Otto Rank
Truth and Reality

[3] The main task, however, as indicated in "Genetische Psychologie" continues to be the presentation of the chief actor and at the same time chief onlooker, the individual ego, in this, his dual role. This involves not only the duality of actor and self-observer, but has yet another meaning, in that, for civilized man, the milieu is no longer the natural reality, the opposing force of an external world, but an artistic reality, created by himself which we, in its outer as in its inner aspects, designate as civilization. In this sense civilized man, even if he fights the outside world, is no longer opposed to a natural enemy but at bottom to himself, to his own creation, as he finds himself mirrored, particularly in manners and customs, morality and conventions, social and cultural institutions. The phenomenon thus described is of fundamental meaning for the understanding of the human being's relation to the outer world as well as to his fellow man. For while Freud's reality psychology emphasized essentially the influence of outer factors, of the milieu, upon the development of the individual and the formation of his character, even in "Der Künstler" I opposed to this biological principle, the spiritual principle which alone is meaningful in the development of the essentially human. This is based essentially on the conception that the inner world, taken in from the outside by means of identification has become in the course of time an independent power, which in its turn by way of projection, so influences and seeks to alter the external, that its correspondence to the inner is even more close. This relation to outer reality I designate as creation in contrast to adaptation, and comprehend as will phenomena. The indication of its psychological determinants and dynamic factors in terms of this will psychology, forms the main content of the following chapters.

This conception of the influencing and transforming of the milieu by the individual allows for the inclusion of the creative, the artist type, for whom there is no place in Freud's world picture where all individual expressions are explained as reactions to social influences or as biological instincts and therewith are reduced to something outside the individual. For with Freud the individual in the nucleus of his being (the so-called "id") is subject to the great natural laws, under the guise of the "repetition compulsion," while personality consists of the layers of identifica-

[4]

tions which form the basis of the parental super-ego. This perhaps may account for the great mass, the average, although even here it can be true only roughly, but it can never explain the creative type nor the so-called "neurotic,' who represents the artist's miscarried counterpart. In this cursory survey I should like to characterize the creative type, in a preliminary way only, in this regard, that he is able, in a way soon to be described more closely, to create voluntarily from the impulsive elements and moreover to develop his standards beyond the identifications of the super-ego morality to an ideal formation which consciously guides and rules this creative will in terms of the personality. The essential point in this process is the fact that he evolves his ego ideal from himself, not merely on the ground of given but also of self-chosen factors which he strives after consciously.

As a result the ego, instead of being caught between the two powerful forces of fate, the inner id and the externally derived super-ego, develops and expresses itself creatively. The Freudian ego driven by the libidinal id and restrained by parental morality, becomes almost a nonentity, a helpless tool for which there remains no autonomous function, certainly not willing whether this be creative or only a simple goal conscious striving. In my view the ego is much more than a mere show place for the standing conflict between two great forces. Not only is the individual ego naturally the carrier of higher goals, even when they are built on external identifications, it is also the temporal representative of the cosmic primal force no matter whether one calls it sexuality, libido, or id. The ego accordingly is strong just in the degree to which it is the representative of this primal force and the strength of this force represented in the individual we call the will. This will becomes creative, when it carries itself on through the ego into the super-ego and there leads to ideal formations of its own, which, if you will, in the last analysis arise from the id, at all events not from without. On this account, the creative man of every type has a much stronger ego than the average man, as we see not only in genius but also in the neurotic, whose convulsed hypertrophied ego is just what creates the neurosis, psychologically a creative achievement just as much as any other. The creative type, whose denial we see in the inferior neurotic is

[5]

therefore not only characterized by a stronger impulse life, but also by a wholly special utilization of it, the most important aspect of which I consider the ideal formation from the own self (i.e. on the basis of the own impulsive make-up) whose "negative" we have to recognize in the neurotic symptom formation. However, while the neurotic so strengthens his repressions against his stronger than average impulsive self, that they finally make him completely incapable of willing and acting, in the creative man there occurs a qualitatively different impulse displacement, which manifests itself psychologically as ideal formation with simultaneous expression in conscious creative activity of will. Such a conception makes creative power and creative accomplishment comprehensible for the first time, rather than the insipid and impotent concept of sublimation, which prolongs a shadowy existence in psychoanalysis. From this viewpoint one could say that with human beings sometimes even impulsive expressions are only a weaker, less satisfactory sub- stitute for that which the creative power of will would like. Therefore, as it were, not only the phantasy-produced substitute for unattained reality, but even the reality which is attainable, is only a weaker substitute for the inexhaustible willing.

[9] In this deeper sense psychology can of necessity be nothing other than a psychology of consciousness; yes, even more, a psychology of consciousness in its various aspects and phases of development. We shall examine later this relativity, not only of all conscious human knowledge, but of all phenomena of consciousness itself. First of all we face the whole problem of psychology, namely, that we become aware of the actual driving factors in our psychic life always only through the medium of consciousness, but that this consciousness itself is nothing firm, constant, or unalterable. There results from this situation a series of difficulties without knowledge of which every psychology is impossible, since the understanding of these contradictions forms the very warp and woof of phychology as such. These difficulties are: first, that we, as said, are aware of the will phenomena only through the medium of consciousness; second, that this conscious self offers us no fixed standpoint for observation of these phenomena, but itself ceaselessly alters, displaces and broadens them. This leads to the third and perhaps most important point, namely, that we can observe these fluctuating phenomena of consciousness itself only through a kind of super-consciousness which we call self-consciousness.

The difficulties are complicated still more seriously when we take into consideration the fact that consciousness itself and its development are determined essentially by will phenomena or at least are influenced in far reaching fashion . We can hardly do justice to this highly complicated state of affairs when we say that a constant interpretation and reinterpretation takes place from both sides. Consciousness is constantly interpreted by will and the various levels of will, yes, consciousness originally is itself probably a will phenomenon; that is, consciousness was an instrument for the fulfilment of will before it advanced to the will controlling power of self-consciousness and finally of analytic hyperconsciousness, which on its side again interprets will and will phenomena continuously in order to make it useful for its momentary interests. If we actually want to pursue psychology we must protect ourselves from extending further this constantly reciprocal process of interpretation by any kind of theory formation. Theory formation of every kind is then only

[10]

an attempt to oppose to the manifold spontaneous attempts at interpretation by will and consciousness a single interpretation as constant, lasting, true. This, however, on the basis of the considerations just presented, is exactly anti-psychological, since the essence of psychic processes consists in change and in the variability of the possibilities of interpretation. The compulsion to theory formation corresponds then to a longing after a firm hold, after something constant, at rest, in the flight of psychic events. Is there perhaps some way out, which might free us from this external compulsion to interpretation or at least let us rest a moment beyond it? Certainly it is not the way of historical or genetic analysis. For aside from the fact that even the final elements to which we can arrive by this path still represent phenomena of interpretation, it is also unavoidable that on the uninterrupted analytic path to these elements we should fall upon the interpretation compulsion of consciousness and of the will also. There remains therewith psychologically no other recourse than just the recognition of this condition and perhaps also an attempt to understand why it must be so. This would be the purely psychological problem, beyond which there begins again the kind of interpretation which we designate as knowledge in the broadest sense of the word. This knowledge, however, is not an interpretative understanding, but an immediate experiencing, therefore a form of the creative, perhaps the highest form of which man is capable, certainly the most dangerous form, because it can finally lead to pain, if it opposes itself to living inhibitingly, instead of confirming it pleasurably. We shall treat in the following chapters this contrast between knowing and experiencing which culminates finally in the problem of "truth or reality" in order eventually to recognize in the opposition of the most longed for psychie states of happiness and salvation, the double role of consciousness or of conscious knowing, as the source of all pleasure but also of all suffering. 10 “ Here I should like to go further by way of introduction as far as the location of the problem itself is concerned, and esti- mate the value of knowledge for the understanding of our own soul life. We sought before for a way out from the contradictory interpretative compulsion, in which will excites consciousness and consciousness excites will. It is that kind of knowledge which 11 one can best designate as philosophic because at least its tend- ency is directed not upon this or that content but upon the existence of the phenomena themselves. The philosopher creates, as little as the artist or the religious believer, merely from his own personality. What manifests itself in all of them, although in different form, is at once something supra-individual, natural, cosmic, which accordingly and to this extent also has value some- how for all humanity. At all events here we run against the problem of form, which is just the essential thing psycho- logically. But in the creative individual, in genius, there is mani- fested, becomes more or less conscious, not only a bit of the primal, but just as much the individual, the personal. How far and to what extent the knowledge is universally valid depends entirely on the relation of these two elements in this mixture and their effect on each other. At all events, the individual is liable to the danger, or at least the attempt, of again interpret- ing the universal which becomes conscious of itself in him in terms of his individual personal development, that is, speaking psychologically, of representing it as an expression of his will and not of a supra-individual force (compulsion). This is the psy- chology of the world view which in contrast to theory building, as we have previously characterized it, as flight from the in- terpretative doubt, represents an immediate creative experience not only of the individual himself, but of the cosmos manifested in him. Again here, on the highest peak of the human elevation of consciousness and its creative expression, we run upon the same basic conflict of will and compulsion which goes through the whole development of man and the process of becoming con- scious. In the creative individual this conflict is manifest only at times, and we can best describe it thus, that nature becomes even more conscious of herself in a man who at the same time with the increasing knowledge of himself which we designate as indi- vidualization, tries always to free himself further from the primi- tive. It has to do, therefore, with a conflictual separation of the individual from the mass, undertaken and continued at every step of development into the new, and this I should like to desig- nate as the never completed birth of individuality. For the whole consequence of evolution from blind impulse through conscious 12 will to self conscious knowledge, seems still somehow to corre- spond to a continued result of births, rebirths and new births, which reach from the birth of the child from the mother, beyond the birth of the individual from the mass, to the birth of the creative work from the individual and finally to the birth of knowledge from the work. In this sense, the contrast of will and consciousness as we have recognized it as the psychological prob- lem par excellence, somehow corresponds to the biological con- trast of procreation and birth. At all events we find in all these phenomena, even at the highest spiritual peak, the struggle and pain of birth, the separation out of the universal, with the pleasure and bliss of procreation, the creation of an own indi- vidual cosmos, whether it be now physically our own child, crea- tively our own work or spiritually our own self. At bottom it is and remains our own act of will, which we oppose to the outer force of reality as the inner pressure after truth. “

