320 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION Dream-interpretation was one of the accomplishments of witchcraft, and was therefore among the black arts persecuted by the Church. Even though we of the twentieth century are rather more broad-minded in this respect, so much historical prejudice still attaches to the whole idea of dream-interpretation that we do not take kindly to it. Is there, one may ask, any reliable method of dream-interpretation? Can we put faith in any of the various speculations? I admit that I share these misgivings to the full, and I am convinced that there is in fact no absolutely reliable method of interpretation. Absolute reliability in the interpretation of natural events is found only within the narrowest limits -that is to say, when no more comes out of the interpretation than we have put in. Every attempt to explain nature is a hazard. A reliable method does not come into being until long after the pioneer work has been accomplished. We know that Freud has written a book on dream-interpretation, but his interpretation is an example of what we have just said: no more comes out of it than what his theory allows to be put into the dream. This view naturally does not do anything like justice to the boundless freedom of dream-life, with the consequence that the meaning of the dream is concealed rather than revealed. Also, when we consider the infinite variety of dreams, it is difficult to conceive that there could ever be a method or a technical procedure which would lead to an infallible result. It is, indeed, a good thing that no valid method exists, for otherwise the meaning of the dream would be limited in advance and would lose precisely that virtue which makes dreams so valuable for therapeutic purposes-their ability to offer new points of view. 
One would do well, therefore, to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people. Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams. Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one's experience, tem- 
15° 

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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN perament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do. In eliciting the meaning he will involuntarily be guided by certain presuppositions, and it depends very much on the scrupulousness and honesty of the investigator whether he gains something by his interpretation or perhaps only becomes still more deeply entangled in his mistakes. So far as presuppositions are concerned, we may take it as certain that the dream is not an idle invention of the conscious mind but an involuntary, natural phenomenon, even though it should prove true that dreams are in some way distorted by becoming conscious. Anyway this distortion occurs so quickly and automatically that it is barely perceptible. It is therefore safe to assume that it is an integral part of the dream-function. And it is equally safe to assume that dreams arise from the unconscious part of our being and are, consequently, its symptoms, allowing us to make inferences as to the nature of this being. If we wish to investigate our own nature, dreams are the most suitable media for this purpose. 
During the work of interpretation one must abstain from all presuppositions that smack of superstition, such as, first and foremost, the notion that the protagonists in dreams are nothing other than these same persons in real life. One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. (Any exceptions are governed by quite definite rules, but I cannot go into this here.) If we acknowledge this truth we shall sometimes find ourselves faced with very interesting problems. I remember two instructive cases: one of my patients dreamed of a drunken tramp who lay in a ditch, and another of a drunken prostitute who rolled about in the gutter. The first patient was a theologian, the second a distinguished lady in high society. Both of them were outraged and horrified, and absolutely refused to admit that they had dreamed of themselves. I gave them both the well-meant advice that they should spend an hour in self-reflection, diligently and devoutly considering in what ways they were not much better dun their drunken brother in the ditch and their drunken sister in the gutter. The subtle process of self-knowledge often begins with 
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a bomb-shell like this. The "other" person we dream of is not our friend and neighbour, but the other in us, of whom we prefer to say: "I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as this publican and sinner." Certainly the dream, being a child of nature, has no moralizing intention; it merely exemplifies the well-known law that no trees reach up to heaven. 
	322 	If, in addition to this, we bear in mind that the unconscious 
contains everything that is lacking to consciousness, that the unconscious therefore has a compensatory tendency, then we can begin to draw conclusions-provided, of course, that the dream does not come from too deep a psychic level. If it is a dream of this kind, it will as a rule contain mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one's own folk or in those of other races. The dream will then have a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind. 
	323 	This does not contradict my earlier remark that we always 
dream of ourselves. As individuals we are not completely unique, but are like all other men. Hence a dream with a collective meaning is valid in the first place for the dreamer, but it expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by the thought that nobody else has their problems. Or else they are those all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim to social recognition on too Iowa level. Moreover, every individual problem is somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a mythological one and makes use of collective symbols. 
	324 	Such dreams are called by primitives "big" dreams. The 
primitives I observed in East Africa took it for gTanted that "big" dreams are dreamed only by "big" men-medicine-men, magicians, chiefs, ete. This may be true on a primitive level. But with us these dreams are dreamed also by simple people, more particularly when they have got themselves, mentally or spiritually, in a fix. It is obvious that in handling "big" dreams intuitive guesswork will lead nowhere. Wide knowledge is required, 
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such as a specialist ought to possess. But no dream can be interpreted with knowledge alone. This knowledge, furthermore, should not be dead material that has been memorized; it must possess a living quality, and be infused with the experience of the person who uses it. Of what use is philosophical knowledge in the head, if one is not also a philosopher at heart? Anyone who wishes to interpret a dream must himself be on approximately the same level as the dream, for nowhere can he see anything more than what he is himself. 
	325 	The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. 
Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands. No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude-the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. 
	326 	The more I engrossed myself in these problems over the 
years, the stronger became my impression that our modern education is morbidly one-sided. No doubt we are right to open the eyes and ears of our young people to the wide world, but it is the maddest of delusions to think that this really equips them for the task of living. It is the kind of training that enables a young person to adapt himself outwardly to the world and reality, but no one gives a thought to the necessity of adapting to the self, to the powers of the psyche, which are far mightier than all the Great Powers of the earth. A system of education does indeed exist, but it has its origins partly in antiquity and partly in the early Middle Ages. It styles itself the Christian Church. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the last two centuries Christianity, no less than Confucianism in China and Buddhism in India, has largely forfeited its educative activity. Human iniquity is not to blame for this, but rather a gradual and widespread spiritual change, the first symptom of which was the Reformation. It shattered the authority of the Church as a teacher, and thereafter the authoritarian principle itself began to crumble away. The inevitable consequence was an increase in 
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the importance of the individual, which found expression in the modern ideals of humanity, social welfare, democracy, and equality. The decidedly individualistic trend of these latest developments is counterbalanced by a compensatory reversion to the collective man, whose authority at present is the sheer weight of the masses. No wonder that nowadays there is a feeling of catastrophe in the air, as though an avalanche had broken loose which nothing can stop. The collective man threatens to stifle the individual man, on whose sense of responsibility everything valuable in mankind ultimately depends. The mass as such is always anonymous and always irresponsible. So-called leaders are the inevitable symptoms of a mass movement. The true leaders of mankind are always those who are capable of self-reflection, and who relieve the dead weight of the masses at least of their own weight, consciously holding aloof from the blind momentum of the mass in movement. 
	327 	But who can resist this all-engulfing force of attraction, when 
each man clings to the next and each drags the other with him? Only one who is firmly rooted not only in the outside world but also in the world within. 
	328 	Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the 
entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programmes, with the so-called problems of reality? 
	329 	But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for 
whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need-because outside authority no longer means anything to me-a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche. 
	330 	If I spoke before chiefly of dreams, I did so because I wished 
to draw attention to one of the most immediate approaches to 154 

THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
the world of inner experience. But there are many things besides dreams which I cannot discuss here. The investigation of the deeper levels of the psyche brings to light much that we, on the surface, can at most dream about. No wonder, then, that sometimes the strongest and most original of all man's spiritual activities-the religious activity-is also discovered from our dreams. This is the activity which, more even than sexuality or social adaptation, is thwarted in modern man. I know people for whom the encounter with the strange power within themselves was such an overwhelming experience that they called it "God." So experienced, "God" too is a "theory" in the most literal sense, a way of looking at the world, an image which the limited human mind creates in order to express an unfathomable and ineffable experience. The experience alone is real, not to be disputed; but the image can be soiled or broken to pieces. 
	331 	Names and words are sorry husks, yet they indicate the qual- 
ity of what we have experienced. When we call the devil a neurosis, we are signifying that we feel this demonic experience as a sickness which is characteristic of our age. When we call it repressed sexuality or the will to power, this shows that it seriously disturbs even these fundamental instincts. When we call it God, we are trying to describe its profound and universal significance, because this is what we have glimpsed in the experience. Looking at it soberly, and bearing in mind the vast, unknowable background, we must admit that this latter designation is the most cautious and also the most modest, because it sets no limits to the experience and does not squeeze it into any conceptual schema. Unless, of course, someone should hit upon the singular idea that he knew exactly what God is. 
	332 	"\Vhatever name we may put to the psychic background, the 
fact remains that our consciousness is influenced by it in the highest degree, and all the more so the less we are conscious of it. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of his psyche, and how dangerous or helpful they may be in shaping his destiny. Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who has forgotten that he is playing a role. But when the play comes to an end, he must remember his own subjective reality, for he can no longer continue to live as Julius Caesar or as Othello, but only as himself, from whom he has become estranged by a 
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momentary sleight of consciousness. He must know once again that he was merely a figure on the stage who was playing a piece by Shakespeare, and that there was a producer as well as a director in the background who, as always, will have something very important to say about his acting. 
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333 
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THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAYl 
In earlier days, when people were less sophisticated in their ideas, psychotherapy was regarded as a technique which could be applied to practically anybody who had learnt it by heart. In medical treatises and text-books you would come across the wonderful remark: " ... in addition, the following may be of use: massage, cold baths, mountain air, and psychotherapy." The nature of this "psychotherapy" was prudently never specified in detail. Certainly, so long as it consisted of hypnotism, suggestion, persuasion, "reeducation de la volonte," Coueism, and so forth, anybody could learn the art by rote and say his piece in season and out of season. The medical profession generally-and this includes psychiatrists and neurologists-is notoriously slow to learn and needs a long period of incubation. And so it happened that, long after psychotherapy had grown to a psychology, and therapeutics had ceased to be a mere technique, the illusion still continued to flourish that psychological treatment was some kind of technical procedure. It would be decidedly too optimistic to say that this illusion has ceased to exist even among the ranks of psychotherapists, nor would it accord with the facts. All that has happened is that now and again voices are heard which demur at the mechanization of psychotherapy and aspire to rescue it from the soullessness of a mere technical procedure. Their aim is to raise it to the higher plane of psychological and philosophical dialectic, where it becomes a discussion between two psychic systems, that is, two human beings confronting one another in their totality. 
