The Depths of the Soul: Psycho-Analytical Studies

Part 1

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THE DEPTHS OF THE SOUL

PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES

Dedicated to his dear friends BESS AND OSCAR BLUMENTHAL in remembrance of his delightful stay in Chicago, 1921

THE AUTHOR

THE DEPTHS OF THE SOUL

PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDIES

BY DR. WILLIAM STEKEL

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY DR. S. A. TANNENBAUM

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C. 1921

PREFACE

An old proverb says that every parent loves the ugly duckling most. My book, The Depths of the Soul, was, from its beginning, my favourite. It was written in the beautiful years in which the first rays of analytic psychognosis penetrated the darkness of the human soul. The reader may find between the lines the exuberant joy of a discoverer. First impressions are the strongest. It is an unfortunate fact that subsequent impressions lack the vividness, the intensity, the warmth, and the colours of the first emotions.

The great success of this book in many foreign languages has given me incalculable pleasure, because it has served to confirm my own blind love. No other book has brought me so many friends from far and near.

I am happy that my friend Dr. Tannenbaum has devoted his knowledge of the art of translation to my favourite child, and I hope that this translation will bring me many new English friends.

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION ii

PREFACE v

CONTENTS vii

THE SECOND WORLD 1

GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE 11

UNPACKING ONE’S HEART 20

LAZINESS 29

THOSE WHO STAND OUTSIDE 38

WHAT CHILDREN ASPIRE TO 46

INDEPENDENCE 57

JEALOUSY 65

Part 2

CHILDHOOD FRIENDSHIP 73

EATING 80

ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS? 91

RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME 98

DEAD-HEADS 108

IDENTIFICATION 115

REFUGE IN DISEASE 125

WHY WE TRAVEL 133

MOODY PERSONS 143

OVERVALUED IDEAS 152

AFFECTIONATE PARENTS 161

WHY THEY QUARREL 171

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE 180

LOOKING BACKWARD 191

ALL-SOULS 201

MIRROR SLAVES 210

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

THE SECOND WORLD

To poets it is a familiar world. The ordinary mortal wanders about in its wonderful gardens as if he were blind; he lives in it without knowing it. He does not know where the real world stops and where the fantasy world begins. In the treadmill of grey day the invisible boundaries between these two worlds escape him.

The second world! What would our life be without it? What a vale of tears would this globe be were it not for this heaven on earth!

The reader probably guesses what I mean. All of us, the poorest and the richest, the smallest and biggest, rarely or never find contentment in our daily routine. We need a second sphere, a richer life, in which we may dream of everything that is denied us in the first sphere. Ibsen called this “The Great Life-Lie.” But is it always a lie? Did not Ibsen go too far with this characterization? Who could doubt that the lie is not one of those eternal truths that is so incorporeal that we cannot grasp it, so colourless that we cannot see it, so formless that we cannot describe it.

The child finds its second world in play. The little duties of everyday life are for it only unnecessary interruptions in its play in the second world. Here the child’s fantasy has ample room. It is a soldier, king, and robber, cook, and princess; it rides through a wide world on steaming express trains, it battles courageously with dragons and giants, it snatches the treasures of the earth from their guardian dwarfs, and even the stars in the heavens are not beyond its reach in its play. Then comes the powerful dictum called education and snatches the child out of its beloved second world and compels it to give heed to the first world and to learn things necessary to it in its actual life. The child learns of obligations and submits unwillingly to the dictates of its teachers. The first world is made up of duties. The second world knows no duties; it knows only freedom and unrestrained freedom of thought. This is the root of the subsequent great conflict between feelings and duties. In our childhood we find duties a troublemaker who interferes with our playing; this childish hostility continues with us all through life. Our vocation, the sphere of our duties, can never wholly satisfy us. It is our first world; and even though we seem to accept it wholly, a little remnant of this hostility remains and this constitutes a part of our second world.

