The Spirit of Psychoanalysis*

Psychoanalysis investigates in several directions. One of these directions is psychology in the strict sense of the word: the anatomy of the mental machine, the description of the Unconscious, of the Ego and some of its tasks. Psychoanalysis also takes biological interest, attempting to find footholds for our mental life in the body. Here erogenous zones have been discovered, sex life has been split into its components, sex life of children has been described and also the nature of perversions, particularly the remarkable phenomenon of bi-sexuality. Freud has published the foundations of all this as early as 1905 in his Three Contributions. A third interest of psychoanalytic investigation is the study of the individual's relations to its environment, their mutual influence. Here, the Oedipus complex and its derivatives have been the most important discovery.

The Oedipus complex is an intersection of the three enumerated psychoanalytic fields of research. It is biological, because it is the result of the prolonged dependency of the human child upon its parents whose indispensable care, affection and training form part of human biology. It is strictly psychological, because we find interlaced with it the Superego with its conscious and unconscious derivatives. Thirdly, it is the start of all social experiences of the child: it has to realize the triangle father-mother-child. Whatever is built up later in life as social or cultural understanding is inseparable from this first social experience.

The child recognizes the differentiation between masculine and feminine first in the image of father and mother. The bi-sexual fog from which we all originate is pierced for the first time and the question: what is a man, what is a woman, is invariably answered by the child: “Why, this one here is my dad. He is a man. And this one there is my mother, she is a woman.” This “definition” might be wanting in logic; as an experience it is a rock on which later experiences of the kind a