valuable thing believed to have been lost is found again. It is a catharsis of a peculiar kind which is remotely comparable to Socrates’ Maieutic, to “midwifery.” It is not surprising that for those persons who have themselves now come to believe in their own poses, psychoanalysis is at times a real torture, since in accordance with the old mystic saying, “Give all thou hast, then only shalt thou receive,” there is first the necessity to get rid of almost all the dearly cherished illusions, to permit the advent of something deeper, finer, and greater, for only through the mystery of self-sacrifice is it possible to be “born again.” It is indeed ancient wisdom which again sees the daylight in psychoanalytic treatment, and it is a very curious thing that this particular kind of psychic re-education proves to be necessary at the height of our modern culture; this education which in more than one respect can be compared to the technique of Socrates, even though psychoanalysis penetrates to much greater depths.
We always find in a patient some conflict, which at a particular point, is connected with the great problems of society; so that when the analysis has arrived at this point the apparently individual conflict is revealed as a universal conflict of the environment and the epoch. Neurosis is thus, strictly speaking, nothing but an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, at a solution of the general problem; it must be so, for a general problem, a “question,” is not an end in itself; it only exists in the hearts of individual men and women. The “question” which troubles the patient is—whether you like it or not—the “sexual” question, or more precisely, the problem of present-day sexual morality. His increased demands upon life and the joy of life, upon glowing reality, can stand the necessary limitations which reality sets, but not the arbitrary, ill-supported prohibitions of present-day morals, which would curb too much the creative spirit rising up from the depths of the darkness of the beasts that perish. For the neurotic has in him the soul of a child that can but ill-endure arbitrary limitations of which it does not see the meaning; it tries to adopt the moral standard, but thereby only falls into deeper disunion and distress within
