said: "On the strength of a case I wish to point out that the patient had never repressed his libido, against which he continually tried to secure himself."[1] Soon thereafter at a discussion in Vienna Adler said: "If you ask whence comes the repression, you are told: from culture. But if you ask whence comes culture, the reply is: from the repression. So you see it is only a question of a play on words." A small fragment of the sagacity used by Adler to defend his "nervous character" might have sufficed to show him the way out of this pettifogging argument. There is nothing mysterious about it, except that culture depends upon the acts of repression of former generations, and that each new generation is required to retain this culture by carrying out the same repressions. I have heard of a child that considered itself fooled and began to cry, because to the question: "Where do eggs come from?" it received the answer, "Eggs come from hens," and to the further question: "Where do the hens come from?" the information was "From the eggs," and yet this was not a play upon words. The child had been told what was true.
Just as deplorable and devoid of substance is all that Adler has said about the dream—that shibboleth of psychoanalysis. At first he considered the dream as a turning from the masculine to the feminine line, which simply means translating the theory of wish-fulfillment in dreams into the language of the "masculine protest." Later he found that the essence of the dream lies in the fact that it enables man to realize unconsciously what is denied him consciously. Adler should also be credited with the priority of confounding the dream with the latent dream-thoughts, on the cognition of which rests his idea of "prospective tendency." Maeder followed him in this, later on. In doing so he readily overlooks the fact that every interpretation of the dream which really tells nothing comprehensible in its manifest appearance rests upon the same dream-interpretation, whose assumptions and conclusions he is disputing. Concerning resistance Adler asserts that it serves to strengthen the patient against the physician. This is certainly correct. It means as much
- ↑ Korrespondenzbl., No. 5, Zürich, April, 1911.
