slowly, torturingly, in the sick souls of our neurotics. Some, step by step, continually struggling against the unseen powers, do free themselves from the clutches of the demon who forces his unsuspecting victims from one savage mischance to another: others rise up and win to freedom, only to be dragged back later to the old paths, caught in the noose of the neurosis. You cannot even maintain that these unhappy people are neurotic or “degenerates.” If we normal people examine our lives from the psychoanalytic standpoint, we too perceive how a mighty hand guides us insensibly to our destiny and not always is this hand a kindly one.[1] We often call it the hand of God or of the Devil, for the power of the infantile constellation has become mighty during the course of the centuries in affording support and proof to all the religions.
But all this does not go so far as to say that we must cast the blame of inherited sins upon our parents. A sensitive child whose intuition is only too quick in reflecting in his own soul all the excesses of his parents must, lay the blame for his fate on his own characteristics. But, as our last case shows, this is not always so, for the parents can (and unfortunately only too often do) fortify the evil in the child's soul, preying upon the child's ignorance to make him the slave of their complexes. In our case this attempt on the part of the father is quite obvious. It is perfectly clear why he wanted to marry his daughter to this brutish creature: he wanted to keep her and make her his slave for ever. What he did is but a crass exaggeration of what is done by thousands of so-called respectable, educated people, who have their own share in this educational dust-heap of enforced discipline. The
- ↑ Between whiles we believe ourselves masters of our acts at any given moment. But when we look back along our life's path and fix our eyes chiefly upon our unfortunate steps and their consequences, often we cannot understand how we came to do this and leave that undone, and it seems as if some power outside ourselves had directed our steps. Shakespeare says;
"Fate show thy force: ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be, and be this so!"Schopenhauer, "Ueber die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen. Parerga und Paralipomena."