Primitive people find their second world in religion. From their primitive fears for the preservation of their lives they flee to their gods, whom they love and fear, punish and reward. The same thing is true of all those simple souls whom culture has not robbed of their religious belief. To them religion is the second world which gives them rich consolation and solace for the pains of the first world. In his book “Seelenkunde,” Benedict attributes anarchism to an absence of consolatory life-lies. He says: “Our free-thinking times have stopped up this source and it is the duty of society to create a consoling life-truth, otherwise that psychic inner life which hoards up bitter hatred will not cease.”

The more highly developed a person’s mind is, the more complicated is his second world. People often express surprise at the fact that so many physicians devote themselves passionately to music or the other fine arts. To me it seems very simple. All day long they see life in its most disagreeable aspects. They see the innocent sufferings, the frightful tortures which they cannot relieve. They look behind the curtain of the “happy family”; they wade through all the repellant and disgusting filthiness of this petty world, and they would have to become dull and non-partisan animals did they not have their second world.

There is first of all music, which is so dear to all of us because it is an all-embracing mother which absorbs all the emotions of hatred, anger, love, envy, fear, and despair, and fuses them all into one great rhythm, into one great vibrating emotion of pleasure. On its trembling waves the thoughts of the poor tortured human soul are borne out into the darkness of uncomprehended eternity and the eternally incomprehensible.

Then there is literature. We open a book and at once we are transported into the second world of another ego, a world which in a few minutes becomes our own. Happy poets, who have been endowed with the gift of saying what they see, of giving form to what they dream, of freeing themselves from their energies, of abreacting their secret sufferings and of making others happy by opening up to them a second world!

Then there are the thousand and one forms of play; sports and in fact everything that tears us away from our daily grind. What is the lottery ticket to the poor wage-earner but an instalment on the pleasures of the second world, or the purchased right of joyous hope?

There is the devotion to clubs and fraternal associations. The henpecked husband flees wrathfully to his club where he can freely and fearlessly launch all those fine argumentative speeches which he has to suppress at home. Here he can rule, here he can play the role of the independent master. For many thousands the club is nothing more than an opportunity to work off their energies, to get rid of unused emotions and to play that role which life in the first sphere has denied them.

Part 3

And thus everyone has his second world. One who does not have it stands on the level of animals, or is the happiest of the happy. By happiness I mean the employment of one’s energies in the first sphere. There is a wide gulf between happiness and the consciousness of happiness. The consciousness of happiness is such a fugitive moment that the poorest wage-slave in his second world can be happier than the truly happy who does not happen to be thinking of his happiness. Happiness is like the possession of a beautiful wife. If we are in danger of losing her we tremble. Before we have obtained her and in moments of jealousy we guard her possession as fortune’s greatest gift. But in the consciousness of undisturbed possession can we be saying to ourselves every second: I possess her, I am happy? No! no! Happiness is the greatest of all life’s lies and one who has had least of it may be the happiest in his second world.

Rose-coloured hope! Queen of all pleasurable emotions, our all-preserving and all-animating goddess! You are the sovereign of the second world and beckon graciously the unhappy weeping mortal who in the first world sees the last traces of you disappear.----

Marital happiness depends very largely upon whether the two spheres of the couple partly overlap or touch each other at a few points. In the first world they must live together. But woe if the second world keeps them asunder! If the two spheres touch each other even only in one point and have only one feeling tangent between them, that will bring them closer together than all the cares and the iron constraint of the first world. Women know this instinctively, especially during the period of courtship. They enthuse about everything over which the lover enthuses; they love and hate with him and want to share everything with him. Beware, you married women, of destroying your husband’s second world! If after the day’s toil he soothes his tired nerves in the fateful harmonies of Beethoven, do not disturb his pious mood; enthuse with him, do not carry the petty cares and the vulgar commonplaces of life into the lofty second world. Do you understand me, or must I speak more plainly? Do not let him go alone on his excursions into the second world! A book that he reads alone, understands alone, enjoys alone, may be more dangerous to you than the most ardent glances of a wanton rival. Art must never become the man’s second world. No! It must become the child of both the lovers if the beats of their souls are to be harmonious.

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