These doubts and aims were not, as one might think, dragged down from the airless realm of eternal ideas by pernickety minds overloaded with philosophy. On the contrary, they sprang from 
1 [Translated from "Zur gegenwartigen Lage der Psychotherapie," Zentralblatt fUr PsychotheraPie und ihre Grenzgebiete (Leipzig), VII (1934): 1, 1-16.-EDITORS.l 
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the deep impression which the un edifying confusion of psychological and therapeutic views cannot fail to make today even on the distant observer. A glance at the chaotic profusion of psychotherapeutic literature is sufficient confirmation of this. Not only are there different schools which until very recently have anxiously avoided any serious communication with one another, there are also groups-self-styled "Societies" -who barricade themselves like cenobites against unbelievers, not to mention the numerous solitaries who are not a little proud of being the only members of their church, to use the well-known mot of Coleridge. No doubt this state of affairs is a sure sign of vitality and of the many pressing problems still to be solved in the field of psychotherapy. But it is far from gratifying; and it ill accords with the dignity of science when bigoted dogmatism and personal touchiness hamper the free discussion so necessary to its growth. 
	335 	What, indeed, could shed a more glaring light on the fact 
that psychotherapy is anything but a technique than the very multiplicity of techniques, points of view, "psychologies," and philosophical premises (or lack of them)? Does not this welter of contradictions show in the most striking way that what we are concerned with is far more than a technique? A technique can be modified and improved by all sorts of recipes and dodges, and everybody would welcome a change for the better. But, far from that being the case, we find all too many people entrenching themselves behind precepts which they envelop with the sacrosanct halo of dogma. Ostensibly they are guarding the ultimate scientific truth; but has it ever-except in the most benighted periods of history-been observed that a scientific truth needed to be elevated to the rank of a dogma? Truth can stand on its own feet, only shaky opinions require the support of dogmatization. Fanaticism is ever the brother of doubt. 
	336 	What is the lesson of these characteristic and, for the history 
of any science, very noteworthy signs? Beyond a doubt they point to the incontrovertible fact that psychotherapy has outgrown the stage of technique and has already broken into the realm of oPinion. We can easily agree about a technique, but hardly ever about opinions. Hence the heatedness of discussion -indeed if there be any-or the equally eloquent silence. 
	337 	It has long been imagined that psychotherapy can be prac- 
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tised "technically," as though it were a formula, a method 0 operation, or a colour-test. The general practitioner can use ( wide assortment of medical techniques without hesitation, what ever his p~rsonal opinions may be about his patients and irre spective of his psychological theories or even of his philosophica and religious assumptions. Psychotherapy cannot be used lik< that. Whether he likes it or not, the doctor and his assumption1 are involved just as much as the patient. It is in fact largely immaterial what sort of technique he uses, for the point is not the technique but the person who uses the technique. The ob. ject to which the technique is applied is neither an anatomical specimen nor an abscess nor a chemical substance; it is the totality of the suffering individual. The object of therapy is not the neurosis but the man who has the neurosis. We have long known, for instance, that a cardiac neurosis comes not from the heart, as the old medical mythology would have it, but from the mind of the sufferer. Nor does it come from some obscure corner of the unconscious, as many psychotherapists still struggle to believe; it comes from the totality of a man's life and from all the experiences that have accumulated over the years and decades, and finally, not merely from his life as an individual but from his psychic experience within the family or even the 
social group. 
In dealing with a neurosis, the doctor is not confronted with 
a delimited field of illness; he is faced with a sick person who is sick not in one particular mechanism or focus of disease but in his whole personality. "Technique" cannot cope with that. The personality of the patient demands all the resources of the doctor's personality and not technical tricks. 
	339 	Very early on, therefore, I required that the doctor himself 
should be analysed. Freud seconded this requirement, obviously because he could not escape the conviction that the patient should be confronted by a doctor and not by a technique. It is certainly very laudable in a doctor to try to be as objective and impersonal as possible and to refrain from meddling with the psychology of his patient like an overzealous saviour. But if this attitude is carried to artificial lengths it has unfortunate consequences. The doctor will find that he cannot overstep the bounds of naturalness with impunity. Otherwise he would be setting a bad example to his patient, who certainly did not get 
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ill from an excess of naturalness. Besides, it would be dangerously to underestimate the patients if one imagined that they were all too stupid to notice the artifices of the doctor, his security measures and his little game of prestige. Nor can it conceivably be the doctor's intention to strengthen the patient everywhere in his natural functioning, and yet to keep him as much as possible in the dark when it comes to the one crucial spot-which concerns the doctor himself-and so in a state of helpless dependence or "transference." Such a mistake could only be made by an extremely unanalysed doctor whose personal prestige counted for more than the welfare of his patient. 
	340 	Because the personality and attitude of the doctor are of 
supreme importance in therapy-whether he appreciates this fact or not-his personal opinions stand out in a disproportionately strong light in the history of psychotherapy and are the cause of apparently irreconcilable schisms. Freud took his stand with fanatical one-sidedness on sexuality, concupiscence-in a word, on the "pleasure principle." Everything turns on the question of whether one can do what one wants. Repression, sublimation, regression, narcissism, wish-fulfilment and the rest are all concepts that relate to the grand drama of the pleasure principle. It almost looks as if man's desire and greed have been made the cardinal principle of psychology. 
	341 	Adler also drew on the wide field of human concupiscence 
and discovered the need for self-assertion. This tendency of human nature was likewise made a cardinal principle of psychology, and with the same one-sidedness so regrettable in Freud. 
	342 	Now, there is no doubt that the principle of concupiscence 
can explain a very large number of cases of neurosis. Indeed, the same case can be explained both in the manner of Freud and in the manner of Adler, nor is either explanation lacking in conviction. As a matter of fact, the one explanation complements the other, which in itself would be a very satisfactory state of affairs did it not also prove that neither explanation can lay claim to absolute validity. Both are relative, heuristic points of view, and as such unfitted to be universal concepts. But at least they have a bearing on essential partial aspects. The theory of repression is based on certain psychic facts which are met with everywhere, and the same is true of the need for self-assertion 
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or the will to power. Clearly everyone would like to enjoy all he can and at the same time be "on top," and it is equally obvious that so long as he has this primitive, naIve, infantile attitude he will not be able to avoid a neurosis if ever he makes an attempt to adapt himself to his surroundings. This last condition is very much to the point, for without it there is no neurosis but simply moral insanity or the higher idiocy. 
	343 	If, then, at least two conditions are necessary to produce a 
neurosis, both must be of aetiological significance. It is out of the question for only the infantile attitude to be causal, but not the will to adapt. Not only can the latter be an aetiological factor, it always is so. Freud and Adler explain a neurosis exclusively from the infantile angle. A more comprehensive explanation would be forced to take account of the will to adapt as well. There need not always be simply an excess of infantilism; there can also be an excess of adaptation. Nor must this latter possibility necessarily be understood as a mere repression of infantilism or as a "substitute formation"; we could equally well explain infantilism as repression of adaptation and call it a "substitute formation." Neither Freud nor Adler would welcome this reversal, although it is logically unavoidable once we take the aetiological significance of the will to adapt into account. And this we must do-even Freud needs a factor that represses, that does not fulfil wishes, that arouses anxiety, etc. Adler needs something that keeps a man down. If there is no aetiological opposite of equal strength, then all that infantile concupiscence is without object. 
	344 	Having discovered that every neurotic suffers from infantile 
concupiscence, we must still ask how it is with his will to adapt, for perhaps he has developed infantile concupiscence merely as a "substitute formation." In this case it would be purely symptomatic and not genuine at all; and, if eXplained from the infantile angle, the explanation would be quite beside the point. More, an unforgiveable blunder would have been committed. Unfortunately such blunders are very frequent, because the doctor's attention is turned too exclusively to the infantile traits. The patient is then automatically charged with inferiority. 
	345 	Infantilism, however, is something extremely ambiguous. 
First, it can be either genuine or purely symptomatic; and second, it can be either residuary or embryonic. There is an 161 

346 
347 
348 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
enormous difference between something that has remained infantile and something that is in the process of growth. Both can take an infantile or embryonic form, and more often than not it is impossible to tell at first glance whether we are dealing with a regrettably persistent fragment of infantile life or with a vitally important creative beginning. To deride these possibilities is to act like a dullard who does not know that the future is more important than the past. For this reason it would be more advisable to examine these "infantile-perverse" fantasies for their creative content than to trace them back to the cradle, and to understand all neurosis more as an attempt at adaptation than as an unsuccessful or otherwise distorted wish-fulfilment. 
Naturally, the theory of infantilism has the inestimable advantage of always putting the doctor "on top" as the representative of sound, healthy, superior insight, while the poor patient lies there helpless, the victim of unconscious infantile-perverse wish-fulfilments. This also gives the doctor the opportunity to know better, to avoid meeting the patient's personality face to face, and to hide behind a technique. 
