father, who in one aspect satisfies the masochistic homosexual side of the son's nature. He frees himself, however, from the father in both aspects. His father was of a dominating character. His first wife had taken her own life and his older son had torn himself completely from home and shot himself under a persecutory hallucination. The poet had solved his relationship differently. His father had always been hostile to his occupation with dreams and had opposed the career of either painter or poet. In his early years, however, the son broke away to follow his own bent. Later he married, and at the time of turning to heterosexual love he turned also decidedly away from his father's religious belief. For a personal God he substituted a nature religion in which the individual is his own creator, maintains his own independence. His poetry shows the infantile conceptions of compassion for the woman, jealousy, solution of conflict through murder. He reveals also that aspect of the father complex which turns to interest in foreign lands away from one's own native land.
The poet had prophetic dreams and hallucinatory experiences relating to the father's death to which the accompanying affect also bears witness to the relation to the wish contained in these experiences. These occurred at a time when his father withheld from him more than ever the means for his support and that of his wife, so that the father's death did mean the obtaining of his inheritance and also the opportunity to return to his native city where his mother's grave was situated. Hitschmann calls attention to the fact that in real life the sons of such overmastering fathers are usually weaklings [Schwachliche Epigonen] or neurotics. In this poet we have an example of a man who heroically overcomes the father and makes productive the power of his infantile complexes. His unconscious received enrichment and strengthening through his experiences with the father, so that Dauthendey says of himself: “What I wished in my deepest subconsciousness always came
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to pass of itself in my life.” This statement Hitschmann believes also throws light upon his telepathic experiences.
3. The Home-coming of the Soul.— Sachs has given a brief survey of man's psychic history in such poetic form that it will not suffer abstracting. He touches upon man's first consciousness of himself after a long experience in a world of which he knew nothing as yet. But desire, yearning, coming to greater power, drove him forth to find himself, and then other objects outside the self, yet interpreted in terms of the self. It was the artist that looked beyond to lead him to other selves. It is the artist again that comes to the rescue of the soul of man to lead it back to rest in dreams when the real world has proved itself hard, unyielding, has humiliated the will to power which man assumed in his first knowledge of himself, but which turned men in destruction upon one another. A soft melancholy takes the place of the original yearning with which man looked out upon the world, as the soul reluctantly yet wearily turns from the real things of the world to the dark gate of dreams.
