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.
Some Types of Character from the Psychoanalytic Work. SIGM. FREUD.
A Poet and His Father. Contribution to the Psychology of Religious Conversion and Telepathic Phenomena. Dr. Eduard Hitschmann.
The Home-coming of the Soul. Hanns Sachs.
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.
Another aspect of character is illustrated in some of the great