Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 3: Psychogenesis of Mental Disease by Read Herbert Jung C. G. Hull R. F.C. Adler Gerhard

Author:Read, Herbert, Jung, C. G., Hull, R. F.C., Adler, Gerhard [Jung, C. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1960-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

ON PSYCHOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING1

[388] The number of investigations into the psychology of dementia praecox has grown considerably since the preceding paper was first published. When, in 1903, I made the first analysis of a case of dementia praecox, I had a premonition of future discoveries in this field. This premonition has since been confirmed.

[389] In 1911 Freud, using an improved analytical technique based on his ample experience of neurotics, subjected a case of paranoid dementia to closer psychological investigation.2 This was the famous autobiography of D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. In his investigation Freud shows out of what infantile drives and forms of thinking the delusional system was built up. The peculiar delusions the patient had about his doctor, whom he identified with God or a godlike being, and certain other surprising and even blasphemous ideas about God himself, Freud was able to reduce in a very ingenious manner to the infantile relationship between the patient and his father. This case also shows the comic and grotesque combinations of ideas described in the foregoing paper. Freud confines himself to pointing out the universally existent foundations out of which we may say every psychological product develops historically.3 This analytical-reductive procedure did not, however, furnish such enlightening results in regard to the rich and surprising symbolism in patients of this kind as we had been accustomed to expect from the same method in cases of hysteria. The reductive method seems to suit hysteria better than dementia praecox.

[390] If one reads the recent researches of the Zurich school, for instance the works of Maeder,4 Spielrein,5 Nelken,6 Grebel-skaja,7 and Itten,8 one gets a powerful impression of the enormous symbolic activity in dementia praecox. Although some of these authors still proceed essentially by the analytical-reductive method, tracing back the complicated system of delusions to its simpler and more general components, as I have done in the preceding pages, one cannot resist the feeling that this method does not altogether do justice to the almost overpowering profusion of fantastic symbolization, illuminating though it may be in other respects.

[391] Let me illustrate what I mean by an example. We are grateful to a commentator on Faust when he traces back all the multifarious material of Part II to its historical sources, or when he gives a psychological analysis of Part I, showing how the conflict in the drama springs from a conflict in the soul of the poet, and how this subjective conflict is itself based on those ultimate and universal problems which are in nowise foreign to us because we all carry the seeds of them in our own hearts. Nevertheless, we are a little disappointed. We do not read Faust just to discover that things everywhere are “human, all-too-human.” We know that only too well already. And anyone who still doesn’t know it has only to go out into the world and look at life without prejudice and with open eyes. He will turn back fully convinced of the prevalence and power of

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