Beyond Psychoanalysis*

Psychoanalysis has rediscovered in the so—called “nervous” patient the significance of the emotional life but has attempted to conceive it scientifically from a purely materialistic point of view. This attempt could succeed only to some extent. For the problem of anxiety, which Freud first came up against in his patients is not to be explained entirely biologically in the human being. Still less can the problem of love be thus purely biologically explained, although Freud attempted to trace it as well as anxiety back to the sexual impulse. The fault lay in the method, namely, in the attempt to explain everything finally from the materialistic viewpoint. Even if we assume to be right the presupposition that everything has developed from the primitive biological, then this concept has only a heuristic value in the sense of a genetic comprehension, whereas it is insufficient as a principle of causal explanation. From a definite moment of development all these human phenomena which are built up over the purely biological attain a life of their own and a significance of their own. By reducing them to the original biological, even if this always succeeded in individual cases, little more is gained than would be the case if for example one wanted to understand an individual's entire life merely from his heredity. Psychoanalysis tried to avoid this error in emphasizing the individual's personal destiny. Only in doing this it has fallen into a similar error in believing that everything can be reduced to the individual's past. Thus even in actual experience psychoanalysis has emphasized the repetition of the individual's past and has not correspondingly valued the individual's own present life and its own actual significance.