[13] Why must will be denied if it actually plays so great a role in reality, or to formulate it in anticipation, why is the will valued as bad, evil, reprehensible, unwelcome, when it is the power which consciously and positively, yes even creatively, forms both the self and the environment? If one puts the problem thus, then one sees at the same time that this apparently necessary contradiction is not only the basic problem of all psychology, but lies at the root of all religious dogma as well as of all philosophic speculation. In a word, not only all religion and philosophy are avowedly moral-

[14]

istic but psychology was also and must continue to be, as long as it cannot place itself beyond this will problem and thus be able to solve it. Religion and philosophy are, as we know, highly valued because of their moralistic tendencies and their ethical content while it is the pride of psychologists to deny this weakness in their science. Certainly psychology should not be moralistic, but it was necessarily so as long and as far as it busied itself with the content of soul life which is saturated and pierced through and through with moralistic principles. To an unusual degree this is true for therapeutically oriented psychoanalysis and that constitutes in my mind its greatest advantage as an educational method. As psychology it has been obliged in its theory formation to justify this moral-pedagogic character in part and in part to deny it. However anti-moralistic psychoanalysis may seem, at bottom for Freud, will—or whatever he understands by that term—is exactly as "bad" as for the Old Testament man or the Buddhist or the Christian, exactly as reprehensible as it still is for Schopenhauer or other philosophers who played reason against it.

The problem therefore is not peculiarly psychoanalytic, not even purely psychological, but cultural and human. Its solution depends upon one single point. The conception of will as evil, its condemnation or justification, is the basic psychological fact which we must understand and explain instead of criticizing it or taking it as presupposition or finally as a primary phenomenon as psychoanalysis has done in the concept of guilt . That is the point at which real psychology begins. That psychoanalysis could not go on beyond this point is understandable from its nature as a therapeutic method. Psychoanalysis began as therapy, its knowledge comes from that source and psychotherapy according to its nature must be oriented morally or at least normatively. Whether it has to do with the medical concept of normality or with the social concept of adaptation, therapy can never be without prejudice for it sets out from the standpoint that something should be otherwise than it is, no matter how one may formulate it. Psychology, on the contrary, should describe what it is, how it is, and, where possible, explain why it must be so.

[17] My contention goes far beyond this conclusion in maintaining that psychoanalysis betrays much more of the psychology of the therapist, of the helper, of the active willing person, only it represents it as the psychology of the patient, the seeker for help, the willness. This is not to deny the psychological value of psychoanalysis in which as I believe, we can study the fundamental problems of human soul life as never before and nowhere else, only we must first agree on certain basic questions upon whose clarification our fruitful utilization of psychoanalysis depends. In a word, the psychology of the normal man, the average type given us by psychoanalysis is in reality the psychology of the creative man, not only of Freud, as Michaelis has shown beautifully in the single case, but of the type. It unveils to us the psychology of the strong man of will, who while almost God himself and creator of men in his practice, in his theory must deny his godlikeness with all its characteristics and represent himself as a small, weak, helpless creature, a person actually seeking help and comfort.

Although enough human tragedy lies in this apparently unavoidable fate of the creative type, the denial continued into the work, the philosophy, darkens its noble aspect. For the work born out of this superhuman internal struggle to represent an

[18]

infallible revelation of the latest universally valid psychological truth may be comprehensible as a reaction against the content of the system, but brings so many trifling features into the picture of the personality as well that the tragedy almost turns into a farce. Nietzsche, who experienced thoroughly the whole tragedy of the creative man and admitted in his "amor fati" the willingness to pay for it, is in my opinion the first and has been up to now the only psychologist. He was at all events the first who recognized the "moral" danger in every philosophizing and psychologizing and sought to avoid it. He would have succeeded still better, that is at a lesser cost, if he had recognized the necessity of the "moral" in all psychologizing (including the therapeutic) instead of analyzing the philosophers from that viewpoint in so masterly a way. At any rate he recognized the problem and was right to see in it a danger for himself first of all, although correctly understood it is not the common danger he made it. In this sense he is at all events much less philosopher, that is, moralist, than Freud for example and accordingly also much more a psychologist than he. Certainly his freedom from office and calling which he had to buy so dearly had much to do with it. In no case, however, was he a therapist who needed a psychological justification, no, not even a patient, a seeker for help, in spite of all his illnesses. He was himself, which is the first requirement for a psychologist, and therefore he was also the first and only one who could affirm the evil will, who even glorified it. That was his psychological product for which he paid not with system building and scientific rationalization, but with personal suffering, with his own experience.

Nietzsche's contribution, therefore, based on Schopenhauer's important discovery of will, is the separation of the will from the guilt problem (the moral). He has not completely solved the problem, could not solve it, because for its solution the analytic experience was necessary. By which I mean not so much the experiences of the analyst through the patient, but also and much more the experience of humanity with psychoanalysis. As Nietzsche's will affirmation represents a reaction to the will denial of the Schopenhauerian system, so Freud's theory is again to be understood as a throwback from Nietzsche's attitude to an al-

[19]

most Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism. I do not doubt that my will psychology which has arisen from personal experiences, represents in its turn a reaction against Freud's "making evil" of the will; I shall show further that the whole history of mankind in the individual himself and in the race represents just such a sequence of will action and reaction, of affirmation and denial. I shall then show also that in the historical developmental process of this will conflict, as in its individual manifestations we have to do not merely with a repetition in the sense of the Freudian fatalism but that a continuous evolution can be traced in terms of the broadening of consciousness and the development of self-consciousness. For as little as Freud's theory is a "repetition" of the closely related one of Schopenhauer, so little has my will psychology to do with Nietzsche's "will to power," with which Nietzsche has again finally smuggled evaluation into psychology. With this comparison I mean only to point to a common psychological aspect of experience, which necessarily conditions these reactions, and which we intend to make the object of our investigation.

The will in itself is not as "evil' as the Jew-hating Schopenhauer believes along with the Old Testament, nor as "good"' as the sick Nietzsche would like to see it in his glorification. It exists as a psychological fact and is the real problem of psychology, first as to its origin, how it has evolved in man, and second why we must condemn it as "bad" or justify it as "good," instead of recognizing and affirming it as necessary . The epistemological question, whence it comes, what it means psychologically, will throw a light upon the ethical question of condemnation or justification in the answering of which, however, we must guard against bringing in moralistic evaluations before we have recognized their psychological source. Which is to say also that we must guard against bringing therapeutic viewpoints into psychology with Freud, or pedagogical aims with Adler, or ethical values with Jung, for at bottom they all involve one and the same cardinal error. That the will must be justified in therapy, we already know, yes, even the patient is caught in the denial of it, that is in guilt feeling, and his seeking for help is just an expression of this will conflict. That the will in pedagogy

[20]

is reprehensible, goes without saying, for pedagogy is obviously a breaking of the will as ethics is a will limitation and therapy will justification.

If I said we must guard ourselves against bringing in therapeutic elements, that is, moral evaluations into psychology, then I must elucidate this further before I go into a sketch of a philosophy of the psychic (seelisch). Although my will psychology has resulted not wholly from analytic experience, but also represents the result of my philosophic, pedagogic, religious and cultural studies, still I will not deny that it was essentially analytic practice that crystallized for me all of these various materials, differing in kind and value, into a psychological experience. I must present these analytic experiences elsewhere not only from lack of space but also on objective grounds in order to exclude as much as possible a mixture of the two viewpoints since they correspond to two different world views. But this external separation would not necessarily guarantee an inner separation if I had not at the same time in my analytic work struggled through to a technique which tries to avoid the therapeutic in the moral pedagogical sense. What, you will probably ask, is this new method and what does it aim at if not re-education since any cure for mental suffering is excluded anyway? To say it in one word, the aim is self development; that is, the person is to develop himself into that which he is and not as in education and even in analytic therapy to be made into a good citizen, who accepts the general ideals without contradiction and has no will of his own. This, as Keyserling recently noted pertinently, is the confessed purpose of Adler's leveling pedagogical cure and as Prinzhorn has seen, the unconfessed but clear purpose of Freudian psychoanalysis which purports to be revolutionary but is really conservative. If one understood the will psychology only a little, one must at least know that this conservatism is the best method of breeding revolutionary, willful men who for the most part are driven into

[21]

the neurosis by the oppressive majority when they want to express their wills. No, the man who suffers from pedagogical, social and ethical repression of will, must again learn to will, and not to force on him an alien will is on the other hand the best protection against excesses of will which for the most part only represent reactions. In my view the patient should make himself what he is, should will it and do it himself, without force or justification and without need to shift the responsibility for it .

How I present the method leading to this end and utilize it practically, I will discuss elsewhere. Here it has this value only; to show how and in how far I can apply my practical experiences to the founding of my will psychology justifiably because as a matter of fact they are not therapeutic in the moralistic pedagogical sense but are constructive . Otherwise I should not have succeeded at all in understanding what a tremendous role will psychology plays in general. In the Freudian analysis the patient is measured by a minimum scale, as it were, as perhaps the weak-sighted by the ophthalmologist in order to be brought up to normal vision. This minimum scale consists of the primitive fear pictures of the Œdipus and castration complexes together with all related sadistic, cannibalistic and narcissistic tendencies. Measured by these the modern civilized man certainly feels himself better than the more evil primitive, at all events not worse, and thus we get the basis for the therapeutic justification. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not making fun of this, any more than of the necessary profession of the ophthalmologist or the normal vision of my chauffeur. But if, for example, a weak visioned painter can create better pictures when he works without glasses, it would be folly to educate him to the wearing of spectacles because he then would see the same as his neighbor the banker . It is just as foolish to educate a man who is inhibited in his self-development by the norm of the Œdipus complex, which he seeks to escape.

