350 JAMES S. VAN TESLAAR
Freud did not set out deliberately to cover the gap between atomism and evolutionism. His ambition was limited to the direct and practical task of finding out what was wrong in the case of that large number of functional nervous disorders which ordinary methods of therapy, including hypnosis and suggestion, failed to cure. His task was a practical one, his attitude that of a specialist in nervous diseases interested in the welfare of his patients.
When Freud found that his patients suffered from painful reminis- cences, hidden or suppressed, he set to work to discover the forces which lead to suppression. He found that the reminiscences in question were linked emotionally to promptings incompatible with ethical standards, and violating the most common dictates of cul- ture—here I use the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘culture’ in their broad- est meaning. Persons mentally handicapped, those who undergo ‘nervous’ breakdowns or who give way entirely, becoming subjects for sanitoria, are burdened with ‘unethical’ and ‘irrational’ cravings of which they are often unaware. Mental and nervous disorders are caused by an attempt of the primitive residue of the psyche
to break through. This proposition is as simple as it is funda- ~
mental to the proper understanding of the forces which govern human nature. Freud found that ordinarily we are often prompt- ed by bits of our racial past in the form of an obscure craving, an unorganized attitude, a blind predisposition impelling us to think or do things which consciousness would refuse openly to contemplate. He found further that manifestations of this primitive, raw, unmoral attitude together with the cravings to which it gives rise, far from being exceptional, is the rule during the earlier
phases of our mental existence; namely, during the preconscious
stage of infancy and early childhood.
Incidentally Freud’s discovery shows that in the course of its development the individual mind repeats our racial history. The details of Freud’s work amount to a restatement of the recapitula- tion theory applied to the biologic history of the mind. For the first time there has been disclosed to us the manner in which psychic recapitulation operates and its consequences.
Primordial cravings that persist are racial vestiges of the mind. They are racial endowments belonging to early psychic stages in our individual development just as certain structures and organs of the embryo represent passing phases in the course of our phys- ical development. Some embryonic organs disappear when higher