It is not hard to see how much this attitude is aided and abetted by all manner of conscious and unconscious tendencies, and why a theory of infantilism is welcomed by the doctor from the start, even if, as a human being, he were quite ready to acknowledge the personality of his patient. The tremendous influence Freud's ideas have exerted rests not merely on their agreement with the real or supposed facts, but very largely on the easy opportunity they afford of touching the other fellow on his sore spot, of deflating him and hoisting oneself into a superior position. What a blessed relief it is when one can say in a tight corner, "That's nothing but resistance!" or when one need no longer take one's opponent's argument seriously because it can so easily be explained away as "symbolical" -without, be it noted, ever asking him whether this explanation is acceptable to his psychology. 
Besides which, there are numberless patients who, with a great show of coyness, are at bottom only too ready to subscribe to the infantilism theory, because it gives them a broad hint of how to pass off the disturbing "infantilism" as a "nothing but." And in many cases the theory offers a heaven-sent way out of the unpleasantly acute problems of real life into the blissful mead- 
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35° 
351 

THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 
ows of childhood, where, having invoked the aetiological bogy, the patient pretends to discover why he is no good in the present and how it is all the fault of his parents and his upbringing. 
Admittedly there is nothing that cannot be used to illegitimate advantage. But one ought to note where the misuse creeps in and how it is being exploited. These things depend very largely on the doctor, who must take his patient with great seriousness in order to detect abuses of this kind. A technique notices nothing, but a human being does-and he alone can develop the sensitiveness necessary to decide whether a neurosis should be treated from the infantile angle or from the adaptation angle. 
I need hardly say that technique is necessary up to a pointwe are all sufficiently convinced of that. But behind every method there stands the man, who is so much more important because, irrespective of his technique, he has to arrive at decisions which are at least as vital to the patient as any technique however adroitly applied. It is therefore the duty of the psychotherapist to exercise self-knowledge and to criticize his personal assumptions, whether religious or philosophical, just as asepsis is obligatory for a surgeon. The doctor must know his "personal equation" in order not to do violence to his patient. To this end I have worked out a critical psychology which would enable the psychiatrist to recognize the various typical attitudes, even though the Freudian school asserts that this has nothing to do with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is evidently a technique behind which the human being vanishes, and which always remains the same no matter who practises it. Consequently, the psychoanalyst needs no self-knowledge and no criticism of his assumptions. Apparently the purpose of his training analysis is to make him not a human being but a correct applier of technique. 
But even regarded as a technique psychoanalysis is far from simple. In actual fact it is a very complicated and fiendishly tricky affair compared even with the most elaborate chemical procedure, subject to endless variation and well-nigh unpredictable in its results. Anyone who finds that hard to believe should peruse the "technique" of a Freudian dream-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams-for instance, the dream of "Irma's injection." To call such a procedure a "technique" requires a 
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strong dose of optimism. And yet dreams are supposed to be the "via regia to the unconscious" and to play a not uncertain role in psychoanalysis! Truly one must be smitten with blindness not to see that this kind of "technique" is first and foremost an expression of the man who applies it and of all his subjective assumptions. 
	352 	These reflections lead us back to the problem of the doctor's 
attitude and to the need for criticism of subjective premises. A subjective view of the world should not be imported uncritically into his conception of neurosis, as was the case, for instance, with Freud's view of the unconscious and with his materialistic bias in regard to the religious function of the psyche. The psychotherapist should no longer labour under the delusion that the treatment of neurosis demands nothing more than the knowledge of a technique; he should be absolutely clear in his own mind that psychological treatment of the sick is a relationshiP in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient. True psychological treatment can only be individual, and this is why even the best technique has only a relative value. All the more significance, therefore, falls to the general attitude of the doctor, who must know himself well enough not to destroy the peculiar values of the patient entrusted to his care, whatever these may be. If Alfred Adler were to request analytical treatment of his old teacher Freud, Freud would have to adjust himself to seeing Adler's peculiar psychology, even to the point of admitting its general right to exist; for there are innumerable people whose psychology is that of the son in need of prestige. If, on the other hand, I were to analyse Freud, I would be doing him a great and irreparable wrong if I failed to take elaborate account of the very real historical significance of the nursery, the importance of the entanglements of the family romance, the bitterness and gravity of early-acquired resentments, and their compensatory accompaniment by wish-fantasies which-unhappily-cannot be fulfilled, and to accept all this as a fait accomPli. Freud would certainly take it amiss if I told him that resentments are all nothing but a "substitute" for failure to love one's neighbour, or something of that sort. True as such an assertion might be in other cases, it would be incorrect here, even if I should succeed in persuading Freud of the truth of my idea. Doubtless Freud means what he says, consequently we must take 
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him as the type of person who says such things. Only then is his particular case accepted, and with it all those whose psychology is similarly constituted. But since we can hardly suppose that either Freud or Adler is a universally valid representative of European man, there is some hope that I too may possess my own peculiar psychology, and, with me, all those who cannot subscribe to the primacy of infantile-perverse wish-fantasies or to that of the urge to power. 
	~53 	It goes without saying that this should not be a matter for 
naIve self-deception; on the contrary, no psychotherapist should let slip the opportunity to study himself critically in the light of these negative psychologies. Freud and Adler have beheld very clearly the shadow that accompanies us all. The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women; being physically weaker, they have to aim at the chinks in the armour of their adversary, and thanks to this technique which has been forced on them through the centuries, the Jews themselves are best protected where others are most vulnerable. Because, again, of their civilization, more than twice as ancient as ours, they are vastly more conscious than we of human weaknesses, of the shadow-side of things, and hence in this respect much less vulnerable than we are. Thanks to their experience of an old culture, they are able, while fully conscious of their frailties, to live on friendly and even tolerant terms with them, whereas we are still too young not to have "illusions" about ourselves. Moreover, we have been entrusted by fate with the task of creating a civilization-and indeed we have need of it-and for this "illusions" in the form of one-sided ideals, convictions, plans, ete. are indispensable. As a member of a race with a threethousand-year-old civilization, the Jew, like the cultured Chinese, has a wider area of psychological consciousness than we. Consequently it is in general less dangerous for the Jew to put a negative value on his unconscious. The "Aryan" unconscious, on the other hand, contains explosive forces and seeds of a future yet to be born, and these may not be devalued as nursery romanticism without psychic danger. The still youthful Germanic peoples are fully capable of creating new cultural forms that still lie dormant in the darkness of the unconscious of every individual-seeds bursting with energy and capable of mighty expansion. The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet 
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created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development. 
	354 	The Jewish race as a whole-at least this is my experience- 
possesses an unconscious which can be compared with the "Aryan" only with reserve. Creative individuals apart, the average Jew is far too conscious and differentiated to go about pregnant with the tensions of unborn futures. The "Aryan" unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism. In my opinion it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categorieswhich are not even binding on all Jews-indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom. Because of this the most precious secret of the Germanic peoples-their creative and intuitive depth of soul-has been explained as a morass of banal infantilism, while my own warning voice has for decades been suspected of anti-Semitism. This suspicion emanated from Freud. He did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonished eyes, taught them better? Where was that unparalleled tension and energy while as yet no National Socialism existed? Deep in the Germanic psyche, in a pit that is anything but a garbage-bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family resentments. A movement that grips a whole nation must have matured in every individual as well. That is why I say that the Germanic unconscious contains tensions and potentialities which medical psychology must consider in its evaluation of the unconscious. Its business is not with neuroses but with human beings-that, in fact, is the grand privilege of medical psychology: to treat the whole man and not an artificially segregated function.2 And that is why its scope must be widened to reveal to the physician's gaze not just the pathological aberrations of a disturbed psychic development, but the creative powers of the psyche labouring at the future; not just a dreary fragment but the meaningful whole. 
2 Similar views are expressed by von Weizsacker in regard to internal medicine. [Viktor von Weizsacker (1886-1957) , professor of medicine at Heidelberg Univer";J:y. He pioneered in psychosomatic medicine.-EDlTORS.] 
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THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 
	355 	A neurosis is by no means merely a negative thing, it is als( 
something positive. Only a soulless rationalism reinforced by ( narrow materialistic outlook could possibly have overlooked thi: fact. In reality the neurosis contains the patient's psyche, or a least an essential part of it; and if, as the rationalist pretends the neurosis could be plucked from him like a bad tooth, h( would have gained nothing but would have lost something veq essential to him. That is to say, he would have lost as much a: the thinker deprived of his doubt, or the moralist deprived of hi: temptation, or the brave man deprived of his fear. To lose ;: neurosis is to find oneself without an object; life loses its poin! and hence its meaning. This would not be a cure, it would b( a regular amputation; and it would be cold comfort indeed i the psychoanalyst then assured the patient that he had lost noth ing but his infantile paradise with its wishful chimeras, most 01 them perverse. Very much more would have been lost, for hid den in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, ;: precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is con demned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that i: hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the nega tive elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since il neglects the positive meaning and value of these "infantile"i.e., creative-fantasies. So often its main endeavour seems to lie in trying to explain everything backwards and downwards, anc there is of course nothing that is not capable of some obscene caricature. But this will never prove that the symbol or symp tom so explained really has that meaning; it merely demon strates the adolescent smutty-mindedness of the explainer. 
	356 	And here I cannot refrain from remarking how often it hap- 
pens that otherwise serious-minded physicians, in complete dis regard of all the fundamental tenets of scientific caution, will interpret psychological material in the light of subjective con jectures, of which one can make absolutely nothing except tha1 they are all attempts to discover by what obscene joke the material can be related to some oral, anal, urethral, or othel sexual abnormality. The poison of the "low-down" interpreta· tion has bitten so deeply into the marrow of these people's bone~ that they can no longer think at all except in the infantile-per. verse jargon of certain neurotics who display all the peculiaritie~ of a Freudian psychology. It is positively grotesque that the doc· 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
tor should himself fall into a way of thinking which in others he rightly censures as infantile and wants to cure for that reason. Certainly it is much easier to make conjectures over the head of the patient than to see what the empirical material really means. Nevertheless, one must assume that the patient came to the analyst in order to rid himself of his morbid way of thinking and looking at things, and we may therefore infer-as everywhere else in modern medicine-that the symptom is really the effort of the diseased system to cure itself. But if the analyst's thoughts, spoken or unspoken, are as negative and disparaging as the patient's, and if he degrades everything to the level of a "dirty joke" psychology, then we must not be surprised if the patient becomes spiritually blighted and compensates for this blight by incurable intellectualism. 