[24] Consciousness, as an instrument of knowledge turned toward the inside seeks truth, that is, inner actuality in contrast to the outer truth of the senses, the so-called "reality." Instinct lifted into the ego sphere by consciousness is the power of will, and at the same time a tamed, directed, controlled instinct, which manifests itself freely within the individual personality, that is, creatively. Indeed it is as free toward the outer as toward the inner. But only the inner effects interest us here, first upon the id, the instinct life itself, and next upon the higher super-ego aspects and ideal formations of the self. Just as the creative will represents the conscious expression of instinct, in a banal sense the act, so emotion represents the conscious awareness of instinct, that is, the emotional tone is an index of the "what? of the will. In both cases, however, it is consciousness which lends to the phenomenon its authentic psychological significance.

[25] From this constructive psychology it is only a step to a widely comprehensive point of view which I designate as a philosophy of the psychic because it includes not only the psychological problem of "Will and Force" but also the epistemological problem of "Truth and Reality," the ethical problem of "Creation and Guilt" and finally, the religious problem of "Happiness and Salvation." And I believe it is impossible to handle or to understand any one without the others. For at the moment when we perceive the mechanism of the instinctive drive set in motion, molded into ethical willing by the conscious ego and this has been abstracted from a wealth of observation and experience), a reacton results with hitherto incomprehensible inexorableness, a reaction which psychoanalysis has designated as guilt feeling. This guilt feeling in spite of all the efforts of psychoanalysis remains not only an unsolved riddle, but in my opinion has led the whole of psychology astray, including psychoanalysis. For this guilt feeling which seems to enter so inevitably into the functioning of the psychic mechanism like the friction in the operation of a machine, leads to the rationalization of our motives, to the interpretation of our emotions, to the falsifying of truth, and to the doubting of the justification of our will. However, as soon as we restore to the will its psychological rights, the whole of psychology becomes of necessity a psychology of consciousness,

[26]

which it is anyway according to its nature, and the "psychology of the unconscious" unveils itself to us as one of the numerous attempts of mankind to deny the will in order to evade the conscious responsibility following of necessity therefrom . The unavoidable guilt feeling shows the failure of this attempt, is as it were the "neurotic" throw-back of the denied responsibility. This enthroning of the conscious will upon its natural rights is no backward step from psychoanalytic knowledge, but a necessary step forward and beyond it to include the psychological understanding of the psychoanalytic world view itself.

[31] In the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, ascribes this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will . Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it. The heroic myth strives to justify this creative will through glorifying its deeds, while religion reminds man that he himself is but a creature dependent on cosmic forces. So the creative will automatically brings the guilt reaction with it, as the self reducing depression follows the manic elation. In a word, will and guilt are the two complementary sides of one and the same phenomenon, which Schopenhauer, resting on the Hindoo teachings, has perceived and comprehended most deeply of all moderns. A philosophy of will accordingly must either be deeply pessimistic if it emphasizes the guilt side, or extremely optimistic like Nietzsche if it affirms its creative power.

In psychoanalysis we find both aspects but not harmoniously united, rather they stand side by side as one of the numerous unreconciled contradictions. As therapy, analysis is optimistic, believes as it were in the good in men and in some kind of capacity for and possibility of salvation. In theory it is pessimistic; man has no will and no creative power, is driven by the id and repressed by the super-ego authorities, is unfree and still guilty. Here lies before us so transparent a contradiction that one can only wonder how it was possible and must again recognize therein a psychological problem so fundamental that it leads far beyond a critique of psychoanalysis. Free will belongs to the idea of guilt or sin as inevitably as day to night, and even if there were none of the numerous proofs for the inner freedom of the conscious will, the fact of human consciousness of guilt alone would be sufficient to prove the freedom of will as we understand it psychologically beyond a doubt . We say man reacts as if he were guilty, but if he reacts so it is because he is guilty psychologically, feels himself responsible, consequently no psychoanalysis in the

[32]

world can relieve him of this guilt feeling by any reference to complexes however archaic. Therefore one should not only permit the individual to will but actually guide him to willing in order at least to justify constructively the guilt feeling which he can by no means escape. I do not mean by rationalizations, religious, pedagogic or therapeutic, but through his own creative action, through the deed itself.

[35] The problem of consciousness has yet another aspect which is opposed to this termination in tormenting self-consciousness and this is consciousness as a source of pleasure. Consciousness origially as a tool of the will and an instrument for its accomplishment or for justification is a source of pleasure just as is the carrying out of will itself. Yes, the consciousness which confirms will and approves of its accomplishment is the very source of pleasure. In this psychological sense, pleasure and displeasure are actually only two opposite conscious aspects of will phenomena . The putting over of will in living plus the consciousness of it in experience is the mechanism of the pleasure feeling which

[36]

we call happiness. It is at once a double, really a redoubled enjoyment, first in the act of will itself and again in the reflecting mirror of consciousness which says "yes" once more to the will achievement. Only when consciousness is placed in the service of the counter-will and manifests itself as a tendency to repression or denial, do we feel unpleasantness and experience in the sum- mation of painful feeling and the simultaneous consciousness thereof, the sense of pain contrasted with pleasure which also represents a reflection phenomenon of consciousness. Both reactions relate to the present attitude of consciousness, to the will expression revealed in experience. Knowledge, on the contrary, is more an historical process , which follows experience and feeling, although it is often very immediate. Knowledge separates consciousness from experiencing, or rather is itself a consequence of this separation and has the tendency to preserve the pleasurable, to remember it and to deny and forget the painful.

[39] Truth therefore is the conscious concomitant, yes, the affirmation of the constructive or creative completion of will on the intellectual level, just as we understand the perception of pleasure as the emotional affirmation of will expression. Accordingly truth brings intellectual pleasure as doubt brings intellectual pain. Truth as positive emotional experience means "it is good, that I will is right, is pleasurable." It is, therefore, willing itself the affirmation of which creates intellectual pleasure. That we do not know truth in its psychological nature but set it up as it were outside of every psychology, yes, as the criterion of psychology itself, as again related to its content. If we did not do that, this last intellectual way to justify will, the will to truth as a

[40]

drive to knowledge which shall make an end of doubt would also be denied us. Once more we cannot enjoy completely the pleasure of truth seeking because it is an expression of our own will which even here on the level of knowledge and self knowledge needs the content of a general truth equally valid for all, in order to deny its own truth, its own individuality. And here, in my opinion, we hit upon the most paradoxical phenomenon of the human soul, the understanding of which I consider the most important result of my relativity theory of knowledge. It concerns the law of continuous development of our general psychological knowledge. This results not as one might think pedagogically, by the handing over and broadening of the already known, whereby he who follows knows more or sees better. No, it is not only that he knows more, he knows differently because he himself is different. And this "being different" is related to the continuous development of self consciousness, which alters the whole individuality because it determines it. This knowing differently about ourselves, about our own psychic processes is in this sense only a new interpretation of ourselves, with which and in which we free ourselves from the old, the bygone, the past, and above all from our own past. Creative individuals, in their advancing knowledge, represent therefore only the increased self knowledge of mounting self consciousness which manifests itself in them. Only in this sense can their truth also serve as the truth and not in relation to any extra-psychological content of the truth-emotion which transforms the positive affirmation of willing into conviction.

With this separation of the content of truth from the feeling of trueness, there is revealed to us the problem of truth and reality in its complete practical meaning, as well as in its psychological and epistemological aspect. The only "trueness" in terms of actual psychic reality is found in emotion, not in thinking, which at best denies or rationalizes truth, and not necessarily in action unless it follows from feeling and is in harmony with it. This, however, is seldom the case because the will for the most part does not permit it but preserves for itself the supremacy over the sphere of action . Then, however, action ensues either on the basis of conscious thought guided by will or is the expression of an affect and is, therefore, not emotionally true in either case. For the most part it stands thusm that the denial tendency arising

[41]

from the negative origin of will and ruling our entire spiritual life in the sphere of thought and action, particularly as far as it concerns our relations to other people, manifests itself as self-deception concerning its own emotions, but really is the truth. The paradox therein is this, that exactly what we pretend consciously to be the truth, this it actually is psychically. It is only that we attach to emotion, as it were, this intellectual denial in order not to admit it to ourselves and the other. Again the will—in its negative form—presses in past emotion and must deny even while it sanctions it. This is the psychological side of the situation. In relation to practical action, to behavior, the result is that we pride ourselves on playing a role when it has to do with true emotional reaction. We actually play, then, what we are in truth, but perceive it as untrue, as false, because again we cannot accept ourselves without rationalization. Just so, in the exaggeration of an action or reaction, the more genuine it is, the more we perceive it as voluntary exaggeration. (I play the injured role, means, I am injured.)

The understanding of this relation between truth and reality is not only highly important psychologically as it reveals to us the psychic truth-status of lying, pretension, dramatization, but also practically for judging the actions resulting therefrom. This explains why we rightly judge a man by his actions and these again according to their manifest appearance , as not only the laity but also justice and education do. For the psychic motivation, upon which one finally stumbles with careful analysis, may be psychically true but it is not actually like the act itself whose psychological understanding always includes its interpretation in terms of the will-guilt problem. Accordingly, therefore, the so-called Freudian slip is psychologically truer than the correct behavior which always rests on a denial of what we really want to do and which usually comes through only in blunders where at the same time it is made ineffective, as also in the dream through the sleeper's incapacity for action. Here also light falls upon the peculiar phenomenon of the intentional blunder, in whose mechanism the emotionally true intention again betrays itself. In this sense the majority of our actions as we have previously described in conscious acting, pretending, falsehood, are really would-be slips.

