Part 3

WILL-TO-POWER.

Alfred Adler was a pupil of Freud. In the course of his psycho-analytic practice he stumbled across a discovery which led to a break with Freud and the enunciation of a new theory. In contradistinction to the sexual theory it may be called the power-theory.

What Adler noticed in every neurotic was a marked feeling of inferiority, a feeling, as he put it, of being under, and a consequent incessant striving to be over or on top. To use a simple, concrete case: If a man felt inferior to the woman he loved, and this was a symptom of inferiority he had always had toward the women he loved, he would strive by every means to put the woman down and himself up. He might put her down by economic pressure, by intellectual attack; or he might put her down in the sexual way, for instance through cruelty (sadism).

In the latter case, Freud would say that the problem was sexual. But Adler would say, what the man is striving for is not sexual satisfaction, but power. If he could put the woman down through money-pressure, that would satisfy him, or if he could put her down sexually, that would be satisfactory. What he was seeking was mastery.

Take the well-known case of the Don Juan who has one love-affair after another, who wins a woman only to tire of her and pass on to the next. Such men will admit, as a rule, that the greatest pleasure is in conquest, and that when a woman has been conquered she is no longer interesting. They look upon love-affairs as a series of battles, and the aim is not love or sexuality, so much as triumph.

What becomes then of the Oedipus complex, the incestuous longing of the son for the mother? According to Adler this, too, is a problem of power. The father is the head of the house, the master, the king in the realm of the family, and possesses the mother. The son is under the father, but would depose this king and take his place. In short, he would be the head and possess the mother. But actually, what the child is seeking, is not really to possess the mother, but to have power in the manner of his father.

The cause, then, of mental disorders and spiritual maladies, Adler traces to an excessive feeling of inferiority which leads to a marked will-to-power. But whence arises this feeling of inferiority? Adler at this point is sure that the origin is to be sought not in something psychic but in something physical. His theory is that the feeling of inferiority is due to some actual organic inferiority.

In other words, he believes that a child who has a club foot, like Byron, or one subject to epileptic fits, like Dostoyevski, or one with an impediment which causes stammering, like Demosthenes, or one with a chronic tendency to constipation like Lincoln (the cases of great men could be multiplied endlessly), that such a child feels himself inferior to normal children; he feels that there is something the matter with him, that he has less chance of success, etc. This is the feeling of inferiority, the feeling of being under. And the deeper this feeling, the greater the reaction to it, the greater the striving to change the position about, so that instead of being under his fellows he is over them. Out of such defects, then, arise the great ambitions, or as Adler puts it, the “guiding fiction.” By this he means a phantasy of some great goal which the child dreams about and sets out to reach.

A classical case is that of Demosthenes. Because he stammered, because he was inferior in speech to other children, an ambition awoke not merely to be able to talk in the normal manner, but something far greater: namely, to be the greatest of orators, an ambition he actually achieved. But suppose he could not have achieved such a victory, suppose conditions had been such that it was impossible for him to be an orator? Then his incessant striving would prove futile, the feeling of inferiority would increase, and there would be a breakdown. The breakdown would be a neurosis, and he would be ready for a psycho-analyst.

Why did Napoleon set out to conquer Europe? His inordinate will-to-power could be traced back to a painful feeling of inferiority in his youth, which showed itself in the military school, where he was put to shame by his fellows. They, he must have felt, would become in time great generals and leaders in the army; hence, he must be even more than they, the general of generals.

As to the feeling of inferiority itself, Adler denotes it as the feeling of being feminine. Woman, he believes, has the psychology of being under, man that of being over, as shown in the sexual act itself. Besides, man is physically stronger than woman. Hence, if a man has an organic inferiority, he feels that he is not a man, and hence, that he is in some way feminine. All his striving therefore is to be masculine, and indeed, super-masculine. This striving Adler calls the masculine protest. One finds it in women also; a marked feeling of inferiority in a woman leading her to strive to be like a man, and a refusal to accept her own psychology.

Such, in brief, is the Adler theory. It owes many things to Nietzsche, who, in his “Thus Spake Zarathustra” teaches will-to-power as the guiding principle of life, who relegates woman to a lesser, man to a greater sphere, and who finds in the striving of the ego the dominant impulse of life.

IV.

THE BREAK BETWEEN FREUD AND JUNG.

At the time that Dr. Freud was making his discoveries in Vienna, Dr. Carl Jung, a young psychiatrist, was conducting certain experiments in Zurich, Switzerland. These were of a dry technical nature which need not be given here, but they led to a tentative theory of an unconscious mind. It was while he was engaged on these experiments that Jung first read the work of Freud. He knew at once that he had found his master and hastened to become Freud’s pupil and colleague. He did more than that. At that period Freud was the laughing stock of Vienna, and wherever his work penetrated. He was jeered and ridiculed for his fantastic notions, and was suffering the bitter fate of all pioneers. Jung was in a powerful position at Zurich, and at once proceeded to enlarge and deepen the fight for Freud. He became the most powerful exponent of the Freudian psychology, and helped to bring the new knowledge and new technic into its first acceptance by the world.