	357 	Unfortunately it is true that there are far too many people 
who justify our mistrust. Too many of them use ideals and meretricious values to pull wool over their own eyes. Often the analyst has to reduce them to a very unpleasant formula indeed in order to bring home to them the truth about themselves. But not all people are like that. At least as many patients need anything rather than distrust and disparagement. They are fundamentally decent folk who play fair and do not prostitute ideals for the adornment of their inferiorities. To treat such people reductively, to impute ulterior motives to them, and to suspect their natural wholesomeness of unnatural obscenities is not only sinfully stupid but positively criminal. A technique is always a soulless mechanism, and whoever takes psychotherapy for a technique and vaunts it as such runs the risk, at the very least, of committing an unpardonable blunder. A conscientious doctor must be able to doubt all his skills and all his theories, otherwise he is befooled by a system. But all systems mean bigotry and inhumanity. Neurosis-let there be no doubt about this-may be any number of things, but never a "nothing but." It is the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity-so vast, indeed, that any and every theory of neurosis is little better than a worthless sketch, unless it be a gigantic picture of the psyche which not even a hundred Fausts could conceive. 
	358 	The fundamental rule for the psychotherapist should be to 
consider each case new and unique. That, probably, is the nearest we can get to the truth. 
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THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 
	359 	The proper handling of psychic material requires supreme 
tact and an almost artistic sensitiveness. Without these, it is hardly possible to distinguish what is valuable from what is not. A neurosis, as I have said, consists of two things: infantile unwillingness and the will to adapt. Hence one has first to feel one's way until one is sure on which side the accent lies, for the road goes on from there. If the accent is on the will to adapt, there is no sense in decrying the attempt at adaptation as an infantile wish-fantasy. The analyst is very liable to make this mistake with his patient, and the patient-to his own great injury-is ever so delighted because he is then protected on medical authority against the feared or hated demands of his neurosis, that is, against the demands of that part of his personality which is concealed in it. But this "other" personality is the very thing he ought never to lose sight of, for it is his own inner antithesis, the conflict that must be fought out again and again if life is to go on. Without this initial opposition there is no flow of energy, no vitality. Lack of opposition brings life to a standstill wherever that lack reaches. But beyond that reach life flows on unconsciously in ever-renewed and ever-changing forms of neurosis. Only if we understand and accept the neurosis as our truest and most precious possession can we be sure of avoiding stagnation and of not succumbing to rigidity and neurotic subterfuge. In the neurosis is hidden one's worst enemy and best friend. One cannot rate him too highly, unless of course fate has made one hostile to life. There are always deserters, but they have nothing to say to us, nor we to them. 
	360 	Neurotic symbolism is ambiguous, pointing at once forward 
and back, downward and up. In general the forward movement is the more important, because the future is coming and the past retreating. Only those who are preparing a retreat will do better to look back. The neurotic has no need to feel himself beaten; he has merely misjudged his necessary adversary, thinking that he could give him the slip. The whole task of his personality lies in the very thing he sought to avoid. Any doctor who deludes him on that score is doing him a disservice. The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis) but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self) the "other" whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from 
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his life. In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a "seat of anxiety," which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically. As soon as the ego becomes a "seat of anxiety," we all run away from ourselves and refuse to admit our fear. That dreaded "other self" is the main target of psychoanalysis with its depreciating, undermining technique which is always seeking to wear down the enemy and cripple him for good. 
	361 	We should not try to "get rid" of a neurosis, but rather to 
experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it-it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him. From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. The psychoanalyst's every second word is "nothing but" -just what a dealer would say of an article he wanted to buy on the cheap. In this case it is man's soul, his hope, his boldest flight, his finest ad- 
venture. 
	36:> 	No, it will not do, this attempt to buy off the sick man's 
neurosis and with it his soul. Moreover it is, at bottom, an impossible undertaking, a fraud: in the long run nobody can dodge his shadow unless he lives in eternal darkness. What the patient encounters in a neurotic dissociation is a strange, unrecognized part of his personality, which seeks to compel his recognition in exactly the same way that any other part of the body, if obstinately denied, would insist on its presence. If anyone set out to deny the existence of his left hand, he would inevitably get entangled in a fantastic web of "nothing but" explanations, just as happens to the neurotic-except that the psychoanalyst dignifies them with the name of a "theory." The infantile-perverse "nothing but" fantasies are the patient's efforts to deny his left hand. These efforts are themselves his morbid deviation, and they are interesting only inasmuch as all fantasies contain a secret allusion to the left hand. Everything else about them is unreal, because it is merely contrived for the purpose of concealment. Freud, of course, thinks that the thing concealed is the 
170 

363 
364 
365 
366 

THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 
thing these fantasies more or less openly allude to, i.e., sexualit)' and all the rest of it. But this is just what that kind of patient is aiming at all the time. He rides the same hobby-horse as his analyst, who may even have handed him a helpful idea or twothe famous infantile sexual trauma, for instance, which we can spend so much time chasing, only to find that we are as far from the truth as ever. 
The true reason for a neurosis always lies in the present, since the neurosis exists in the present. It is definitely not a hangover from the past, a caput mortuum; it is fed and as it were new-made every day. And it is only in the today, not in our yesterdays, that the neurosis can be "cured." Because the neurotic conflict has to be fought today, any historical deviation is a detour, if not actually a wrong turning. And because the neurosis contains a part of one's own personality, an excursus into the thousand and one possibilities of obscene fantasy and unfulfillable infantile wishes is just a pretext for avoiding the essential question. 
The essential question is: what will pierce through this fog of verbiage to the conscious personality of the patient, and what must be the nature of his attitude if he is to integrate that splitoff fragment, supposing it were ever part of him? But how could it trouble him so much unless it were like his left hand, like the other half of himself? Something, therefore, that belongs to him in the deepest sense, completes him, creates organic balance, and yet for some reason is feared, perhaps because it makes life complicated and sets apparently impossible tasks? 
Obviously, the best way to evade these tasks is to replace them by something that can rightly be called impossible-for instance, that world of obscenities whose speediest sublimation is recommended by Freud himself. Freud, it seems, took these neurotic conjectures quite seriously and thus fell into the same trap as the neurotic: on the one hand he seeks a wrong turning at any price, and on the other hand he cannot find the right way out of the maze. He was obviously taken in by the neurotic trick of euPhemistic disparagement. He undervalued the neurosis and thereby won the applause of patients and doctors alike, who want nothing better than to hear that neurosis is "nothing but ... " 
The very word "psychogenic," however, tells us that certain 171 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
disturbances come from the psyche. Unfortunately the psyche is not a hormone but a world of almost cosmic proportions. Scientific rationalism completely overlooked this fact. Have psychotherapists ever seriously reflected that they have quite other forbears than Mesmer, Faria, Liebeault, Charcot, Bernheim, Janet, Forel, and the rest? 
	367 	For thousands of years the mind of man has worried about 
the sick soul, perhaps even earlier than it did about the sick body. The propitiation of gods, the perils of the soul and its salvation, these are not yesterday's problems. Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul's nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off; only the individual consciousness that has lost its connection with the psychic totality remains caught in the illusion that the soul is a small circumscribed area, a fit subject for "scientific" theorizing. The loss of this great relationship is the prime evil of neurosis, and that is why the neurotic loses his way among ever more tortuous back-streets of dubious repute, because he who denies the great must blame the petty. In his book The Future of an Illusion Freud has unwittingly shown his hand. He wants to put an end once and for all to the larger aspect of the psychic phenomenon, and in the attempt he continues the baleful work that is going on in every neurotic: destruction of the bond between men and the gods, severance from the universally felt and known bases of the psyche, and hence "denial of the left hand," of the counterpart man needs for his psychic existence. 
	368 	Let us not ask who has not preached to deaf ears! But did 
Goethe really write his Faust in vain? Hasn't Faust a neurosis as big as your fist? For surely the devil has been proved nonexistent. Consequently his psychic counterpart doesn't exist either-a mystery still to be unriddled, born of Faust's dubious internal secretions! That at least is the opinion of Mephistopheles, who is himself not altogether above reproach sexuallyinclined to be bisexual, if anything. This devil who, according to The Future of an Illusion) does not exist is yet the scientific object of psychoanalysis, which gleefully busies itself with his non-existent ways of thought. Faust's fate in heaven and on earth 
172 

THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 
may well be "left to the poets," but meanwhile the topsy-turv view 3 of the human soul is turned into a theory of psychi suffering. 
	369 	Psychotherapy today, it seems to me, still has a vast amoun 
to unlearn and relearn if it is to do even rough justice to it subject, the full range of the human psyche. But first it mllS cease thinking neurotically and see the psychic processes in tru perspective. Not only the whole conception of neurosis, but ou ideas about the psychic functions themselves-for instance th function of dreams-stand in need of radical revision. Ver notable blunders have occurred here, as when the perfectl' normal function of dreams was viewed from the same angle a disease. It will then become clear that psychotherapy made ap proximately the same mistake as did the old school of medicinl when it attacked the fever in the belief that this was the noxiou agent. 