[42]

From this results not only a new comprehension of human behavior, but also an understanding of it, a view of life that is therapeutic in an anti-analytic sense . It is to the effect that our seeking the truth in human motives for acting and thinking is destructive. With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer. The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance as essence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he be. At the moment when we begin to search after truth we destroy reality and our relation to it. Be it that we find in the beloved person in truth a substitute for the mother, or for another person, or for ourselves. Be it that, just reversed, we establish through analysis that we really love the hated person, but must displace this love upon another person, because our proud will does not permit that we confess this to ourselves. In a word, the displacements are the real. Reality unveils itself to analysis always as something displaced, psychologically untrue. This is a cognitive fact but no life principle. It is not at all a matter of putting an end to these displacements because it is impossible as the analytic situation teaches us best of all, where the patient only continues this displacement process further, in denying the actual feeling relation to the analyst, and displacing it upon other persons or situations. This displacement, if it succeeds, we regard and rightly so as healing, for this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism, but the essence of reality, the—as it were—continuous blunder. This is also the authentic wisdom of the Greek Œdipus myth, whose hero would live happily in his displaced world of appearance if he were not driven by his intellectual pride, the will to truth, to expose his reality as lies, as appearance, as falsehood . He carries out his will pleasurably in the search for truth, in the overcoming of obstacles, but suffers in the content of what he finds, which brings to consciousness the denied emotions (in the case of Œdipus, for his parents).

[44] Psychoanalytic therapy then works therapeutically for the neurotic in that it offers him new contents for the justification of his will in the form of scientific truth. It works therefore on the basis of illusion exactly like religion, art, philosophy and love, the great spontaneous psychotherapies of man , as I called them in "Der Künstler." On the other hand, the psychotherapy which lets the individual first of all accept himself and through that learn to accept reality, must also, according to its nature, use illusions not truth in the psychological sense because it is that from which the neurotic suffers. In this sense, psychoanalysis too is therapeutic but only so long or with those individuals who are still capable of this degree of illusion and with a class of neurotics whom we see today, this is often no longer possible. The insoluble conflict in which psychoanalysis itself is caught arises because it wants to be theory and therapy at the same time and this is just as irreconcilable as truth with reality.

[49] we see man in various situations, but especially in the so-called neurotic reactions, think and act as if he were ruled by two wills which struggle against each other, as formerly the own will struggled against an external, opposing will. These two factors which lie at the root of all dualistic world views, from the Persian Zarathustrianism to the system of Schopenhauer, were described by Freud in the beginning as the conscious and the unconscious, later with a deepened meaning, as the ego and the id . Accordingly unconsciousness was at first identified with sexuality, consciousness with the ego; while Freud later desexualized the id somewhat or rather made it more cosmic, on the other hand he ascribed to the ego unconscious elements also. This connecting of new terminology with old contents is more confusing than clarifying, especially as the ego plays a relatively slight role with Freud despite its unconscious elements because it is ruled by the two great powers, the id and the super-ego, which represents the moral code. I have no occasion to go back to this terminology here, because I would like to describe the phenomena just as they present themselves to me, except to make clear where and in how far my conception differs from the former one.

[51] In contrast to Adler, however, I do not believe that the individual must continuously prove his own strength of will because he feels inferior, and therefore is really weak. I believe much more that he could never prove his strength if he were not actually strong, if he did not have just that powerful a will. Here again the problem is why the individual cannot accept his own will, cannot admit it or affirm it, but is compelled to reject and deny it, in other words, to replace it with a "must." But just this denial tendency brings with it secondarily the guilt and inferiority feeling which really says, "I ought not to have such a strong will, or in general any will at all." In this sense, the powerful compulsion of the biological sexual urge is raised to a representative of the will, whose individual freedom is then justified by the generic compulsion. Herein lies the psychological motive for the tie-up of the conscious individual will with the generic sex drive, as significant as it is fateful, also the origin of the sexual guilt feeling since the guilt for willing falls into the sexual sphere by displacement and at the same time is denied and justified.

The explanations that psychoanalysis and also the Adlerian doctrine give for these phenomena of guilt and inferiority seem to me unsatisfactory because they do not meet the real problem at all, that is, the denial of will from which secondarily follow guilt and inferiority. The explanation given formerly is that the will of the child has been so broken by the authority of parents, that it can no longer trust itself to will, in a word, experiences anxiety which was added to it from the outside. Not only does every educational experiment contradict this, but also experiences in the psychology of the neuroses and creative personalities testify that the fact is other and deeper. Our conflicts in general go back to much deeper causes than external social restrictions even if we conceive them psychologically with Freud as internal super-ego formation or with Adler as inner inferi-

52

ority feeling, springing from the externally inferior status of the child. Probably in the beginning we were bound to our milieu, which, however, we are able to outgrow, and just so to a great extent we have remained bound by nature in our sexual life. But what characterizes man or is made to by himself, perhaps unfortunately, is just the fact that his conscious will increases to a power equal to the outer environmental influences and the inner instinctual claims, and this we must take into account in order to understand the individual in all his reactions. Our will is not only able to suppress the sex urge, but is just as able to arouse it through conscious effort, to increase it and to satisfy it. Perhaps our will is able to do this because it, itself, is a descendant, a representative of the biological will-to-live become conscious, creating itself in self maintenance and reproduction, which in the last analysis is nothing more than supra-individual self maintenance. When this tendency to perpetual self maintenance of the species carries over to the individual, there results the powerful will whose manifestations bring with them guilt reactions because they strive for an enrichment of the individual, biologically at the cost of the species, ethically at the expense of the fellow man.

This brings us to the fundamental thought of my whole viewpoint which I have already expressed in principle in "Der Künstler," namely, that instinct and inhibition, will and counter-will do not correspond to any original dualism, but in the last analysis always represent a kind of inner self limitation of one's own power and, therefore, since everything has its roots within, the outer reflects more than it creates the inner. This conception as was emphasized likewise in "Der Künstler," relates in particular to all kinds of sexual conflicts which arise not through any kind of outer prohibition but through inner inhibition of the own will, by the counter-will. It explains also the resistance which Freud's sexual theory has met and necessarily must meet since it is an expression of the same conflict, the understanding of which leads us out of all the futile discussions which psychoanalysis has occasioned. Freud said: "Sexuality is the strong-

[53]

est"; the answer was—"No, the will can control it to a great degree." And both sides were right. But each emphasized only one side, instead of recognizing the relationship between them and understanding the conflict in its essential meaning. Freud has gradually yielded and in his castration and super-ego theory recognizes the power of the factors which inhibit sexuality. But they are for him external anxiety factors and remain so even later, when he internalizes them in the super-ego, although they establish themselves as the court of morals which evokes the uncontrollable guilt reactions. But guilt feeling is something other than internalized anxiety, as it is more than fear of itself, of the claim of instinct, just as the ethical judgments are something more than introjected parental authority.

In order to understand what they are and how they arise, we turn back to the struggle of ego will against race will represented in sexuality, which actually represents a struggle of the child against any pressure that continues within him. In the so-called latency period as Freud has it (between early childhood and puberty) the ego of the individual, his own will, is strengthened and has turned, for the most part in revolutionary reactions, against the parents and other authorities that it has not chosen itself. In the struggle against sexuality which breaks in at that point, the ego, as it were, calls to its aid the earlier contested parental inhibitions and takes them as allies against the more powerful sex drive. This introduction of the will motive makes the mysterious process of the introjection of parental authority comprehensible psychologically for the first time. Hitherto it had to be forced upon the child from the outside and this force must obviously be maintained because the child opposes the acceptance with his will, his counter-will. Moreover the child has no occasion to make of these actual outer restrictions an inner censor, and even if it had reasons, its counter-will would resist the acceptance of force. The child obeys because it wins love, avoids punishment and lessens its own inner control. But it does not do these things of its own free will; on the contrary, prohibition strengthens the impulse, as we know, just as permission lessens the desire. In puberty, however, where the individual is awakened on the one side to autonomy of will and on the other defends himself against the pressure of the racial sex urge, he has

[54]

a strong will motive for making his own these early parental prohibitions and all that he has learned to know meantime in moralistic inhibitions, in order to use them in his encounter with sexuality. Here the individual forms his own super-ego because he needs these moral norms for his own will victory over the sex impulse. Again it is a victory which many a time is bought at too dear a price and must be paid for by a life long dependency on this moral code.

The constructive formation and creative development from what Freud calls super-ego to what I call ideal-formation from the self is a highly complex process which is accomplished in the typical forms of the will conflict and under its pressure. It consists first in the fact that the individual who earlier made his own only externally, limitations accepted of necessity, now affirms them in the service of his own will interests. This affirmation of a condition already established earlier under pressure, is a very important factor psychologically, yes, is the essential psychological factor; for the fate of the individual depends on the attitude he takes to the given factors, whether these happen to be a part of environment, or the sexual constitution itself. This "I will, because I must," is, as is easily seen, the positive opposite of the denying attitude which we formulated in the sentence, "I do not will at all, but I obey a force! The whole difference lies in the fact that this force as external cannot be borne and causes the will to react negatively as denial. But if this outer force becomes inner, then there arise two possibilities, the one of which leads to neurotic reactions, the other to ethical standards. If the force although inner is still perceived as force, the will conflict manifests itself, as already pointed out, in guilt feeling, which, as it were, represents an inner ethical compulsion resisting the individual's will just like an alien counter-will. But if the own will says "Yes" to this force, this internal "must," then the inner force becomes inner freedom in that will and counter-will both affirm the same willing.

The process just described goes beyond the mere affirmation of force, either outer or inner, to its constructive evaluation, that is, positively as ethics in ideal-formation and not merely normatively and regulatively. Therefore the individual only takes over the overcome moral code for a protection, as it were,

[55]

under the first violence of the sexual impulse. Soon, however, the proud will stirs again and strives to win the battle alone without the help of authoritative morality. Here then begins the ethical ideal-formation in the self although the individual may turn to external models, ideal figures from life or history. But these ideals he chooses in terms of his own individuality which, as we know, has nothing to do with infantile authorities, least of all the parents. It does not matter whether the individual succeeds wholly in freeing himself from the traditional moral concepts; probably he never does, especially not as long as he must live with other individuals who more or less depend on this traditional morality. It is important, however, that for everything creative, regardless of how it manifests itself, even in the neurosis, we can thank this striving of the individual, of his individual will to free himself from the traditional moral code and to build his own ethical ideals from himself, ideals which are not only normative for his own personality, but also include the assurance of creative activity of any kind and the possibility of happiness . For this whole process of inner ideal formation which begins with the setting up of one's own moral norms inside is a mighty and important attempt to transform compulsion into freedom. The broader fate of the individual depends essentially on the success with which this attempt is undertaken, how it is carried through and conducted further, also how far it goes in a particular case and where and how it ends.

