Some Remarks on a Chapter of Helen Keller's Book: “The World I Live in”*

Since the psychology of the Ego and its relation to actual reality has come more into the range of psychoanalytic investigation, works like that of Helen Keller have a definite interest for us, though they do not carry any evidence on more classical psychoanalytic topics. That the interest in Ego-psychology has grown particularly strong on the Continent [for the last ten years or so—as seems to be the case—] is, I think, due to the more acute course of social developments there. Not only had we to face, in a degree not experienced before, the constant interference of external circumstances in almost every case, but we observed with increasing astonishment how far such deeply established formations inside ourselves as our Ego and Super-Ego (not the Id) could be influenced and altered by the social situation. Gradually, instead of considering this unrestful time of ours as an accidental disturbance of our work, we realised that it showed—only more clearly—an underlying factor at work which we have to reckon with in practice and in science as long as human beings will go on living in a social way.

We could grasp with our hands, so to speak, that our Ego and Super-Ego are socially conditioned institutions and can only be understood out of their constant interaction—taking place during the whole time of our development from the earliest days—with reality, whatever that may be. The all-important problem of reality comes in here. I cannot pursue this now, but hope at some later date to be able to contribute something in that respect. There was perhaps never a historical situation so apt to impress these facts so deeply and irrevocably on our minds as the present one. The more philosophically minded among us may find a singular opportunity of studying them, but the trouble is that we might be swept away precisely by those realities whose influence we realise so clearly. In fact, the very