	37° 	It is the fate and misfortune of psychotherapy to have beer 
born in an age of enlightenment, when self-distrust had made the old cultural values inaccessible and there was no psycholog; anywhere that went much beyond the level of Herbart or Con dillac-none at any rate that would have done anything lik< justice to the complexities and perplexities with which the inno cent and wholly unprepared physician was suddenly faced. Ir this respect we must be grateful to Freud, for at least he createc a certain sense of direction in this chaos, and gave the physiciar sufficient courage to take a case of hysteria seriously, as a scien tific proposition. Criticism after the event is easy enough, bUI all the same there is no sense in an entire generation of docton going to sleep on Freud's laurels. Much has still to be learn1 about the psyche, and our especial need today is liberation from outworn ideas which have seriously restricted our view of the psyche as a whole. 
3 ["Afterbild."-TRANS.] 
173 

III 
PREFACE TO 
"ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS" 
WOTAN 
AFTER THE CATASTROPHE 
THE FIGHT WITH THE SHADOW 
EPILOGUE TO 
"ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS" 

PREFACE TO 
"ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY EVENTS" 1 
Medical psychotherapy, for practical reasons, has to deal with the whole of the psyche. Therefore it is bound to come to terms with all those factors, biological as well as social and mental, which have a vital influence on psychic life. 
We are living in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame, internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of chaos, and the very foundations of our Weltanschauung are shattered. This critical state of things has such a tremendous influence on the psychic life of the individual that the doctor must follow its effects with more than usual attention. The storm of events does not sweep down upon him only from the great world outside; he feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting-room and in the privacy of the medical consultation. As he has a responsibility towards his patients, he cannot afford to withdraw to the peaceful island of undisturbed scientific work, but must constantly descend into the arena of world events, in order to join in the battle of conflicting passions and opinions. Were he to remain aloof from the tumult, the calamity of his time would reach him only from afar, and his patient's suffering would find neither ear nor understanding. He would be at a loss to know how to talk to him, and to help him out of his isolation. For this reason the psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history, even if his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not mention his duties as 
1 [Originally published as the Vorwort to Aufsatze ZUT Zeitgeschichte (Zurich, 1946). Trans. by Elizabeth Welsh in Essays on Contemporary Events (London, 1947); this version has been consulted. The latter volume contained the four papers that follow this preface and two more that were published in Vo!. 16 of the Call. Works: "Psychotherapy Today" (pp. 94ff.) and "Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life" (pp. 76ff.).-EDlTORS.] 
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2 Abyssinia. 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
a citizen, which confront him with a similar task. As a physician, he has a higher obligation to humanity in this respect. 
From time to time, therefore, I have felt obliged to step beyond the usual bounds of my profession. The experience of the psychologist is of a rather special kind, and it seemed to me that the general public might find it useful to hear his point of view. This was hardly a far-fetched conclusion, for surely the most naive of laymen could not fail to see that many contemporary figures and events were positively asking for psychological elucidation. Were psychopathic symptoms ever more conspicuous than in the contemporary political scene? 
It has never been my wish to meddle in the political questions of the day. But in the course of the years I have written a few papers which give my reactions to current events. The present book contains a collection of these occasional essays, all written between 1936 and 1946. It is natural enough that my thoughts should have been especially concerned with Germany, which has been a problem to me ever since the first World War. My statements have evidently led to all manner of misunderstandings, which are chiefly due, no doubt, to the fact that my psychological point of view strikes many people as new and therefore strange. Instead of embarking upon lengthy arguments in an attempt to clear up these misunderstandings, I have found it simpler to collect all the passages in my other writings which deal with the same theme and to put them in an epilogue.2 The reader will thus be in a position to get a clear picture of the facts for himself. 
2 [Infra, pp. 227ff.] 
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WOTANl 
En Germanie naistront diverses seetes, S'approehans fort de l'heureux paganisme: 
Le ereur eaptif et petites reeeptes Feront retour a payer la vraye disme. 
-ProPheties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus) 1555 
	371 	When we look back to the time before 1914, we find our. 
selves living in a world of events which would have been inconceivable before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an ab. surdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organized world. And what came after the war was a veritable witches' sabbath. Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbours and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale political murder, and finally we have witnessed a light-hearted piratical raid on a peaceful, half-civilized people.2 
	372 	With such goings on in the wide world it is not in the least 
1 [First published as "Wotan," Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich), n.s., III (March, 1936), 657-69. Republished in Autsiitze zur Zeitgeschichte (Zurich, 1946), 1-23. Trans. by Barbara Hannah in Essays on Contemporary Events (London, 1947), 1-16; this version has been consulted. The author added footnotes 3, 4, 15and 16 (first par.) to the London edn. Motto, trans. by H. C. Roberts: 
"In Germany shall divers sects arise, Coming very near to happy paganism. 
The heart captivated and small receivings Shall open the gate to pay the true tithe." 
-EDITORS.] 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
surprising that there should be equally curious manifestations on a smaller scale in other spheres. In the realm of philosophy we shall have to wait some time before anyone is able to assess the kind of age we are living in. But in the sphere of religion we can see at once that some very significant things have been happening. We need feel no surprise that in Russia the colourful splendours of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been superseded by the Movement of the Godless-indeed, one breathed a sigh of relief oneself when one emerged from the haze of an Orthodox church with its multitude of lamps and entered an honest mosque, where the sublime and invisible omnipresence of God was not crowded out by a superfluity of sacred paraphernalia. Tasteless and pitiably unintelligent as it is, and however deplorable the low spiritual level of the "scientific" reaction, it was inevitable that nineteenth-century "scientific" enlightenment should one day dawn in Russia. 
	373 	But what is more than curious-indeed, piquant to a degree- 
is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages. "'\Ve have seen him come to life in the German Youth Movement, and right at the beginning the blood of several sheep was shed in honour of his resurrection. Armed with rucksack and lute, blond youths, and sometimes girls as well, were to be seen as restless wanderers on every road from the North Cape to Sicily, faithful votaries of the roving god. Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by the thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journeys. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-year-olds to veterans, and produced the spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. Wotan the wanderer was on the move. He could be seen, looking rather shamefaced, in the meeting-house of a sect of simple folk in North Germany, disguised as Christ sitting on a white horse. I do not know if these people were aware of Wotan's ancient connection with the figures of Christ and Dionysus, but it is not very probable. 
	374 	Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up 
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WOTAN 
strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil, and only lived on in fading local traditions as a ghostly hunter who was seen with his retinue, flickering like a will 0' the wisp through the stormy night. In the Middle Ages the role of the restless wanderer was taken over by Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, which is not a Jewish but a Christian legend. The motif of the wanderer who has not accepted Christ was projected on the Jews, in the same way as we always rediscover our unconscious psychic contents in other people. At any rate the coincidence of anti-Semitism with the reawakening of Wotan is a psychological subtlety that may perhaps be worth mentioning. 
	375 	The German youths who celebrated the solstice with sheep- 
sacrifices were not the first to hear a rustling in the primeval forest of the unconscious. They were anticipated by Nietzsche, Schuler, Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages.3 The literary tradition of the Rhineland and the country south of the Main has a classical stamp that cannot easily be got rid of; every interpretation of intoxication and exuberance is apt to be taken back to classical models, to Dionysus, to the puer aeternus and the cosmogonic Eros.4 No doubt it sounds better to academic ears to interpret these things as Dionysus, but Wotan might be a more 
3 Ever since Nietzsche (1844-1900) there has been consistent emphasis on the "Dionysian" aspect of life in contrast to its "Apollonian" opposite. Since "The Birth of Tragedy" (1872), the dark, earthy. feminine side, with its man tic and orgiastic characteristics, has possessed the imagination of philosophers and poets. Irrationality gradually came to be regarded as the ideal; this is found, for example, all through the research of Alfred Schuler (d. 1923) into the mystery religions, and particularly in the writings of Klages (b. 1872 [d. 1956]), who expounded the philosophy of "irrationalism." To Klages, logos and consciousness are the destroyers of creative preconscious life. In these writers we witness the origin of a gradual rejection of reality and a negation of life as it is. This leads in the end to a cult of ecstasy, culminating in the self-dissolution of consciousness in death. which meant, to them, the conquest of material limitations. 
The poetry of Stefan George (1868-1933) combines elements of classical civilization, medieval Christianity, and oriental mysticism. George deliberately attacked nineteenth- and twentieth-century rationalism. His aristocratic message of mystical beauty and of an esoteric conception of history had a deep influence on German youth. His work has been exploited by unscrupulous politicians for propaganda purposes. 
4 Vom kosmogonischen Eros is the title of one of Klages' main works (first pub. 1922). 
181 

382 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
correct interpretation. He is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature. 
	376 	Nietzsche's case is certainly a peculiar one. He had no knowl- 
edge of Germanic literature; he discovered the "cultural Philistine"; and the announcement that "God is dead" led to Zarathustra's meeting with an unknown god in unexpected form, who approached him sometimes as an enemy and sometimes disguised as Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra, too, was a soothsayer, a magician, and the storm-wind: 
And like a wind shall I come to blow among them, and with my spirit shall take away the breath of their spirit; thus my future wills it. 
Truly, a strong wind is Zarathustra to all that are low; and this counsel gives he to his enemies and to all that spit and spew: 
"Beware of spitting against the wind." 5 
	377 	And when Zarathustra dreamed that he was guardian of the 
graves in the "lone mountain fortress of death," and was making a mighty effort to open the gates, suddenly 
A roaring wind tore the gates asunder; whistling, shrieking, and keening, it cast a black coffin before me. 
And amid the roaring and whistling and shrieking the coffin burst open and spouted a thousand peals of laughter. 
	378 	The disciple who interpreted the dream said to Zarathustra: 
Are you not yourself the wind with shrill whistling, which bursts open the gates of the fortress of death? 