Certainly it is no planned and straightforward way, but a continuous struggle against outer forces and a constant conflict with inner ones, in which the individual must live through for himself all stages of his evolution. That cannot be avoided and should not be, for just this living through and fighting through constitute the valuable, the constructive, the creative which does not inhibit the will but strengthens and develops it. The first step in the freeing process is that the individual now wills what he was earlier compelled to, what externally or internally he was forced to do, and the normal, average man perhaps never gets beyond this level which guarantees a relatively harmonious working together of will and counter-will. It corresponds to a willed

[56]

acceptance of the external compulsion of authority, the moral code and the inner compulsion of the sexual instinct. Accordingly it permits fewer possibilities of conflict but also fewer creative possibilities of any kind. The human being to a large extent is one with himself and with the surrounding world and feels himself to be a part of it. He has the consciousness of individuality but at the same time also the feeling of likeness, of unity, which makes the relation to the outer world pleasant.

The next stage is characterized by the feeling of division in the personality, through the disunity of will and counter-will, which means a struggle (moral) against the compulsion of the outer world as well as an inner conflict between the two wills. The constructive person goes beyond the mere moralistic and instinctual affirmation of the obligatory in his own ideal formation which itself having become a new goal-seeking power can work thereafter constructively or inhibitingly. On this level there are possibilities of neurotic or creative development not present on the first level. And again it depends on what position the will takes toward the moral and ethical standards originally called in by it or self created, after they have once been called into life, or have even achieved power. So the will is always compelled to take attitudes anew; first to the given, then to the self created, and finally even to the willed. And this taking an attitude can always turn out to be negative or positive, negative even when it concerns something originally self willed or self created. This negative attitude in turn can always have one of two results; either it leads to improvement, to a higher level, to a new creativity as with the productive, or it creates itself in self criticism, guilt and inferiority feeling, in short, under the neurotic inhibition of will.

The third and highest level of development is characterized by a unified working together of the three fully developed powers, the will, the counter-will and the ideal formation born from the conflict between them which itself has become a goal-setting, goal-seeking, force. Here the human being, the genius, is again at one with himself; what he does, he does fully and completely in harmony with all his powers and his ideals. He knows no hesitation, and no doubt as does the conflicted man of the second level, even though the latter be productive. He is a man of will

[57]

and deed in accord with himself, although as distinguished from the type of realistic man he is not in accord with the world, because too different from others. I do not mean that the conflicts of this type would be more of an external nature, played out more in the battle with the hostile environment; I merely wish to emphasize here the creative side of their being, which just through its unlikeness to reality gives to genius its peculiar greatness. This type in its ideal formation, in its continuous rebuilding or building anew, has created an autonomous inner world so different and so much its own, that it no longer represents merely a substitute for external reality (original morality) but is something for which reality can offer in every case only a feeble substitute so that the individual must seek satisfaction and release in the creation and projection of a world of his own. In a word, with this type, from all the accepted, the obligatory, from all the wished for, and the willed, from all the aspirations and the commandments is formed neither a compromise, nor merely a summation but a newly created whole, the strong personality with its autonomous will, which represents the highest creation of the integration of will and spirit.

The first level corresponds to the type of duty-conscious, the second to the type of guilt-conscious and the third level finally to the type of self-conscious individual . We see at once that in these three types, which represent a line of development, the relation to reality and to the fellow man is different. The first level is oriented to the external world, corresponds to the adaptation of the ego to it; in this the individual takes over the social and sexual ideals of the majority for his own, and this is not only a passive identification but an effort of will which certainly ends in a submission of will. On the third ethical level there are no longer the external demands or norms, but the own inner ideals, which were not only created by the individual out of himself but which the self also willingly affirms as its own commandments. The second neurotic level represents the failure in going from the first to the third stage; the individual perceives the external commands and norms as compulsion which he must continually oppose, but cannot affirm the ideals which correspond to his own self. Therefore he has guilt feeling toward society (or the various representatives of it) and consciousness of guilt toward himself.

[58]

In other words, the first type accepts reality with its demands and so adjusts his own individuality that he perceives and can accept himself as part of reality. He removes the painful feeling of difference since he feels himself one with reality. The third type, on the contrary, accepts himself and his inner ideal formation and seeks accordingly to adjust the environment and the fellow man to himself. This can take place violently as with thoughtless men of action or by way of a reformative ideology, whether it be educational or therapeutic, in the scientific or religious sense of the word. It can, however, also be creative and reaches then its highest level when the individual creates from himself and his own idealized will power, a world for himself, as the artist or the philosopher does, without wanting to force it on others . Certainly this peculiarly creative type also strives for recognition but it cannot, as with the therapeutic reformative personality, be through force or violence, but rather must be the expression of a spontaneous movement of the individual who finds in the creator something related to himself. This creative type finds recognition in himself as he also finds in himself motivation and its approbation.

The first adapted type, therefore, needs the external compulsion, the second neurotic type defends itself against every kind of external or internal compulsion, the third creative type has overcome compulsion through freedom. The first type is dependent on reality, the second defends itself against the compulsion of reality, the third creates for itself against the compulsion a reality of its own which makes it independent, but at the same time enables it to live in reality without falling into conflict with it. The second neurotic type is the most interesting psychologically, because it shows that the whole problem at bottom turns on the acceptance of the own individuality on which the attitude toward reality primarily depends. For the neurotic shatters not only on the incapacity to bear external pressure, but he suffers just as much, yes, even more, from the inability to subject himself to any pressure whether it be inside or out, even the pressure of his own ideal formation. The essential therapeutic problem is not, therefore, to adjust him to reality, to teach him to bear external pressure, but to adjust him to himself , that is, to enable him to bear and to accept himself instead of

[59]

constantly defending himself against himself. If one attains this therapeutic goal, that the individual accepts himself, that is psychologically speaking, that he affirms instead of denies his will, there follows thereupon spontaneously without further effort the necessary adaptation to reality. This, howerer, cannot form an equally valid scheme for all men, regardless of whether one defines it with the concept of the Œdipus complex like Freud, or again as social feeling like Adler, or as a collective union like Jung. Adaptation ensues with each individual in a different, even in an individual way, from the three possibilities we have described as types. Psychologically speaking, adaptation on the basis of self acceptance may be an acceptance of external norms which finally represents a justification of will, but at least a generally recognized one, or the self acceptance enables the individual to continue his development on the basis of his own ideal formation and its essential difference. In each case, however, the neurotic self denial as it follows from the denial of will must first be overcome constructively in a therapeutic experience.

How this happens I am describing simultaneously in another book. Here I would only like to point out how, as a matter of fact, the various reactions of the individual only correspond to various attitudes to the same fundamental problem. The average man adapted to reality finds the justification of his individual will in the similarly adjusted wills of the majority, but accepts therewith also the universal attempts at justification and unburdening, as society itself apparently uses them in its moral norms and religious projections. The neurotic who in consequence of his stronger individualization feels himself so very different from others, can accept neither the general norms nor the justifications, but neither can he accept his own because they would be an expression of his own will, which he would therewith have to accept. The creative type, on the other hand, accepts as we have said, himself and his ideal, that is, his own individual will, at all events in higher degree than any other type. Certainly he also needs all kinds of external justifications but these work destructively only in the field of intellectual production, like philosophy and science, where they lead to theoretical denial of

[60]

will and justifications which appear under the guise of truth.

This leads us back from the problem of will to the problem of consciousness and conscious knowledge. Where ideal formation works constructively and creatively, it is on the basis of acceptance of the self, of the individual will, which is justified in its own ideal, that is ethically, not morally in terms of the average ideal as with the adapted type. In other words, in its own ideal the originally denied will of the individual manifests itself as ethically justified. The neurotic suffers not only from the fact that he cannot accomplish this, but also from insight regarding it which, according to the degree of insight, manifests itself as consciousness of guilt or inferiority feeling. He rejects the self because in him the self is expressed on the whole negatively as counter-will and accordingly cannot justify itself ethically, that is, cannot reform and revalue itself in terms of an ideal formation. Accordingly he strives only this far, to be himself (as so many neurotics express it) instead of striving to live in accordance with his own ideal. Therefore while the ideal of the average is to be as the others are, the ideal of the neurotic is to be himself, that is, what he himself is and not as others want him to be. The ideal of the creative personality finally is an actual ideal, which leads him to become that which he himself would like to be.

In the sphere of consciousness we see these various levels of development toward ideal formation comprehended in three formulae which correspond to three different ages, world views and human types. The first is the Apollonian, know thyself; the second the Dionysian, be thyself; the third the Critique of Reason, "determine thyself from thyself" (Kant) . The first rests on likeness to others and leads in the sense of the Greek mentality to the acceptance of the universal ideal; it contains implicity the morality, consciously worked out by Socrates, which still lies at the basis of psychoanalytic therapy: know thyself, in order to improve thyself (in the terms of universal norms). It is therefore not knowledge for the sake of the self, but knowledge for the goal of adaptation. The second principle in contrast to the first repudiates likeness and the improvement based on it, as it demands the acceptance of what one is anyway. In contrast to the principle of the Delphic Apollo, I have desig-

[61]

nated it as Dionysian because, in contrast to adaptation, it leads to ecstatic-orgiastic destruction, as not only Greek mythology but also Ibsen shows in Peer Gynt, who on the basis of the same principle landed in a mad house. The true self, if it is unchained in Dionysian fashion, is not only anti-social, but also unethical and therefore the human being goes to pieces on it. In this sense the longing of the neurotic to be himself is a form of the affirmation of his neurosis, perhaps the only form in which he can affirm himself. He is, as it were, already himself, at any rate far more than the others and has only a step to take in order to become wholly himself, that is, insane. Here comes in the Kantian "Determine thyself from thyself" in the sense of a true self knowledge and simultaneously an actual self creation as the first constructive placing of the problem. Herein lies Kant's historical significance as epistemologist and ethicist. He is in- debted to us for the psychology but also a part of his greatness lies therein, for the avoidance of psychologizing has protected him from falling into all the denials, rationalizations and interpretations which form the contents of most psychological theories including the Freudian.

