The case dealt with a rather neurotic young lady who, in Flournoy’s publication, described how surprised she was at the connecting phantasy-formations which penetrated from the unconscious into the conscious. I subjected these phantasies, which the lady herself reproduced in some detail, to my constructive methods and gave the results of these investigations in my book, “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”
This book has, I regret to say, met many perhaps inevitable misunderstandings. But I have had one precious consolation, for my book received the approval of Flournoy himself, who published the original case which he knew personally. It is to be hoped that later works will make the standpoint of the Zürich school intelligible to a wider public. Whoever by help of this work has taken the trouble to grasp the essence of the constructive method, will readily imagine how great are the difficulties of investigation, and how much greater still are the difficulties of objective presentation of such investigations.
Among the many difficulties and opportunities for misunderstanding I should like to adduce one difficulty which is especially characteristic. In an intensive study of Schreber’s or any similar case, it will be discovered that these patients are consumed by the desire for a new world-philosophy which may be of the most bizarre kind. Their aim is obviously to create a system such as will help them in the assimilation of unknown psychical phenomena, i.e. enable them to adapt their own unconscious to the world. This arrangement produces a subjective system which must be considered as a necessary transition-stage on the path to the adaptation of their personality in regard to the world in general. But the patient remains stationary at this transitory stage and assumes his subjective view is the world’s, hence he remains ill. He cannot free himself from his subjectivism, and does not find the link to objective thinking, i.e. to society. He does not reach the real summit of self-understanding, for he remains with a merely subjective understanding of himself. But a mere subjective understanding is not real and adequate. As Feuerbach says: Understanding is only