Freud looked upon Jung as upon a favorite son. They fought shoulder-to-shoulder, the work spread, and they were invited to this country to give lectures. In Switzerland, Austria, England and America the psycho-analyst made his appearance, and the world of the intelligentsia awoke with a shock to the sexual theory. Among the cultured everywhere there was discussion of the Oedipus complex, the repressions, the sexual perversions, the idea that much that we had thought purely spiritual, like art and religion, were merely masks for sexual complexes. The psycho-analytic movement, held firmly together by two great men, was forging ahead.

However, Jung, from his continued analysis of patients, and from his own experiences, was beginning to form doubts in his own mind. There was something, he began to think, inadequate in Freud’s theory. He hardly dared, at this time, to make any formal criticism; but finally, after a great conflict, he was moved, even inspired, to write his first great book. This book is entitled “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”

He has said of it that it was a voyage of discovery. He himself, when he started it, hardly knew to what depths it would lead him, to what conclusions it would force him. But when he was finished, he knew that he could no longer withhold his own point of view and that this would inevitably lead to a break with Freud.

It proved to be so. Freud was shocked and appalled. He sent the manuscript back with a letter in which their relationship was ended. He said that Jung had betrayed the psycho-analytic movement, that he had ventured out beyond the bounds of science, and that he was seeking to destroy the greatest values in the new psychology.

Of course such a break was inevitable, and in the end it proved fortunate. It set Jung free. He could now go on, without hindrance, in his great task, which led finally to the greatest contributions thus far made.

The break itself may be traced to a divergence between two theories of the unconscious. As will be remembered, Freud’s theory would define the unconscious as something which is produced after we are born, and when the repressions begin. All that is anti-social, that flies in the face of conventional morality and the law of the land, everything that is taboo, gets walled off from the conscious mind, and is henceforth the unconscious mind. The unconscious then is a storehouse of the evil, the thwarted, the unconventional, the instinctive.

Jung does not deny that a part of the unconscious is exactly of this nature. But in “The Psychology of the Unconscious” he proceeds to prove, by a wealth of material and a sureness of analysis, that the unconscious is something far deeper and greater than merely a personal bag of discards.

He finds in numerous typical dreams and phantasies of his patients that they reproduce symbols and stories as old as the human race. He shows that the human mind everywhere, among the most widely scattered peoples, and in different ages, produces the same typical myths, the same figures of deities and demons; and that the patient of today gives forth, in analysis, a similar mythology; and very often something which he, the patient, has been utterly ignorant of and which is beyond his understanding.

He finds further that man has always had what might be called a typical psychological fate; that the story of man’s inner life and development has always taken a certain form, embodied in the figure of the hero. The hero, in the myth, is always he who goes forth to conquer greatly, who overcomes dragons and supernatural powers, but who finally loses his power, is subjugated and dies an inner death. But out of this death he is reborn and appears with a new life, often magical, by which he goes on to his greater achievements.

Such a death and rebirth is pictured in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. It appears in a modern work, in “Jean-Christophe,” where the hero suffers a spiritual disintegration and can no longer compose music, but with the first breath of Spring, feels the new tides of life pouring into him and rises to the greatest heights of his creative power. Such, too, is doubtless the inner story of our greatest American poet, Walt Whitman. When he was about 35, and after suffering some deep personal reverse, he secluded himself on Long Island beside the sea for some weeks, and had a spiritual experience which led to his awakening as a poet and the beginning of “Leaves of Grass.”

What is this typical myth? It is known as the sun-myth, for the savage doubtless based it on the strange fact that the sun, after setting in the west, rose again the following morning in the east. This sun-myth, boiled down to its essentials, is somewhat as follows: The sun is the hero. He is born of the mother, the sea, in the east. He rises in his splendor and reaches the zenith. But now his strange descent begins, and when he reaches the west, he must re-descend into the waters of the sea, die again and re-enter the mother’s womb. Actually he is pictured as being devoured by a sea monster. In the belly of this monster he rides in the sea under the earth back toward the east. At first he lies supine; but finally, plucking up courage he begins to battle with the monster. Finally he kills him, and the body of the great fish floats to shore, where the hero, the sun, steps out reborn, and rises again in the east.

This story, based on something seen in nature, is found to be typical of man’s soul. And Jung discovered that wherever an analysis was carried far enough, this typical myth appeared in various forms in the dreams of the patient, and the patient went through an experience analogous to the myth.

What is this experience? A man has reached a high point of development and achievements. There comes upon him now a sense of deadness and futility, a period of disillusionment and turning away from the world, the experience which is described in the beginning of Goethe’s “Faust.” This inner death proceeds until he is lost in himself, until he is, in the language of the myth, devoured by the monster; and now he goes through a long period of inner suffering and groping until the time comes when a new life awakens and he goes back to the world of men with a greater energy, a new vision, and perhaps a new life-task. So, in the beginning of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” we see the hero step forth after his years of preparation in the wilderness to bring his message to the world of men.