An epistemological psychology without flaw, that is, neither moral nor religious as the Freudian system still is, must start at the point where Kant placed the problem. How can the individual determine himself from himself, or better, why does he do this with such difficulty? Here we strike the will-guilt problem, the knowledge of which remains the indisputable psychological contribution of Schopenhauer. But he has denied the will, while Nietzsche sought to deny the guilt feeling. Freud, finally has seen the guilt problem, as the neurotic presented it to him it is true, but he has tried to solve it by leading it back to a definite content of willing, namely the sexual, while the other analytic schools (Jung, Adler, etc.) differentiate themselves in this, that they have put another content in place of the sexual, and so have hidden the purely psychological will problem itself. The Freudian content disguises itself under the occidental religious morality from which we still suffer and in its failure to solve his individual problem, the modern man has finally shattered in terms of the neurosis.

[end ch. v]

[62] WE HAVE traced the evolution of the will conflict in the individual from the negative externalization of will, which leads to denial and guilt consciousness to the positive creative power of will, which not only affirms the obligatory instead of denying it, but leads beyond it to a constructive "ought." This "ought" as we have pictured it in the ideal formation of the individual, if the will is able to affirm itself and its own activity on this ethical level, can finally lead to creativity that alters, reforms and builds anew the outer and inner environment as the individual wills it. From the purely psychological act of willing, we have arrived at the moralistic problem of content, that is, what the individual does will or ought to will. The will projection itself, as reaction to an outer or inner counter-will, is independent of the content of the willed. It is related to the "musts' and the won'ts" as such and accordingly, can have to do even with something that the individual himself has wanted, but does not any more when it is forced on him by a strange will or merely offered, that is, permitted. Apparently it is generally the content itself, a definite content, which the originally denying force of will transforms into a positive, constructive, and finally a creative one with which not only the content of willing in the sense of the own ethical ideal is justified, but also the individual will as such.

Whence comes the content of willing and what does it contain? Just as willing itself arises as an inner, primarily negative opposing force against a compulsion, so the content of willing arises primarily from rejection; we want what we cannot have, that which is denied us. If this first level of willing is determined more negatively from without, so the next level is equally influenced

[63]

from without, but in terms of desire which already contains definite willing. We want at that level what others have or want, and this manifests itself as envy or competition in terms of the desire for possessions. But a truly positive willing is arrived at only when we have made this willing our own, that is, have given up comparisons and no longer measure our individual willing by external obstacles or models, but by our own ethical ideal formation . In other words, the will becomes positive, constructive in the ethical justification of the ideal formation and eventually creative from the purely inner will conflict which ensues between the content of our willing and the self ideal of the ought." If even in this stage the will remains too dependent on outer likeness and justifications in relation to other individuals, there result the feelings of inferiority or guilt which we have comprehended as the neurotic opposite for creative affirmation of will on the ethical level. Before we can understand this in its own terms as the proper subject of this chapter we must first review again the neurotic development.

We must remember that the deeply rooted psychological turning from the affirmation of willing to the denial of the will is closely tied up with the problem of content. All external restrictions and refusals meet the individual in childhood (and also later in life) not as a universal prohibition against willing in general, but as prohibition against willing some definite thing at a certain moment, and are therefore determined in terms of content and eventually also in terms of time . The individual himself, on the contrary, very early connects these particular prohibitions with willing as such. Here it seems to me, as we have noted before, lie the roots of the most important difference and the deepest misunderstanding between the grown-up and the child. In this sense one could say that the child is more ethical than the grown-up average man who is able to think in moralistic concepts only, that is, in terms of content, while for the more impulsive child every restriction, refusal, or prohibition affects the whole of willing, the will as such, and on that account, as we see, is taken so tragically. Briefly put, the momentary content has only symbolic meaning originally, but gradually because of the individual's tendencies to justification, takes on an ever more

[64]

"real" meaning, while the universal impulse life, which is always the essential, is made ever more abstract. Thus the child deceives the adults about willing itself in terms of their own ideology by means of a "good" acceptable content. And equally in the same way, or much more, the adult deceives himself later about the evil of willing itself by means of a content approved by his own ideal or by that of his fellow men. As long as we must justify the evil of willing in terms of its content, so long we feel ourselves morally answerable to others and are accordingly dependent on their praise and blame all the more, the more we are slaves to this deception and self-deception . In the degree, however, that we become conscious of the will itself in its original form of counter-will, as the source of our conflicts with the external world and ourselves, to the same degree do we feel the responsibility with which our own ethical consciousness has to say "Yes" or "No" to our individual willing. And only in this sense can we understand what we now wish to handle as creation but also only in this ethical sense can we comprehend the guilt indissolubly bound up with it not as guilt feeling toward others (in the moralistic sense), also not as consciousness of guilt toward itself (in the neurotic sense), but as guilt in itself, in the ethical sense.

Since we conceive of the creative urge as the expression of will by which willing itself is justified ethically and its content morally, that is, through others, the genesis of the guilt inherent in the creative is to be understood in the following way. The individual seeks to justify his willing in the manner described above, through its "good" content, hence the will branded as bad through the moralistic critique of the content attaches itself to the bad, illicit contents, which are identified from then on with the forbidden will itself. This expresses itself in the child in so-called "being bad," in the adult in the phantasies or day dreams which according to Freud form not only the preliminary step to the neurotic symptoms, but also to creative activity, with both, only insofar and because they represent the aforesaid acts of will which embrace various and, for the most part, forbidden contents. Whether they manifest themselves neurotically or creatively does not depend on content which can be the same in both cases, and is also not to be explained in the Freudian sense by repression, no, not even by the quality and degree of the repres-

[65]

sion, but seems to me determined only by the relation of the will to the content of willing. In other words, if the good contents of willing are shown and expressed because they imply a moral recognition of will, but the bad are hidden and kept secret because they contain moral condemnation of willing, then their final fate and that of the individual depends on the relation to the will itself, independent of all contents. If the will itself, as pointed out before, is identified with the evil contents and remains so, then these phantasies with the forbidden will content remain secret, that is, the will itself remains evil, condemned, forbidden, in a word, negative counter-will which leads then to repression, denial and rationalization. On the contrary, if the will itself is originally very strong in the individual (as counter-will) then the good contents are not sufficient for the justification of the badness of the will and the individual affirms the forbidden contents also, that is, the bad will itself which they represent. The phantasies are then released from the sphere of mental will expression into the sphere of action, that is, they are no longer kept secret as forbidden, but are transformed into deed as will expression which in this sense is creative. It is not only affirmation of the content stigmatized as evil, but of the individual will which it represents.

The morally proscribed contents themselves are associated originally with the bodily functions. The child must learn to eat and to control the excretory functions, when the adults wish, not when he wishes. His counter-will in relation to this is commonly designated as "bad" and "hateful, but this means restricted and eventually punished. Very soon also the physical expressions of sexuality are drawn in and then become the most important contents of willing, perhaps just because these expressions are so violently put under and forbidden. With regard to the overwhelming part that the psychic plays in our love life, which we will discuss later, the moral prohibition of the physical expression of sex in childhood, has perhaps the biologically valuable effect of strengthening the physical side in its later reaction so that it can stand against the psychic in general. Possibly we have here the ground for that separation of sensuality and tenderness which Freud has described as characteristic of the neurotic, but which I would characterize rather as the attitude

[66]

of the average, at all events, as more wholesome than the indissoluble union of sensuality with the spiritual which seeks in love the individual justification of sexuality. Again we see here the separation of will from content lying at the root of these phenomena. The tender expressions of love toward certain persons are permitted to the child, are good; the purely physical element of the will is evil, bad.

We said before that the child with the evil forbidden content turns to wish, to phantasy. It seems wholly in accord with my conception that the phantasies of men (of the child as of the adult) relate not so much to the satisfaction of actually forbidden bad contents as to the carrying through of will in itself. To speak bromidically, they are overwhelmingly egoistic even when their content is on a sexual theme . They show the ego of the individual putting through his own will successfully, victoriously against all obstacles. The development into the productive, the creative, represents only a step further in this direction, namely the lifting out of these expressions of will, from the sphere of thought to action. The phantasies are objectified in work, and thus the forbidden content is accomplished somehow, but in the last analysis it is the will expression afforded by creativity, the putting out, the affirmation, that constitutes the satisfying, many times rewarding factor.

Herein lies the essential difference between the average man who keeps the phantasies secret from others, the neurotic who keeps them secret from himself (represses them), and the creative type who affirms them for himself and reveals them to the world, yes, is compelled to do just that. This difference is explained by the different attitudes of the individual to will itself on the one side and to its contents, good or bad, on the other, and this also creates the guilt problem in its various forms. The average man who hides from others the content of the phantasies as an expression of evil will, has guilt feeling (toward the others) ; the individual who hides them from himself, that is represses them, tries to deny thereby not so much the evil contents as the evil will they represent, has consciousness of guilt (toward himself). Finally the individual who maintains the phantasies and therewith affirms his individual will so that he can transform it into

[67]

positive action has guilt, makes himself guilty by the individual nature of his doing . Actually guilt arises toward others to whom he opposes himself through his individualization, but also there is guilt toward himself which persists in the justification of this individual will expression. The creative type must constantly make good his continuous will expression and will accomplishment and he pays for this guilt toward others and himself with work which he gives to the others and which justifies him to himself. Therefore he is productive, he accomplishes something because he has real guilt to pay for, not imaginary guilt like the neurotic, who only behaves as if he were guilty but whose consciousness of guilt is only an expression of his will denial, not of creative accomplishment of will which makes one truly guilty.

