CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
of Paul Valery, which took place in Paris in October 1933,2 and was the immediate occasion of La Revolution mondiale. He says: 
"In short, the solution we advocate has a good deal in common with that offered by the monasteries at the beginning of the Middle Ages." What moving spirits will belong to the New Order? 
Of what kind would the men be who were capable of giving direction to the masses who now determine the course of history? Surely the very men we have been describing: absolutely free, haughtily independent, concerned with quality alone, conscious of their uniqueness, determined to acknowledge no authority outside themselves, proud to be a tiny minority, as active mentally as the mob is passive. Men whose consciousness is naturally centred on a plane superior to earthly happenings, to country, to race, to social or political necessities; men who in their deepest aspirations are completely free of all external considerations, of glory, influence, status; ascetics, in short, of a single pattern, forming a nobility of a kind hitherto unknown. 
	944 	The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in mu- 
seums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead. An "Order" is constituted, firstly, by the grace of God, and secondly, by a majority of highly insignificant people. Those noble souls who float before the eyes of the author will constitute an order, or will be fit to be received into such, when (in keeping with the author's list of qualities) they (1) are conscious of their lack of freedom, (2) humbly recognize their dependence, (3) have forgotten their socalled uniqueness, (4) can adapt to the eternal powers outside themselves, (5) can endure being a small minority, (6) have their natural centre of consciousness in their earth, in their race, and in social and political necessities, and (lastly) when, through the presence of God, which curiously enough always coincides with a time of great distress, there has grown up in them a need for true human fellowship from a profound experience of the nullity of human existence. 
	945 	If our esteemed author, Count Keyserling, were to become 
2 [The third in a series of "Conversations," actually organized by the Permanent Committee of Arts and Letters of the League of Nations and conducted by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation in various cities from 1932 to 1938. Keyserling represented Germany at the meeting in question. Cf. Vah~ry, History and Politics, pp. 531ff. and 541ff.-EDITORS.] 
500 

LA REVOLUTION MONDIALE 
a lay brother charged with working in the kitchens of the cultural monastery, then I would believe in the feasibility of this idea, but not before. I even believe that the reader would be doing the book an injustice if he took such ideas quite literally. Ideas are images for something, and not its essence; they are symbols, and even symptoms. By taking them literally we block the approach to Keyserling's world of ideas. He is, in the truest sense, the mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist) or, to be more accurate, the Zeitgeist of the spiritual man. When one takes him like this, even his cultural monastery presents no difficulty: it is symptomatic of that chiliastic mood which no conscious person nowadays should dismiss as worthless. The time is as great as one thinks it, and man grows to the stature of the time. Keyserling's mediumistic gifts have gathered together the loose, fluttering, fragmentary thoughts of a whole epoch. Like Ortega y Gasset, he condenses the symptomatic utterances of the collective spirit, speaking through a thousand tongues, into a single discourse addressed to his contemporaries. That is why everyone will hear his own voice in this discourse. And because it is extremely useful and desirable to know what one is thinking (which is not always the case, by any means), one should read this book assiduously. There is probably no other work which describes the spiritual imponderabilia of our age more lucidly than La Revolution mondiale. 
5°1 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 1 
	946 	It would never occur to the naIve European to regard the 
psychology of the average American as particularly complicated or even sophisticated. On the contrary he is rather impressed by the simplicity and straightforwardness of American thought and manners. He likes to think of Americans as being a very active, business-like, and astonishingly efficient people, concentrated upon a single goal (viz., the yellow god), and a bit handicapped by what certain English magazines call "Americana" -something on the border-line of mild insanity, "colonials are liable to be a bit odd, don't you know, like our South African cousins." 
	947 	Thus, when I have to say something serious about Americans 
and their peculiar psychology, my European audience is not shocked exactly, but at all events somewhat puzzled and inclined to disapprove. '1\That the Americans will feel about my ideas, remains to be seen. 