Are you not yourself the coffin filled with life's gay malice and angel-grimaces? 6 
	379 	In 1863 or 1864, in his poem "To the Unknown God," 
Nietzsche had written: 
I shall and will know thee, Unknown One, Who searchest out the depths of my soul, And blowest through my life like a storm, Ungraspable, and yet my kinsman! 
I shall and will know thee, and serve thee. 
5 Thus SPake Zarathustra. trans. by Kaufmann, p. 211 (mod.). 6 Ibid., p. 247 (mod.). 
182 

WOTAN 
	380 	Twenty years later, in his "Mistral Song," he wrote: 
Mistral wind, chaser of clouds. 
Killer of gloom, sweeper of the skies, Raging storm-wind, how I love thee! Are we not both the first-fruits 
Of the same womb, forever predestined To the same fate? 7 
	381 	In the dithyramb known as "Ariadne's Lament," Nietzsche is 
completely the victim of the hunter-god: 
Stretched out, shuddering, 
Like a half-dead thing whose feet are warmed, Shaken by unknown fevers, 
Shivering with piercing icy frost arrows, Hunted by thee, 0 thought, Unutterable! Veiled! horrible one! Thou huntsman behind the clouds. Struck down by thy lightning bolt, 
Thou mocking eye that stares at me from the darkl Thus I lie, 
Writhing, twisting, tormented With all eternal tortures, Smitten 
By thee, cruel huntsman, Thou unknown-God! 8 
This remarkable image of the hunter-god is not a mere 
dithyrambic figure of speech but is based on an experience which Nietzsche had when he was fifteen years old, at Pforta. It is described in a book by Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth FoersterNietzsche.9 As he was wandering about in a gloomy wood at night, he was terrified by a "blood-curdling shriek from a neighbouring lunatic asylum," and soon afterwards he came face to face with a huntsman whose "features were wild and uncanny." Setting his whistle to his lips "in a valley surrounded by wild scrub," the huntsman "blew such a shrill blast" that Nietzsche lost consciousness-but woke up again in Pforta. It was a nightmare. It is significant that in his dream Nietzsche, who in reality 
7 Werke, V, pp. 457f. and 495; trans. by R.F.C.H. S Thus Spake Zarathustra, Kaufmann trans., p. 365. 9 Der werdende Nietzsche, pp. 84ff. 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
intended to go to Eisleben, Luther's town, discussed with the huntsman the question of going instead to "Teutschenthal" (Valley of the Germans). No one with ears to hear can misunderstand the shrill whistling of the storm-god in the nocturnal wood. 
	383 	Was it really only the classical philologist in Nietzsche that 
led to the god being called Dionysus instead of Wotan-or was it perhaps due to his fateful meeting with Wagner? 
	384 	In his Reich ohne Raum) which was first published in 1919, 
Bruno Goetz saw the secret of coming events in Germany in the form of a very strange vision. I have never forgotten this little book, for it struck me at the time as a forecast of the German weather. It anticipates the conflict between the realm of ideas and life, between Wotan's dual nature as a god of storm and a god of secret musings. Wotan disappeared when his oaks fell and appeared again when the Christian God proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter. When the Holy Father at Rome could only impotently lament before God the fate of the grex segregatus) the one-eyed old hunter, on the edge of the German forest, laughed and saddled Sleipnir. 
	385 	We are always convinced that the modern world is a reason- 
able world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too-human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wo tan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan's character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible even after the deepest reflection. 
	386 	Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergrif- 
fenheit-a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but also an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wo tan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one 
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wishes to deify Hitler-which has indeed actually happened-l is really the only explanation. It is true that \Votan shares th quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to ha, exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical rl ports, were dangerous enough. W otan confined himself to tb berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts ( mythical kings. 
	387 	A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as met, 
physical entities existing in their own right, or else regards then as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of vie, the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at leas the value of a parable. But since the gods are without doub personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysica existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinioI that they could ever be invented. Not that "psychic forces" have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of play ing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. "Psychic forces" have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence anything unexpected that approaches us from that dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and therefore as real, or else as an hallucination and therefore not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man. 
	388 	For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, 
we could of course dispense with the name "Wo tan" and speak instead of the furor teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of "fury." We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously "possessed," has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition. 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
It seems to me that Wo tan hits the mark as an hypothesis. 
Apparently he really was only asleep in the Kyffhiiuser mountain until the ravens called him and announced the break of day. He is a fundamental attribute of the German psyche, an irrational psychic factor which acts on the high pressure of civilization like a cyclone and blows it away. Despite their crankiness, the Wotan-worshippers seem to have judged things more correctly than the worshippers of reason. Apparently everyone had forgotten that 'Votan is a Germanic datum of first importance, the truest expression and unsurpassed personification of a fundamental quality that is particularly characteristic of the Germans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is a symptom which arouses suspicion that other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere. The emphasis on the Germanic race (vulgarly called "Aryan"), the Germanic heritage, blood and soil, the Wagalaweia songs,10 the ride of the Valkyries, Jesus as a blond and blue-eyed hero, the Greek mother of St. Paul, the devil as an international Alberich in Jewish or Masonic guise, the Nordic aurora borealis as the light of civilization, the inferior Mediterranean races-all this is the indispensable scenery for the drama that is taking place and at bottom they all mean the same thing: a god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a "mighty rushing wind." It was soon after Hitler seized power, if I am not mistaken, that a cartoon appeared in Punch of a raving berserker tearing himself free from his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather. 
Things are comparatively quiet in Switzerland, though occasionally there is a puff of wind from the north or south. Sometimes it has a slightly ominous sound, sometimes it whispers so harmlessly or even idealistically that no one is alarmed. "Let sleeping dogs lie"-we manage to get along pretty well with this proverbial wisdom. It is sometimes said that the Swiss are singularly averse to making a problem of themselves. I must rebut this accusation: the Swiss do have their problems but they would not say so for anything in the world, even though they see which way the wind is blowing. We thus pay our tribute to the time 
10 [After the meaningless refrains sung by the Rhine maidens in Wagner's Ring cycle: "Weia! Waga! Wagala weia!," etc.-EDITORS.] 
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WOTAN 
of storm and stress in Germany, but we never mention it, all( this enables us to feel vastly superior. 
It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, per haps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to lean what those perils of the soul were from which Christianity triec to rescue mankind. Germany is a land of spiritual catastrophes where nature never makes more than a pretencL of peace wilt world-ruling reason. The disturber of the peace is a wind thal blows into Europe from Asia's vastness, sweeping in on a wide front from Thrace to the Baltic, scattering the nations before il like dry leaves, or inspiring thoughts that shake the world to it! foundations. It is an elemental Dionysus breaking into the Apollonian order. The rouser of this tempest is named Wo tan, and we can learn a good deal about him from the political con· fusion and spiritual upheaval he has caused throughout history. For a more exact investigation of his character, however, we must go back to the age of myths, which did not explain everything in terms of man and his limited capacities but sought the deeper cause in the psyche and its autonomous powers. Man's earliest intuitions personified these powers as gods, and described them in the myths with great care and circumstantiality according to their various characters. This could be done the more readily on account of the firmly established primordial types or images which are innate in the unconscious of many races and exercise a direct influence upon them. Because the behaviour of a race takes on its specific character from its underlying images we can speak of an archetype "Wotan." 11 As an autonomous psychic factor, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature. For Wotan has a peculiar biology of his own, quite apart from the nature of man. It is only from time to time that individuals fall under the irresistible influence of this unconscious factor. When it is quiescent, one is no more aware of the archetype Wotan than of a latent epilepsy. Could the Germans who were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that "bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst 11 One should read what Bruno Goetz (Deutsche Dichtung, pp. 36ft and 72ff.) has to say about Odin as the German wanderer-god. Unfortunately I only read this book after I had finished my article. 
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not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth." It seizes everything in its path and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows it shakes everything that is insecure, whether without or within. 
	392 	Martin Ninck has recently published a monograph 12 which 
is a most welcome addition to our knowledge of Wotan's nature. The reader need not fear that this book is nothing but a scientific study written with academic aloofness from the subject. Certainly the right to scientific objectivity is fully preserved, and the material has been collected with extraordinary thoroughness and presented in unusually clear form. But over and above all this one feels that the author is vitally interested in it, that the chord of Wotan is vibrating in him too. This is no criticism-on the contrary it is one of the chief merits of the book, which without this enthusiasm might easily have degenerated into a tedious catalogue. 
	393 	Ninck sketches a really magnificent portrait of the German 
archetype Wotan. He describes him in ten chapters, using all the available sources, as the berserker, the god of storm, the wanderer, the warrior, the Wunsch- and Minne-god, the lord of the dead and of the Einherier,13 the master of secret knowledge, the magician, and the god of the poets. Neither the Valkyries nor the Fylgja 14 are forgotten, for they form part of the mythological background and fateful significance of Wotan. Ninck's inquiry into the name and its origin is particularly instructive. He shows that Wotan is not only a god of rage and frenzy who embodies the instinctual and emotional aspect of the unconscious. Its intuitive and inspiring side also manifests itself in him, for he understands the runes and can interpret fate. 
	394 	The Romans identified W'otan with Mercury, but his char- 
acter does not really correspond to any Roman or Greek god, although there are certain resemblances. He is a wanderer like Mercury, for instance, rules over the dead like Pluto and Kronos, and is connected with Dionysus by his emotional frenzy, particularly in its mantic aspect. It is surprising that Ninck does not mention Hermes, the god of revelation, who as pneuma and 
12 Wodan und germanischer Schicksalsglaube. 
13 [Wunsch, magical wish; Minne, remembrance, love; Einherier, the dead heroes in Valhalla (Meyers Konversations-Lexikon).-EDITORS.] 