We notice here that creation and guilt in the ethical sphere present the same contrast as truth and reality in the sphere of knowledge, and that they belong together just as indissolubly. The individually created, the work, is to be generally recognized like truth, and guilt opposes itself to this inhibitingly but also stimulatingly as inner reality, which is continuously overcome by new and ever more lofty feats of will. Accordingly we have to do here with guilt-laden creation and with creative guilt, which in contrast to the more than individual guilt consciousness of the neurotic type, has something specifically personal, individual. What we have here is just the activity of the creative type, not a sublimation of sex instinct, but, on the contrary, the expression of individual will which is almost to be called anti-sexual. For the authentic creative force proceeds always only from the inner will conflict, as we have described it before, that is, beyond the conflict between ego and sexuality, which the will wages on that level, and with the weapons belonging to that level. It may well be the biologically basic instinet that, in the last analysis, is used as I have already shown in "Der Künstler," but it is used. For it creates in the service of the will to its own downfall and what it helps to create is essentially different from itself, in the ideal case, far surpasses it. This is the mighty wrestling between nature and spirit, force and will, which Freud sought to describe with the educational concept of sublimation without recognizing the fundamental difference that lies between repro-

[68]

duction and production, begetting and creating, tool and master, creature and creator.

We recognize therefore in the creative impulse not only the highest form of the will affirmation of the individual, but also the most mighty will conquest, that of the individual will over the will of the species represented by sexuality. A similar victory of the individual will over generic will, as I show elsewhere, is represented in the individual love claim, whose psychological meaning lies in the fact that the individual can and will accept his generic role only if this is possible in an individual personal way, in the love experience. This represents, as it were, the creativity of the average type who demands a definite individuality for himself and if necessary also creates it, an individuality that sanctions and so justifies and saves his individual will. The creative type on the contrary does not content himself with the creation of an individual. Instead he creates a whole world in his own image, and then needs the whole world to say "yes" to his creation, that is, to find it good and thus justify it.

In this sense, to create means to make the inner into outer, spiritual truth into reality, the ego into the world. Biological creating also represents an ego extension in the child, as the love creation represents a confirmation of ego in the "other," but above all the spiritual psychic creation is a creation by itself in the work, the ego is opposed to the world and rules it thus in terms of its will . This manifestation of the ego will in the creation of the work is therefore not a substitute for sexuality and love, but rather both of them are attempts to occupy the creative drive really, attempts which with the creative type always result unsatisfyingly because they always represent forms of expression of the individual creative urge limited by alien counter-wills and accordingly insufficient. Moreover, creativity is not something which happens but once, it is the constant continuing expression of the individual will accomplishment, by means of which the individual seeks to overcome self-creatively the biological compulsion of the sexual instinct and the psychological compulsion to emotional surrender.

[69]

This conception of the creative will as a victory of the individual over the biological sexual instinct explains the guilt which the development and affirmation of the creative personality necessarily produces. It is this going beyond the limits set by nature as manifested in the will accomplishment to which the ego reacts with guilt. Only this guilt reaction makes completely intelligible the projection of the God idea by means of which the individual again subjects himself to a higher power. For the primitives who spiritualized the world, this was nature itself, for heroic man triumphing over nature it was the creative God made by himself, therefore his own will at once glorified, denied and justified, and finally for the man of our western culture, it is the really fateful powers of parental authority and love choice, to which he wishes to submit voluntarily, that is, ethically.

This entire conflict complex we find represented on a grand scale in the myth of the fall of man, which presents the level of knowledge on which consciousness wants to control and rule sexuality, that is, to use it for its own pleasure and satisfaction. The hero Adam is not punished because he exults in his Godlike knowledge, but because he wants to use it to force the sex instinct into the service of his individual will. It is not the father complex that can give us understanding here, as little as can the contrasting Greek figure Prometheus. It is just the reverse. The utilization of the sexual instinct in the service of the individual will on the basis of knowledge of good and evil, that is, the affirmation of the evil willing, brings suffering and punishment. The punishment consists in the loss of paradisical naïveté, of oneness with nature and her laws, and the recently won order among them. Adam is punished for not wanting to become a father and the punishment is the obligation to become one, that is, subordination under the compulsion of the biological sexual drive, in spite of knowledge of the moral problem which has branded the pleasure will as evil, and the attempt to overcome this morality through will affirmation.

The hero becomes thus the psychological representative of the creative man whose negative opposite we see before us in the neurotic type. The hero does not disown the parents in the sense of the Œdipus complex, that is, because he wants to put himself in the father's place, but because he is the earthly representative

[70]

of God, that is, of the creative will. Accordingly he has no children (which he would have to in the role of father) but expresses himself and his individual will in works, in heroic deeds. He knows no gratitude (toward parents) and no guilt feeling (toward others), but he has guilt which derives from creating. Not that the fact that he wants to become the father or to be God gives him guilt consciousness, but that he is God, that he occupies himself creatively, makes him guilty and this guilt can only be atoned for through further performance and finally through death. I believe moreover that the idea of hero formation, as explained in the material presented in the "Myth of the Birth of the Hero" was strongly influenced by the discovery of the man's share in procreation. At all events the conscious comprehension of the male process of procreation seems to signify a revolutionary turning point in the history of mankind.

A whole area of will and guilt psychology as the present day neurotic still shows, seems to me to be grounded in the fact that man on the one hand could feel himself as a creator who creates human beings (Prometheus), on the other hand could control this biological procreative act consciously and thus utilize sexuality for mere pleasure gain (Adam's knowledge?). Moreover, the discovery of this connection gave the first real basis for the social and psychological father concept, against whose recognition the individual defends himself even in the myth of the hero with the denial of the father and the emphasis on the maternal role. Here is to be found perhaps a powerful motive for the fact that God representing the individual ego-will took on fatherly features at a certain period. The autonomous heroic individual could not endure and use the biological dependence on an earthly progenitor and ascribed it all the more readily to the already installed creator God who received in this way paternal features, which give psychological expression to the hero's self creation.

Moreover the first intimation of the individual love problem betrays itself here in the creation of the woman from the man and in his own image. Here the woman is a product of the creative man, who ascribes to himself this divine creative power and divine knowledge—like the Greek Prometheus. We recognize therein the first faint beginnings of that magnificent process of rivaling the Gods which we have understood psychologically as

[71]

the gradual acknowledgment of the conscious individual will in the human being. It appears in a glorious fashion in Greek culture with the heroes rebelling against the Gods, and reaches the peak of its development in Christianity with the humanizing of God and the deifying of man. If man had first to manifest his own creative will in the formation of God, but at the same time had to justify it, so in the heroic period, at the other extreme, he fell into the deification of himself, of his own individual will in order finally to deify and worship in the individual love experience, the other individual who represents the creation and redemption of his own individual will. Christianity as the religion of love and guilt unites all the conflicting elements of this will-guilt problem in itself. It shows us in the humanizing of God, the continuation of "heaven" on earth. It is still in the form of universal brotherhood as it also led away from individualism, for it created a mass hero of such great sweep that every man could feel himself redeemed in and through him.

Our whole spiritual development is thus represented by the three levels, the Jewish, the Greek and the Christian, which represent not only historical phases, but also psychological types, ways of reacting and attitudes even of modern men. They correspond to the different attempts to solve the will-guilt problem, the real, the ideal and the spiritual. The biblical Jews were a rough, warlike nation of herdsmen who needed and created a strong willed, confident god of battle as an ego ideal. If one understands "Jahwe" as the personification of the hard and tenacious individual will of the wild herdsman constantly fighting against enemies, then one recognizes in the Bible the first noble attempt of a victorious people arrived at stability and prosperity to dethrone their old god of war and to perceive themselves in his strong will. But after that, all that is accomplished and attained is ascribed to a creative God who earlier had only been a destructive one, and to whom the chosen people which feels itself as completely heroic, voluntarily submits. Thus the warlike Jewish people first sought their leader, embodied in the hero Moses, in a strong willed God, as later they sought in him the justification for all the horrors and conquests of war.

[72] Greek civilization actually represents the birth of individuality in human history. Man himself takes the place of God in the form of the self-ruling creative hero, a God whose first twilight appears here in his passive role of spectator. Accordingly also we have the excessive guilt feeling of the Greeks as it manifests itself particularly in tragedy as a reaction to the heroic phase. In the Greek tragic poet the hero, as it were, makes himself fully re- sponsible for himself and pays, atones, with death.

Here lies their difference from the Jewish nation, which could Keep and preserve the fruits of victory because they put the responsibility for it back on God. The Greek who recognized and acknowledged deed and guilt equally as an expression of his individual will came to grief in the tragic recognition of the will problem and self responsibility while the Jew converted the evil, destroying, recognition "therapeutically" into the moral compulsion of good and evil and made it concrete in a meaningful will prohibition, the decalogue, which protected him from stepping over the boundaries set for the individual will . Christianity, as an immediate reaction to Roman tyranny, representing paternal authority, presents in the symbolism of the rebellious son, the passive hero, who conquers, not by means of will assertion but by means of will submission, conquers spiritually even though corporeally, physically, he fails. Therewith the struggle is lifted from the sphere of the real to the unreal, while Greek culture had lifted it from the moral to the ethical. At the same time, in Christianity God is brought from the unreal sphere to the real, just as with the Greek heroes, only still further humanized, as it were, made into a universal hero. In this sense Christianity is a

[73]

reaction to and attempt at healing from the danger of individualism, as it had culminated in terms of will in the Roman autocratic system of father rule. If, therefore, the creative God was the strongest expression of the individual ego will, so the mild, forgiving God of the Christian faith is the strongest expression of the self depreciatory ego which presents itself in terms of the Roman ideology as son, that is, as creature and not as creator. Therewith at the same time, it tries to reprimand the father as creator and lifts the mother principle to a spiritual significance which it had not had formerly. Here the realization of the will principle as we see it in the Roman father rule begins to oppose the realization of the maternal love principle, which reaches its height in the individual love claim and love creation of the modern irreligious man.

