Psycho-Analysis
Reading edition
Some Random Thoughts Thereon
FLORENCE KIPER FRANK
Why not history rewritten from the researches of the Freudians? We have our economic determinism; why not our psycho-sexual? The tendencies of the individual studied in their relations to world-breaking and world-making! Hannibal and his mother, Queen Elizabeth and her nurse, Frederick the Great and the Oedipus complex!
The priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician. All tendencies seem so to point. The Christian Scientist and New Thought healers are vague and emotional answers to this social demand, the psycho-analytic physician a more sophisticated and precise one. The functions of those who now minister separately to soul and to body will, as in primitive society, again be united. The modern medicine-man shall be the priest of the new order!
To the adolescent, the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be over-stated. Jeanne D’Orge has thus written of the sixteen-year-old period:
I wish there were Someone Who would hear confession: Not a priest—I do not want to be told of my sins; Not a mother—I do not want to give sorrow; Not a friend—she would not know enough; Not a lover—he would be too partial; Not God—he is far away; But Someone that should be friend, lover, mother, priest, God all in one, And a Stranger besides—who would not condemn nor interfere, Who when everything is said from beginning to end Would show the reason of it all And tell you to go ahead And work it out your own way.
What of the functions of the physician-priest in marriage! The possibilities are, to say the least, interesting. As substitute for the churchly bunk talked at the average churchly ceremony, an intimate tete-a-tete between, say, the Inspired Physician and the woman. It might do much to validate the “sacredness” of wedlock. And, incidentally, I wonder what data the Freudians are going to contribute during the next ten years to feminism. Ellis states that sexual normality isn’t possible to determine because there isn’t enough material by which to base a norm. Especially, says he, is this true of the sexual psychology of women. Valuable, then, will be the testimony of those who have been hearing confessions!
One of the most powerful functions of the Catholic Church united with modern scientific research! I wonder if the need for the confessional isn’t eternal.
Amazing, isn’t it, that the most remarkable contributions to the study of personality come out of the modern Prussianized Teutonic empires? On the one hand men mowed down by the socialized thousands; on the other this incredibly patient and exhaustive searching into the bewildering complexities of the individual soul.
Break through the crust of any man as he thinks he is, and you are plunged into currents undreamed of. And isn’t one amazed at how much alike we all of us are—and how different!
The Freudian searching into motives is the accredited material of the novelist; the use of dream symbols the very stuff of the poet. The successful psycho-analytic physician ought to combine the adroitness of the fictionist with the imagination of the versifier.
From the standpoint of medical technique Freud and Jung may have diverged importantly—philosophically the younger man builds on the Freudian researches and there is no break in the continuity. Freud is perhaps more valuable to the physician; to the layman Jung opens up a realm of speculation and discovery more fascinating than that of Darwinism.
The old sweet mythos, as friend Browning says, has been rediscovered. We are more wonderful than we thought. We are carrying about in our compassed personalities all dreams and imaginings. What avails the modernity of elevators and skyscrapers! You, betrousered one, walking Michigan Avenue—in your psyche are the ancient Hindus and the dancing sun-worshippers. You with the hand-bag and that 1916 model frock, do you truly think you are thinking in terms of American asphalted Chicago? Indeed! It was the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries that was used in the image which flashed into your mind just then. How was it recreated? Heaven knows—or Dr. Jung! And in your dreams, when the censor is quite off guard—how did you, prosaic being, become suddenly the wildest of poets?
The average man—by that I mean the average man of cultivation—is not at all cognizant yet of the large significance of the psycho-analytic studies. He thinks them some libidinous sex-stuff come out of Germany, or perhaps one of the many new methods to be tried on the insane and the neurotic. Their immense import for the normal (whatever he is!) he has not yet understood. It will take perhaps another five years, for the discoveries of psycho-analysis to penetrate the popular consciousness. Perhaps less—for some Augustus Thomas (God save us from such!) may before then write a play about it.