Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/111

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I PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND PSYCHIATRY 365

been moved. We, as followers, found this procedure easier, because we were able to allow the attraction of the newly discovered fields for scientific thought to influence us. We must remember, however, that the narcissism is always ready to creep up again. This possibility threatens most easily from the side of morals, .-i><' religion, and scientific and philosophical systems.

While the rest of the psychiatrists awaited the further elaborat- ion of psychiatry chiefly through the improvement of instruments and their methods of use, Freud recognised that in the first in- stance the investigator should be improved and adapted to his task. He demands that the investigator should have analysed him- self or been analysed before he undertakes the study and treatment ^- '■ of patients. This procedure is indispensable and not to be substi-

"■f tuted by anything, not even by the profound study of psycho-

-f^,- analytical literature. He who adopts this course gains a widening

of his mental field of vision that henceforth becomes his most valuable instrument. Problems that were previously hidden in im- penetrable darkness become illuminated as by the sunrise. i^i , The field of the psychoses is not, as is imagined, the most

-M difficult, but the easiest field of psychology to work upon. Palaeo-

'ii ' psychic layers that otherwise lie deeply buried and can only be

,5^ reached after laborious mining are exposed to view in the psych-

oses. Those things which are betrayed in the life of the healthy person and the neurotic only through indications, the real value of which can only be recognised through the microscope of psycho- analysis, are visible to all, in caricature-like enlargement, in the mental patient. The only need is eyes that can see and ears that If^': can hear. But the investigator can neither hear nor see because

' he does not wish to see or hear, because the repressions of the

normal person prevent it.

Science always serves two different purposes, which the poet has symbolised clearly and briefly as the milch-cow and the godd- ess. The first of these is a social and above all a material pur- pose. The investigator's task is to bring a further portion of the external world that has been created by the mind by means of the sense organs of distance (hearing, sight, smell) into the reach of the sense organs of proximity (feeling, taste), and to get the useful part ready for incorporation. For this object, which is more r of service to society than to the investigator, it is necessary for

>■ the latter to sacrifice a part of his own personal happiness.