You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anyone who has seriously tried to unravel the complicated relationships subsisting between any two of these emotional attitudes will agree that the problem is one of exceptional difficulty. I hope, nevertheless, that the considerations to be brought forward here will contribute in some measure in elucidating at least the nature of the complexities in question and thus in furthering the approach to the more fundamental problems that lie behind them. As in our daily analytic practice, and indeed in all forms of scientific investigation, to get problems clearly stated is by no means the least difficult part of the task, nor is it the least important part.
Let us first consider the more purely clinical aspects of these relationships. The heart of the difficulty soon reveals itself. It is that—to speak statically—there exists a curious series of layer formations definitely connected one with the next, the connection being often in the nature of a reaction. This holds good for each of the emotional attitudes in question, so that one may be found at a given level in the mind, another at a deeper level, the former again at a still deeper level, and so on. It is this stratification that makes it so hard to tell which is the primary and which is the secondary of any two groups. To put the matter more dynamically, it is the complex series of interactions among these attitudes that makes it hard to determine chronologically their developmental relationships.