14 [Fylgja, attendant spirit in the form of an animal (Hastings, Encyclopedia).] 
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WOTAN 
nous is associated with the wind. He would be the connectinglink with the Christian pneuma and the miracle of Pentecost. As Poimandres (the shepherd of men) Hermes is an Ergreifer like Wotan. Ninck rightly points out that Dionysus and the other Greek gods always remained under the supreme authority of Zeus, which indicates a fundamental difference between the Greek and the Germanic temperament. Ninck assumes an inner affinity between Wotan and Kronos, and the latter's defeat may perhaps be a sign that the Wo tan-archetype was once overcome and split up in prehistoric times. At all events, the Germanic god represents a totality on a very primitive level, a psychological condition in which man's will was almost identical with the god's and entirely at his mercy. But the Greeks had gods who helped man against other gods; indeed, All-Father Zeus himself is not far from the ideal of a benevolent, enlightened despot. 
	395 	It was not in Wotan's nature to linger on and show signs of 
old age. He simply disappeared when the times turned against him, and remained invisible for more than a thousand years, working anonymously and indirectly. Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them, but which it can find again at any time. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it has flowed in this channel the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return to its old bed. The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as part of the State may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control, in the hands of One who has always been stronger than men. The League of Nations, which was supposed to possess supranational authority, is regarded by some as a child in need of care and protection, by others as an abortion. Thus the life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks, and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways. 
189 

398 
396 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
But what a so-called Fiihrer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country. 
The ruling archetype does not remain the same for ever, as is evident from the temporal limitations that have been set to the hoped-for reign of peace, the "thousand-year Reich." The Mediterranean father-archetype of the just, order-loving, benevolent ruler has been shattered over the whole of northern Europe, as the present fate of the Christian Churches bears witness. Fascism in Italy and the civil war in Spain show that in the south as well the cataclysm has been far greater than one expected. Even the Catholic Church can no longer afford trials of strength. 
The nationalist God has attacked Christianity on a broad front. In Russia he is called technology and science, in Italy, Duce, and in Germany, "German Faith," "German Christianity," or the State. The "German Christians" 15 are a contradiction in terms and would do better to join Hauer's "German Faith Movement." 16 These are decent and well-meaning people 15 A National Socialist movement inside the Protestant Church, which tried to eliminate all vestiges of the Old Testament from Christianity. 
16 Wilhelm Hauer (b. 1881), first a missionary and later professor of Sanskrit at the University of Tubingen, was the founder and leader of the "German Faith Movement." It tried to establish a "German Faith" founded on German and Nordic writings and traditions, e.g., those of Eckhart and Goethe. This movement sought to combine a number of different and often incompatible trends: some of its members accepted an expurgated form of Christianity, others were opposed not only to Christianity in any form but to every kind of religion or god. One of the common articles of faith, which the movement adopted in 1934, was: "The German Faith Movement aims at the religious renaissance of the nation out of the hereditary foundations of the German race." 
The spirit of this movement may be contrasted with a sermon preached by Dr. Langmann, an evangelical clergyman and high dignitary of the Church, at the funeral of the late Gustloff. Dr. Langmann gave the address "in SA. uniform and jackboots." He sped the deceased on his journey to Hades, and directed him to Valhalla, to the home of Siegfried and Baldur, the heroes who "nourish the life of the German people by the sacrifice of their blood"-like Christ among others. "May this god send the nations of the earth clanking on their way through history." "Lord bless our struggle. Amen." Thus the reverend gentleman ended his address, according to the Neue Ziircher Zeitung (1936, no. 249). As a service held to "\Totan it is no doubt very edifying-and remarkably tolerant towards believers in Christ! Are our Churches inclined to be equally tolerant and to preach that Christ shed his blood for the salvation of mankind, like Siegfried, Baldur, and Odin among others?! One can ask unexpectedly grotesque questions these days. 
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WOTAN 
who honestly admit their Ergrifjenheit and try to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact. They go to an enormous amount of trouble to make it look less alarming by dressing it up in a conciliatory historical garb and giving us consoling glimpses of great figures such as Meister Eckhart, who was also a German and also ergrifjen. In this way the awkward question of who the Ergreifer is is circumvented. He was always "God." But the more Hauer restricts the world-wide sphere of IndoEuropean culture to the "Nordic" in general and to the Edda in particular, and the more "German" this faith becomes as a manifestation of Ergrifjenheit) the more painfully evident it is that 
the "German" god is the god of the Germans. 
One cannot read Hauer's book 17 without emotion, if one 
regards it as the tragic and really heroic effort of a conscientious scholar who, without knowing how it happened to him, was violently summoned by the inaudible voice of the Ergreifer and is now trying with all his might, and with all his knowledge and ability, to build a bridge between the dark forces of life and the shining world of historical ideas. But what do all the beauties of the past from totally different levels of culture mean to the man of today, when confronted with a living and unfathomable tribal god such as he has never experienced before? They are sucked like dry leaves into the roaring whirlwind, and the rhythmic alliterations of the Edda become inextricably mixed up with Christian mystical texts, German poetry, and the wisdom of the UPanishads. Hauer himself is ergrifjen by the depths of meaning in the primal words lying at the root of the Germanic languages, to an extent that he certainly never knew before. Hauer the Indologist is not to blame for this, nor yet the Edda; it is rather the fault of kairos-the present moment in time-whose name on closer investigation turns out to be Wotan. I would therefore advise the German Faith Movement to throw aside their scruples. Intelligent people will not confuse them with the crude Wotan-worshippers whose faith is a mere pretence. There are people in the German Faith Movement who are intelligent enough not only to believe but to know that the god of the Germans is Wotan and not the Christian God. This is a tragic experience and no disgrace. It has always been terrible to fall 17 Deutsche Gottschau: Grundzuge eines deutschen Glaubens [German Vision of GOd: Basic Elements of a German Faith). 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
into the hands of a living god. Yahweh was no exception to this rule, and the Philistines, Edomites, Amorites, and the rest, who were outside the Yahweh experience, must certainly have found it exceedingly disagreeable. The Semitic 18 experience of Allah was for a long time an extremely painful affair for the whole of Christendom. We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims. 
	399 	If we apply our admittedly peculiar point of view consist- 
ently, we are driven to conclude that Wo tan must, in time, reveal not only the restless, violent, stormy side of his character, but also his ecstatic and man tic qualities-a very different aspect of his nature. If this conclusion is correct, National Socialism would not be the last word. Things must be concealed in the background which we cannot imagine at present, but we may expect them to appear in the course of the next few years or decades. Wotan's reawakening is a stepping back into the past; the stream was dammed up and has broken into its old channel. But the obstruction will not last for ever; it is rather a reculer pour mieux sauter) and the water will overleap the obstacle. Then at last we shall know what Wo tan is saying when he "murmurs with Mimir's head." 
	Fast move the sons 	of Mim, and fate 
	Is heard in the note 	of the Gjallarhorn; 
	Loud blows Heimdall, 	the horn is aloft, 
In fear quake all who on Hel-roads are. 
	Y ggdrasil shakes 	and shivers on high 
	The ancient limbs, 	and the giant is loose; 
	Wotan murmurs 	with Mimir's head 
	But the kinsman of Surt 	shall slay him soon. 
	How fare the gods? 	how fare the elves? 
	All jotunheim groans, 	the gods are at council; 
	Loud roar the dwarfs 	by the doors of stone, 
	The masters of the rocks: 	would you know yet more? 
18 [Using the word to connote those peoples within the Semitic language-group. -TRANS.] 
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WOTAN 
	Now Garm howls loud 	before Gnipahellir; 
	The fetters will burst, 	and the wolf run free; 
	M uch do I know, 	and more can see 
	Of the fate of the gods, 	the mighty in fight. 
	From the east comes Hrym 	with shield held high; 
	In giant-wrath 	does the serpent writhe; 
	O'er the waves he twists, 	and the tawny eagle 
	Gnaws corpses screaming; 	Naglfar is loose. 
	O'er the sea from the north 	there sails a ship 
	With the people of Hel, 	at the helm stands Loki; 
	After the wolf 	do wild men follow, 
	And with them the brother 	of Byleist goes,19 
19 Voluspo (The Poetic Edda, trans. by Bellows, pp. 20f.; line 7 mod.). 
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AFTER THE CATASTROPHE 1 
	400 	This is the first time since 1936 that the fate of Germany 
again drives me to take up my pen. The quotation from the Voluspo with which I ended the article 2 I wrote at that time, about Wotan "murmuring with Mimir's head," pointed prophetically to the nature of the coming apocalyptic events. The myth has been fulfilled, and the greater part of Europe lies in rUIns. 
	401 	Before the work of reconstruction can begin, there is a good 
deal of clearing up to be done, and this calls above all for reflection. Questions are being asked on all sides about the meaning of the whole tragedy. People have even turned to me for an explanation, and I have had to answer them there and then to the best of my ability. But as the spoken word very quickly gives rise to legends, I have decided-not without considerable hesitations and misgivings-to set down my views once again in the form of an article. I am only too well aware that "Germany" presents an immense problem, and that the subjective views of a medical psychologist can touch on only a few aspects of this gigantic tangle of questions. I must be content with a modest contribution to the work of clearing up, without even attempting to look as far ahead as reconstruction. 
	402 	While I was working on this article I noticed how churned 
up one still is in one's own psyche, and how difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one's emotions. No doubt we should be cold-blooded and superior; but we are, on the whole, 
1 [First published as "Nach der Katastrophe," Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich), n.s., XIII (1945), 67-88; reprinted in Aufsatze zur Zeitgeschichte (Zurich, 1946), pp. 73-116. Previously trans. by Elizabeth Welsh in Essays on Contemporary Events (London, 1947), pp. 45-72.-EDlTORS.] 
