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of suggestion whatever other views the physician may have on the subject.

When a neurotic patient comes for any kind of treatment he will soon transfer unconsciously on to the idea of the physician various repressed allo-erotic tendencies, i.e. he will take the physician as a love-object (provided, of course, that the treatment continues long enough). If the treatment is not psycho-analysis one of two things will happen. The patient may become aware of affection for the physician. Then probably symptoms will improve, libido being withdrawn from them and transferred to the idea of the physician. I suspect, however, that in these cases true educative treatment by suggestion or any allied method is rarely successful. What usually happens is that the improvement is dependent on continued contact with the physician, and even this has to be of a specially satisfactory kind. When the physician's attention is withdrawn the symptoms tend to reappear. The alternative to this course of events is that the allo-erotism regresses to the stage of narcissistic identification with the physician, that is, the father ideal. The educative suggestions then made are more likely to have a lasting effect, the reason being that the stage to which the patient's libidinal organisation is reduced approximates closely to that of true narcissism, so that when he leaves the physician he still has himself as a love-object. This is certainly the direction that most neurotics spontaneously take, for it spares them the suffering of symptoms, the distress at having to recognise their repressed allo-erotism, and the pangs of disappointed love. It is the great reason, as I hinted at the outset of my paper, why autosuggestion is so widely preferred to hetero-suggestion, with all its potentialities of allo-erotism. The practical drawback to auto-suggestion clinically is that it is in so many cases harder to mobilise the narcissism in this way than by means of hetero-suggestion. The drawback to any form of suggestion is that what peace of mind it gives is purchased at the expense of an important part of the personality being impeded in development, with consequent lack of stability; the allo-erotism that should progress to object-love, altruism and the various sublimations of life regress towards auto-erotism, with all its stultifying potentialities.

In psycho-analysis, on the other hand, the aim of the treatment is to effect some reconciliation-or at least tolerance-between the ego ideal and the repressed allo-erotism. As in other forms of treatment, the alloerotic transference tends to regress to a stage in which the analyst is identified with the father component of the ego ideal, i.e. with the father ideal, and this tendency has to be carefully watched by the analyst.

When the ego ideal begins to raise serious protests against accepting the repressed tendencies that are being brought to light by the analytic procedure, the well-known state of resistance ensues. Now the most securely entrenched form of resistance1, one to which there is a tendency in all analyses, is that in which the patient identifies the analyst with his real ego, projects on to him his own repressed mental processes, and then severely criticises him from the standpoint of his ego ideal. This situation is the most formidable met with in psycho-analytic work, for all object-relationship between analyst and patient may be suspended, and the analyst cannot proceed until this is re-established. As it is characteristically accompanied by such manifestations as arrogant conceit, the analyst often says that a limit has been set to analytic possibilities by the patient's narcissism, overlooking the vital consideration that the narcissism is not a primary one, but has been secondarily resorted to as a defence against repressed allo-erotism. It may be said, therefore, that the success of an analysis depends very largely on the extent to which the analyst can manage to preserve an object-relationship to himself in the patient's mind, for it is just this relationship that has to be brought to consciousness and harmonised with the ego ideal.

It will thus be seen that the aims of the hypnotist and the analyst are diametrically opposed. The former really seeks to strengthen the patient's narcissism, the latter to divert it into more developed forms of mental activity. The psychological situation (narcissistic identification) most favourable to the one aim is fatal to the other.

I have considered here the contrast between suggestion and analysis in its therapeutic aspects only. It is probable, however, that it is applicable over far wider fields. The contrast between auto-erotism and alloerotism on which it rests, i.e. between infantilism and adult life, may be correlated with the whole difference in outlook and conduct between the mental attitude of introversion and exclusion of reality, on the one hand, and adjustment to the world of reality on the other: between what may be called the Eastern and the Western methods of dealing with life.

1 An excellent description of the manifestations of this is given by Abraham, "Über eine besondere Form des neurotischen Widerstandes gegen die psychoanalytische Methodik,” Internat. Zeitschr. f. Psychoanalyse, 1919, Bd. v. S. 173.

ON THE RELATION OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY TO POETIC ART1.

By C. G. JUNG.

NOTWITHSTANDING its difficulty, the task of discussing the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art provides me with a not unwelcome occasion for defining my standpoint in regard to the much debated question of the relation between psychology and art generally. In spite of their incommensurability, both provinces are doubtless closely interrelated, and these connections cannot remain uninvestigated. For they originate from the fact that, in practice, art is a psychological activity, and, just in so far as this is the case, it can and, indeed, should be subjected to a psychological consideration. Art, like every other human activity proceeding from psychic motives, is from this angle a proper object for psychology. This conclusion, however, also involves a very obvious limitation in the application of the psychological viewpoint: only that portion of art which consists in the process of artistic form can be an object of psychology, but that which constitutes the essential nature of art must always lie outside its province. This other portion, namely, the problem, what is art in itself, can never be the object of a psychological, but only of an aesthetico-artistic method of approach.

