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The urgency of our work forces us to discriminate. We therefore have to consider only such topics as appear to be most economically relevant. Our problems more than keep pace with such progress or advances as we make. If one tries to match oneself against these problems a critical situation becomes more and more critical faster than we are able to develop our techniques and our ability to deal with it. We need some quick and efficient method of recording what we do – assuming that past experience would add to our store of wisdom. Not so many years ago people who wanted analysis seemed to have plenty of time and money with which to meet the requirement of the situation. Today even governments of states are confronted with problems which are beyond their control, or their capacity. Consider something which was once regarded as a simple matter of mechanisms of exchange and economics: when I was a small boy I once discovered a coin in one of my pockets. I had no idea that I was so fabulously wealthy – it not only made my day for me, but the next day too. Nowadays we feel well off at one moment; at the next our valuables have seeped away from our ‘store’. It appears that even states experience this descent from affluence to poverty.
As for the emotional forces with which we, as psychoanalysts, are concerned, we can discern the same phenomenon in mental or psychological terms. The spirit of the country swings from a sense of affluence to a sense of bankruptcy. Which are we to consider the ‘generator’? The economic situation leading to recession, or the emotional situation leading to economic recession? We, who purport to study the motions of individuals, need to state the ‘direction’ which the progress is taking, but we have no co-ordinates by which to indicate this primitive base. The subject becomes even more harassing in
a state of emotional turbulence. We shall have, later, to investigate the turbulence.
With regard to our mental resources, one would like to believe