2 [See previous paper.] 
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AFTER THE CATASTROPHE 
much more deeply involved in the recent events in Germany than we like to admit. Nor can we feel compassion, for the heart harbours feelings of a very different nature, and these would like to have the first say. Neither the doctor nor the psychologist can afford to be only cold-blooded-quite apart from the fact that they would find it impossible. Their relationship to the world involves them and all their affects, otherwise their relationship would be incomplete. That being so, I found myself faced with the task of steering my ship between Scylla and Charybdis, and -as is usual on such a voyage-stopping my ears to one side of my being and lashing the other to the mast. I must confess that no article has ever given me so much trouble, from a moral as well as a human point of view. I had not realized how much I myself was affected. There are others, I am sure, who will share this feeling with me. This inner identity or particiPation mystique with events in Germany has caused me to experience afresh how painfully wide is the scope of the psychological concept of collective guilt. So when I approach this problem it is certainly not with any feelings of cold-blooded superiority, but rather with an avowed sense of inferiority. 
	4°3 	The psychological use of the word "guilt" should not be con- 
fused with guilt in the legal or moral sense. Psychologically, it connotes the irrational presence of a subjective feeling (or conviction) of guilt, or an objective imputation of, or imputed share in, guilt. As an example of the latter, suppose a man belongs to a family which has the misfortune to be disgraced because one of its members has committed a crime. It is clear that he cannot be held responsible, either legally or morally. Yet the atmosphere of guilt makes itself felt in many ways. His family name appears to have been sullied, and it gives him a painful shock to hear it bandied about in the mouths of strangers. Guilt can be restricted to the lawbreaker only from the legal, moral, and intellectual point of view, but as a psychic phenomenon it spreads itself over the whole neighbourhood. A house, a family, even a village where a murder has been committed feels the psychological guilt and is made to feel it by the outside world. Would one take a room where one knows a man was murdered a few days before? Is it particularly pleasant to marry the sister or daughter of a criminal? What father is not deeply wounded if his son is sent to prison, and does he not feel injured in his 
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family pride if a cousin of the same name brings dishonour on his house? Would not every decent Swiss feel ashamed-to put it mildly-if our Government had erected a human slaughterhouse like Maidenek in our country? Would we then be surprised if, travelling abroad with our Swiss passports, we heard such remarks at the frontier as "Ces cochons de Suisses!"? Indeed, are we not all a little ashamed-precisely because we are patriots-that Switzerland should have bred so many traitors? 
	404 	Living as we do in the middle of Europe, we Swiss feel com- 
fortably far removed from the foul vapours that arise from the morass of German guilt. But all this changes the moment we set foot, as Europeans, on another continent or come into contact with an Oriental people. What are we to say to an Indian who asks us: "You are anxious to bring us your Christian culture, are you not? May I ask if Auschwitz and Buchenwald are examples of European civilization?" Would it help matters if we hastened to assure him that these things did not take place where we live, but several hundred miles further east-not in our country at all but in a neighbouring one? How would we react if an Indian pointed out indignantly that India's black spot lay not in Travancore but in Hyderabad? Undoubtedly we'd say, "Oh well, India is India!" Similarly, the view all over the East is, "Oh well, Europe is Europe!" The moment we so-called innocent Europeans cross the frontiers of our own continent we are made to feel something of the collective guilt that weighs upon it, despite our good conscience. (One might also ask: Is Russia so primitive that she can still feel our "guilt-by-contagion"as collective guilt might also be called-and for that reason accuses us of Fascism?) The world sees Europe as the continent on whose soil the shameful concentration camps grew, just as Europe singles out Germany as the land and the people that are enveloped in a cloud of guilt; for the horror happened in Germany and its perpetrators were Germans. No German can deny this, any more than a European or a Christian can deny that the most monstrous crime of all ages was committed in his house. The Christian Church should put ashes on her head and rend her garments on account of the guilt of her children. The shadow of their guilt has fallen on her as much as upon Europe, the mother of monsters. Europe must account for herself before the world, just as Germany must before Europe. The European 
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AFTER THE CATASTROPHE 
can no more convince the Indian that Germany is no concern of his, or that he knows nothing at all about that country, than the German can rid himself of his collective guilt by protesting that he did not know. In that way he merely compounds his collective guilt by the sin of unconsciousness. 
	4°5 	Psychological collective guilt is a tragic fate. It hits every- 
body, just and unjust alike, everybody who was anywhere near the place where the terrible thing happened. Naturally no reasonable and conscientious person will lightly turn collective into individual guilt by holding the individual responsible without giving him a hearing. He will know enough to distinguish between the individually guilty and the merely collectively guilty. But how many people are either reasonable or conscientious, and how many take the trouble to become so? I am not very optimistic in this respect. Therefore, although collective guilt, viewed on the archaic and primitive level, is a state of magical uncleanness) yet precisely because of the general unreasonableness it is a very real fact, which no European outside Europe and no German outside Germany can leave out of account. If the German intends to live on good terms with Europe, he must be conscious that in the eyes of Europeans he is a guilty man. As a German, he has betrayed European civilization and all its values; he has brought shame and disgrace on his European family, so that one must blush to hear oneself called a European; he has fallen on his European brethren like a beast of prey, and tortured and murdered them. The German can hardly expect other Europeans to resort to such niceties as to inquire at every step whether the criminal's name was Muller or Meier. Neither will he be deemed worthy of being treated as a gentleman until the contrary has been proved. Unfortunately, for twelve long years it has been demonstrated with the utmost clarity that the official German was no gentleman. 
	406 	If a German is prepared to acknowledge his moral inferiority 
as collective guilt before the whole world, without attempting to minimize it or explain it away with flimsy arguments, then he will stand a reasonable chance, after a time, of being taken for a more or less decent man, and will thus be absolved of his collective guilt at any rate in the eyes of individuals. 
	.{°7 	It may be objected that the whole concept of psychological 
collective guilt is a prejudice and a sweepingly unfair condemna- 
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tion. Of course it is, but that is precisely what constitutes the irrational nature of collective guilt: it cares nothing for the just and the unjust, it is the dark cloud that rises up from the scene of an unexpiated crime. It is a psychic phenomenon, and it is therefore no condemnation of the German people to say that they are collectively guilty, but simply a statement of fact. Yet if we penetrate more deeply into the psychology of this phenomenon, we shall soon discover that the problem of collective guilt has another and more questionable aspect than that merely of a collective judgment. 
	4°8 	Since no man lives within his own psychic sphere like a snail 
in its shell, separated from everybody else, but is connected with his fellow-men by his unconscious humanity, no crime can ever be what it appears to our consciousness to be: an isolated psychic happening. In reality, it always happens over a wide radius. The sensation aroused by a crime, the passionate interest in tracking down the criminal, the eagerness with which the court proceedings are followed, and so on, all go to prove the exciting effect which the crime has on everybody who is not abnormally dull or apathetic. Everybody joins in, feels the crime in his own being, tries to understand and explain it. Something is set aflame by that great fire of evil that flared up in the crime. Was not Plato aware that the sight of ugliness produces something ugly in the soul? Indignation leaps up, angry cries of "Justice!" pursue the murderer, and they are louder, more impassioned, and more charged with hate the more fiercely burns the fire of evil that has been lit in our souls. It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. The murder has been suffered by everyone, and everyone has committed it; lured by the irresistible fascination of evil, we have all made this collective psychic murder possible; and the closer we were to it and the better we could see, the greater our guilt. In this way we are unavoidably drawn into the uncleanness of evil, no matter what our conscious attitude may be. No one can escape this, for we are all so much a part of the human community that every crime calls forth a secret satisfaction in some corner of the fickle human heart. It is true that, in persons with a strong moral disposition, this reaction may arouse contrary feelings in a neighbouring compartment of the 
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AFTER THE CATASTROPHE 
mind. But a strong moral disposition is a comparative rarity, so that when the crimes mount up, indignation may easily get pitched too high, and evil then becomes the order of the day. Everyone harbours his "statistical criminal" in himself, just as he has his own private madman or saint. Owing to this basic peculiarity in our human make-up, a corresponding suggestibility, or susceptibility to infection, exists everywhere. It is our age in particular-the last half century-that has prepared the way for crime. Has it never occurred to anybody, for instance, that the vogue for the thriller has a rather questionable side? 
	409 	Long before 1933 there was a smell of burning in the air, 
and people were passionately interested in discovering the locus of the fire and in tracking down the incendiary. And when denser clouds of smoke were seen to gather over Germany, and the burning of the Reichstag gave the signal, then at last there was no mistake where the incendiary, evil in person, dwelt. Terrifying as this discovery was, in time it brought a sense of relief: now we knew for certain where all unrighteousness was to be found, whereas we ourselves were securely entrenched in the opposite camp, among respectable people whose moral indignation could be trusted to rise higher and higher with every fresh sign of guilt on the other side. Even the call for mass executions no longer offended the ears of the righteous, and the saturation bombing of German cities was looked upon as the judgment of God. Hate had found respectable motives and had ceased to be a personal idiosyncrasy, indulged in secret. And all the time the esteemed public had not the faintest idea how closely they themselves were living to evil. 
	410 	One should not imagine for a moment that anybody could 
escape this play of opposites. Even a saint would have to pray unceasingly for the souls of Hitler and Himmler, the Gestapo and the 5.5., in order to repair without delay the damage done to his own soul. The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul-there is no getting away from this fact. The victim is not the only sufferer; everybody in the vicinity of the crime, including the murderer, suffers with him. Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood. True, we are innocent, we are the victims, robbed, betrayed, outraged; and yet for all that, or precisely because of 
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