A similar distinction must also be made in the realm of religion; there also a psychological consideration is permissible only in respect of the emotional and symbolical phenomena of a religion, wherein the essential nature of religion is in no way involved, as indeed it cannot be. For were this possible, not religion alone, but art also could be treated as a mere subdivision of psychology. In saying this I do not mean to affirm that such an encroachment has not actually taken place. But whoever trespasses in this way clearly forgets that a similar fate can easily befall psychology, whose specific value and essential quality is entirely destroyed as soon as it is regarded as a mere brain activity, thus aligning it with other glandular activities, as a mere subdivision of physiology. In actual fact, this, as we all know, has actually occurred.

1 A paper read before the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache und Literatur, in Zurich, May, 1922. Translation by H. Godwin Baynes.

Art, by its very nature, is not science, and science is essentially not art; both provinces of the mind, therefore, have a reservation which is peculiar to them, and which can only be explained from themselves. Hence when we speak of the relation between psychology and art, we are only treating of that portion of art which without encroachment can be submitted to a psychological manner of approach. Whatever psychology is able to determine about art will be confined to the psychological process of artistic activity, and will have nothing whatever to do with the innermost nature of art itself. It is as powerless in this respect as is the capacity of the intellect to present or even apprehend the nature of feeling. Moreover these two things could have no kind of existence as separate entities, had not their essential difference long since challenged recognition. The fact that in the child, the “war of faculties" not yet having declared itself, we find artistic, scientific, and religious possibilities still slumbering tranquilly together; or that with the primitives dispositions towards art, science, and religion still maintain an undifferentiated co-existence in the chaos of the magical mentality; or that, finally, with animals, no trace of "mind" can as yet be discerned, but merely "natural instinct." All these facts hold no shadow of evidence for that essential unity of nature in art and science which could alone justify a reciprocal subsumption, or in other words, a reduction of the one into the other. For if we go far enough back in the state of mental development for the essential differences of the individual provinces of the mind to have become altogether invisible, we have not thereby reached a deeper principle of their unity, but merely an earlier evolutionary state of undifferentiation in which neither province can be said to have a separate existence. But this elementary state is not a principle from which any conclusion regarding the nature of later and more highly developed states might be inferred, notwithstanding, as is indeed always the case, that a direct descent can be demonstrated. The scientific attitude will naturally and constantly tend to overlook the nature of a differentiation in favour of a causal derivation, and will strive to subordinate the former to an idea that is certainly more general, but at the same time more elementary.

These reflections seem to me not inappropriate at the present time, for there have been frequent demonstrations of late, how poetic artworks in particular may be submitted to an interpretation that corresponds precisely with this reduction to elementary conditions. Granted that the determinants of the artistic creation, the material and its individual treatment, can, for instance, be traced back to the personal

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relations of the poet with his parents. Yet nothing is, thereby, gained for the understanding of his art, since we can perform the same reduction every other possible case, and not the least in cases of pathological disorder. Neuroses and psychoses are also reducible to infantile relations with the parents, as are good and bad habits, convictions, qualities, passions, especial interests and so forth. But we are surely not entitled to assume that all these very different things must, therefore, have one and the same explanation; for were this so, we should be driven to conclude that they were in actual fact one and the same thing. Thus, if a work of art and a neurosis are explained in precisely similar terms, either the art-work must be a neurosis, or the neurosis a work of art. As a paradoxical play upon words such a façon de parler might pass muster, but a healthy human reason must assuredly revolt at the notion of art-work and neurosis being placed within the same category. To take the most extreme case, only an analysing physician viewing a neurosis through the spectacles of a professional bias could come to regard it as a work of art. But it would never occur to a thinking lay mind to confound art with a morbid phenomenon, in spite of the undeniable fact that the origin of a work of art must confess to similar psychological preconditions as a neurosis. This is only natural, since certain psychic preconditions are universally present, and furthermore, because of the relative similarity of human conditions of life, these are constantly the same, whether in the case of a nervous intellectual, a poet, or a normal human being. All, doubtless, have had parents, all have a so-called father and mother-complex, all have the onus of sexuality and, therewith, certain general and typical human difficulties. That one poet is influenced more by the relation with the father, another by the tie to the mother, while a third reveals unmistakable traces of repressed sexuality in his works; all this can be said equally well not only of every neurotic, but also of every normal human being. Hence nothing specific is thereby gained for the judgment of a work of art. At most our knowledge of the historic preconditions will have been somewhat broadened and deepened. The school of medical psychology inaugurated by Freud has certainly tended to inspire the literary historian to bring certain qualities of the individual work of art into relation with the personal and intimate life of the poet. But thereby nothing more has been said than what the scientific treatment of poetic works had long since revealed, viz. the presence of certain threads, woven by the personal and intimate life of the poet-whether with or without conscious intention—into the fabric of his work. But the works of Freud may conceivably enable a more

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