The Development of the Individual

In the beginning of psychoanalysis one is easily deluded into thinking that the problems of the human being always repeat the same simple theme and that this theme is sufficient explanation for the complicated forms brought forth. The simple theme is present, the similarities are beguiling, and there is danger of resting satisfied when the various products of the patient—dream, phantasy, or wish—can be reduced to the primitive sexual root or to the egotistic desires. But this is much too simple; later one learns to seek for differences and their meanings and comes to realize that in them lie the individual values and the real key to the particular personality and its possibilities. The modifications of thought and technic, which years of practical experience must inevitably bring to anyone who works seriously and studies the data of his experience, have come to the psychologist and the psychiatrist.

Many biologists believe that there is in nature an inherent tendency towards a progressive and fuller development. If this is so, and we are all prone to act as if it were, where and how can such a tendency be expressed in humanity except through the individual? We may see, indeed, everywhere, individuals striving to be different, to separate themselves from the crowd, to be unique; and although this effort is frequently expressed in unattractive and undesirable ways, it does not seem adequately explained by merely referring it to the egotistic “will to power” motive or the autoerotic root. Certainly no one who looks as deeply into the composition of human personality as the technic of psychoanalysis permits can fail to perceive a valuable meaning in the variability of and differences between individuals, unless he is committed, a priori, to some fixed theory to which all findings must conform.

Man goes through a set of motions to which he has been trained; he tries to adapt to a collective conception of what a human being ought to be; even his thoughts must be pruned to u