Thus the hero formation emphasizes the divine in man, affirms, glorifies the individual creative power of will while religion formation seeks to deny it and shows man again as the creature who humbly subjects himself to the higher racial will. In this sense the Jews represent the religious; the Greeks the heroic; and Christianity the human solution of the will-guilt problem. The first is moralistic, the second ethical, the third spiritual . This is associated with the transformation of the guilt problem which again is dependent on the level of consciousness. With the Jews, God represents the will and the individual the guilt; with the Greeks the individual hero represents will and guilt; in Christianity God represents guilt and the individual subjects his will to the God conquered and overcome by himself. In the same degree that we see the will in the individual develop and then break, we can substantiate an analogous displacement and denial in the sphere of consciousness; with the Jews recognition of the moralistic solution as the saving of the individual; with the Greeks recognition of the ethical problem as the fall of the individual; in Christianity the recognition of the human problem as the abrogation of the individual, as release from the compulsion of the will and the torment of the conscious responsibility as creator. Accordingly Christianity puts the emotional experience of love in the center and brings the female principle again into a position of honor, in its symbolic meaning; the Greek puts the creative principle first, which leads to guilt, and therewith brings

[75] Perhaps the predominance of the father principle itself whose culmination in the Roman state was broken by Christianity, is to be understood psychologically just from the fact that the "father" represents the strong willed man who dares to ascribe to himself the divine prerogative and whose domination is accepted not only on the basis of force, but equally from the neces sity of placing other earthly bounds to the all powerful will of

[76]

the ego which is always being put further back into the individual . It would be the psychological opposite of our conception of love as a humanizing of the self deifying tendency, since the father principle in its proper and psychological manifestations would correspond to a humanization of the negative side of will, of the counter-will. Be that as it may, at all events, for us the opposition of the mother and father principle as it has come to expression recently in the contrast of Bachhofen's world view to that of Haller1 and in the various psychoanalytic interpretations, corresponds to the opposition between natural right and forced right, in other words between love and force, or psycho- logically speaking, between the positive will (mother) and coun- ter-will (father). In other words, the father represents, as I have said before, only a symbol of the own actually inhibited will, but not the creative power of will as it is presented in the occidental God, creator of heaven and earth. Freud takes part in this denying rationalizing attempt of guilt conscious human- ity in his theory, where, as it were, the individual will hides itself behind the father principle; hides in a double sense, quite as in the creation of God, for the father symbolizes the own will but the individual hypocritically denies his own will which he ascribes to the father in order to be able to subordinate himself to it. In this humble subordination of the weak helpless creature to the parental will, psychoanalysis is religious, in its actual domi nation of consciousness it is presumptuously heroic. That means that the analyst must pay for his likeness to God in knowledge and in creation (re-creation) of men, since he must represent the individual as such, including himself, as an unfree, powerless creature who, a pawn of his unconscious wishes and evil impulses, has lapsed into guilt.

[79] The basis for this is easy to see in the light of what we have just said. With the knowledge and the perception of the divine power of creation as his own individual power of will, the individual must also take over the responsibility for it himself, and this leads necessarily to the ethical guilt concept, which relates to willing itself and not like the moralistic guilt feeling, to any particular content of will . The conscious knowledge of divine creativity leads therefore beyond an heroic phase in which the individual voluntarily takes upon himself and affirms will and responsibility, to a new erection of the rule of God on earth, as we recognized it in the love principle on the one side and in the father principle on the other. Both correspond to current attempts to solve the will conflict in reality, after its magnificent unreal solution in the God concept had been destroyed by the knowing power of consciousness and the disintegrating force of self consciousness. But this twilight of the Gods now approaching its end is accompanied by a still more fatal and tragic process, which one might designate as the disenthroning of the individual himself, the result of which we have before us in the neurotic type with its guilt and inferiority feelings.

For the earthly attempts at justification of the individual will also are shattered by the power of the counter-will only to end finally in a kind of psychological "twilight of the ego," with a tormenting hopelessness of the individual thrown upon his own resources. The basis for this, as has already been pointed out, is that something is lacking in all real attempts at solution of this will conflict which the unreal God creation, whose very faults actually made solution possible, did not have. It is this, the fact that the earthly representatives of the individual ego themselves have an own will and a counter-will against which our own constantly strike. The father or the parental authority represents not only a symbol of the child's own will, but also—and probably equally early and strongly—a strange counter-will, which disturbs and restrains its own. In the love relation, which, as already noted, represents entirely individual creative activity, yes

[80]

exactly the creative activity of the individual as such, he runs against the same counter-will which wants to occupy itself creatively on him. This makes the conflicts of the modern man so difficult and deep because the inner will conflict cannot become released really through an external agent, but apparently is only to be temporarily and partially unburdened in the more suitable manner of unreal projection.

The neurotic human type of our time has therefore not only exploded the God illusion itself, but perceives the real substitute for it as we have recognized it in the parental authority and love objects to be unsatisfying for solving or even lessening the inner will conflict heightened through knowledge and intensified by self consciousness. Knowledge, which we have understood as an intellectual will experience in terms of spiritual truth, leads therefore to taking the Gods from heaven and to the humanizing of the omnipotent creative will. The tormenting self consciousness which again leads to the denial of the individual will thus affirmed, comes into the picture first when the will conflict is thrown back from the real personifications of it as we recognized them in the parent authorities and love objects, through the counter-will, upon the individual himself and this leads to the recognition of his own inner conflicts. However, this throwing back does not ensue as we consciously strive for it in the therapeutic experience, in a constructive fashion so that the individual can accept himself as conflicted, instead the actual conflict only shows the individual that he cannot find salvation from the evil will in the "other" either. The therapeutic value of the analytic situation as such lies in the fact that it affords the individual an unreal solution of his will conflict corresponding to the creation of God from the own will, but at the same time lets him experience in the actual emotional relation to the analyst and understand in this connection the real earthly parallel .

The therapeutic experience is thus only to be understood from the creative experience because it is itself a creative experience and in truth a very special form of it which we describe more fully and make intelligible elsewhere.1 [chapter "Love and Force," in Will Therapy] Just as for the individual neurotic the therapeutic experience represents the last deliverance from the two-fold conflict of the negative denial of will and

[81]

destructive self consciousness, so the creative type as such is the last salvation of human kind from the same inevitable neurotic conflict which we all work against. The creative man saves himself first of all from the neurotic chaos of will denial and self consciousness since he affirms himself and his own creative will, which at once protects him in the growing advance of consciousness from falling into the inhibiting self consciousness. He keeps for himself the capacity to manifest himself and his individual will creatively instead of denying and reacting to it with guilt consciousness. He expresses himself instead of knowing himself consciously, wills instead of knowing or knows that he wills and what he wills and lives it. His guilt consists in the fact of his release from common pressure, whether it be biological or moral, in his isolation, which however he can affirm creatively instead of having to deny it neurotically. His creativity cancels his guilt while the neurotic willing makes the individual guilt-conscious with its denial. Since he transforms the neurotic self consciousness arising from the hypertrophied compulsive thinking into creative living again, that is, into individual will affirmation, he does isolate himself it is true, as an individual from his contemporaries who suffer from consciousness, but unites them again with positive natural forces, thus revealing at once the grandeur and strength of man.

The creative man is thus first of all his own therapist as which I have already conceived him in "Der Künstler," but at the same time a therapist for other sufferers. Only he solves his individual will conflict in a universal form which does not satisfy the hyper-individualized type of our time. This type needs and desires no longer a common savior, but an individual one ; he comes to the therapist, however, as soon as and because he has broken down in the individual therapy which the love experience affords. In analysis he tries again the unreal and real methods of salvation which no longer work for him because for his heightened and hypertrophied self consciousness there is only one savior—and that is himself! In this sense the therapeutic experience, as I pointed out before, is to be understood only from the creative. For in the first place the therapist is a creator, and in truth almost a creative God, and not made so first by the patient. For he creates men in the Promethean sense, men who like himself have

[82]

the creative will, but must deny it instead of being able to affirm it. And this is the second reason why the therapeutic experience is only to be understood from the creative. For the patient is also a creator, but a miscarried negative one and his powerful identification with the therapist arises from this, that at bottom he is the same and would like to possess creative power positively also. This therapeutic creation of men, which the patient on that account presents as a rebirth experience, cannot ensue on the basis of a general norm or a common ideal for which the neurotic type is just as unsuited as is the creative, and he cannot be educated to it either. The only therapeutic possibility with our modern individual neurotic type is to permit him to develop and accept his own individuality, in other words, to allow the individual to mold himself into that which he is, that is, to affirm his own will and therewith his individuality . This can happen, however, only in an individual personal experience of therapy, where again we meet the guilt bound up with creation, the release of which presents the greatest difficulty for this individual type of therapy.

Since we are keeping these problems for presentation in "Will Therapy," we turn in conclusion to one more universal viewpoint which is important not only for individual therapy, but also for the universal therapy of the creative type. We spoke of different phases and levels of the formation of religion and the creation of God, which certainly have a history, whose interesting evolution and many aspects we have no intention of giving here. These historical allusions are only a convenient help in the presentation of these complicated processes in the individual and serve merely to illustrate the point of view, which seems to me essential to the understanding of the individual structure and its reactions. We spoke of a period of evil deities, of protective gods, of will gods, of father gods, of the deifying of love and finally of self deification in the heroic man as well as of his negative, the self condemnation of the hyperconscious neurotic hemmed in by guilt feeling. All these and yet other phases, developmental levels and reactions we find to vary in the single individual himself at different periods of his development. I do not believe, however, that we are able to understand the historical development in the past through projecting backwards or drawing conclusions a pos-

[83]

teriori from the individual. Rather it would perhaps be possible that the past, if we should understand it from its own time, might light up many an individual of the present who seems to be going through similar phases, not only in terms of an ontogenetic repetition of the phylogenetic as it lies at the basis of the Jungian concept of the "collective" unconscious, but from his own will conflict, which, in contact with the outer reality of his fellow men and with the inner reality of his own consciousness and development manifests itself in similar fashion. We are concerned therefore with parallel phenomena as the ancient world picture conceived it in the opposition of microcosm and macrocosm, not with causal connections as they underlie the concept of phylogenesis, whether one undertakes to explain the past from the individual or vice versa wants to understand the individual from the past. For the guilt is no accumulated guilt, neither historical nor individual and all attempts thus to explain it represent a misuse of the natural science principle of causality in the service of will justification. Guilt arises in and from the individual and must continue to produce evil if the individual uses it for the justification of his evil will, when it appears as neurotic guilt consciousness and not as creative guilt which can be atoned for through new creation.

...