Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/291

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SOME CRUCIAL POINTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
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that urge towards individualisation by which our whole epoch deserves to be characterised. (Cf. Müller-Lyer: "Die Familie.") If a man does not believe in this orientation and still bows before the scientific causal view-point, he will, of course, be disposed merely to resolve this hostility, and to let the patient remain in a positive relationship towards the father, thus expressing the ideal of an earlier epoch of civilisation. It is commonly recognised that the Catholic Church represents one of the most powerful organisations based upon this earlier tendency. I cannot venture to doubt that there are very many individuals who feel happier under compulsion from others than when forced to discipline themselves. (Cf. Shaw: "Man and Superman.") None the less, we do our neurotic patients a grievous wrong if we try to force them all into the category of the unfree. Among neurotics, there are not a few who do not require any reminders of their social duties and obligations; rather are they born or destined to become the bearers of new social ideals. They are neurotic so long as they bow down to authority and refuse the freedom to which they are destined. Whilst we look at life only retrospectively, as is the case in the Viennese psychoanalytic writings, we shall never do justice to this type of case and never bring the longed-for deliverance. For in that fashion we can only educate them to become obedient children, and thereby strengthen the very forces that have made them ill—their conservative retardation and their submissiveness to authority. Up to a certain point this is the right way to take with the infantile resistance which cannot yet reconcile itself with authority. But the power which edged them out from their retrograde dependence on the father is not at all a childish desire for insubordination, but the powerful urge towards the development of an individual personality, and this struggle is their imperative life's task. Adler's psychology does much greater justice to this situation than Freud's

In the one case (that of infantile intractability) the positive transference signifies a highly important achievement, heralding cure; in the other (infantile submissiveness) it