	948 	In 1909 I paid my first short visit to the United States. This 
was my first impression of the American people as a whole; before that I had known individuals only. I remember, when walking through the streets of Buffalo, I came across hundreds of workmen leaving a factory. The naIve European traveller I was then could not help remarking to his American companion: "I really had no idea there was such an amazing amount of Indian blood in your people." "What," said he, "Indian blood? I bet there is not one drop of it in this whole crowd." I replied: "But don't you see their faces? They are more Indian than European." Whereupon I was· informed that probably most of these workmen were of Irish, Scottish, and German extraction without a trace of Indian blood in their veins. I was puzzled and half in- 
1 [Written in English and first published as "Your Negroid and Indian Behavior," Forum (New York), LXXXIII (1930):4, 193--99. Slightly revised stylistically for publication here.-EDIToRs.] 
5°2 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 
--- 
credulous. Subsequently I learned to see how ridiculous my 
hypothesis had been. Nevertheless, the impression of facial similarity remained and later years only enhanced it. As Professor Boas maintains, there are even measurable anatomical changes in many American immigrants, changes which are already noticeable in the second generation. His findings, however, have not been accepted by other authorities. 
	949 	I remember a New York family of German immigrants of 
which three of the children were born in Germany and four in America. The latter were unmistakably Americans, the first three were clearly Germans. To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European. It is not so much in the anatomical features as in the general behaviour, physical and mental. One finds it in the language, the gestures, the mentality, in the movements of the body, and in certain things even more subtle than that. 
	950 	When I returned from America, I was left with the pecu- 
liarly dissatisfied feeling of one who has somehow missed the point. I had to confess that I was unable "to size them up:' I only knew that a subtle difference existed between the American and the European, just as it does between the Australian and the South African. You can say many witty or clever things about that difference, and yet you miss the point somehow. But another impression also stuck in my mind. I had not noticed it at first, but it kept on coming back like all those things that have a certain imponance and yet have not been understood. I was once the guest of a pretty stiff and solemn New England family of a rather terrifying respectability. It felt almost like home. (There are very conservative and highly respectable folk in Switzerland, too. We might even better the American record in this respect.) There were Negro servants waiting at table. I felt at first as if I were eating lunch in a circus and I found myself diffidently scrutinizing the dishes, looking for the imprint of those black fingers. A solemnity brooded over the meal for which I could see no reason, but I supposed it was the solemnity or serenity of great virtue or something like that which vibrated through the room. At all events nobody laughed. Everyone was just too nice and too polite. Eventually I could stand it no longer, and I began to crack jokes for better or worse. These 
5°3 

954 
955 
951 
952 
953 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
were greeted with condescending smiles. But I could not arouse that hearty and generous American laugh which I love and admire. "Well," I thought, "Indian blood, wooden faces, camouflaged Mongols, why not try some Chinese on them?" So I came to my last story, really a good one-and no sooner had I finished than right behind my chair an enormous avalanche of laughter broke loose. It was the Negro servant, and it was the real American laughter, that grand, unrestrained, unsophisticated laughter revealing rows of teeth, tongue, palate, everything, just a trifle exaggerated perhaps and certainly less than sixteen years old. How I loved that African brother. 
I admit it is a rather foolish story, all the more so as I could not then see the reason why the incident should stick in my mind. Only much later did I discover the underlying significance of this and of that other impression I had received at 
Buffalo. 
Our convictions often have a humble origin. I do not hesi- 
tate, therefore, to tell my reader exactly how my ideas about American psychology started. Those two little impressions really hold in a nutshell everything I subsequently learned in the course of twenty-five years' work with American patients. 
The American laugh is most impressive. Laughing is a very important emotional expression and one learns a lot about character from a careful observation of the way people laugh. There are people who suffer from a crippled laughter. It's just painful to see them laugh and the sound of that shrill, evil, compressed rattle almost makes you sick. America as a nation can laugh, and that means a lot. There is still a childlikeness, a soundness of 
emotion, an immediate rapport with your fellow being. 
This laughter goes hand in hand with a remarkable vivacity 
and a gTeat ease of expression. Americans are great talkers. 
Gossip and chattering spill over into monstrously big newspapers. The talking goes on even when you are reading. The style of "good" American writing is a talking style. When it is not too flat, it is just as refreshing and exhilarating for us Europeans as your laughter. But often, alas, it is just chattering, the 
vibrating noise of a big ant-heap. 
One of the greatest advantages of the American language is 
its slang. I am far from sniffing at American slang, on the contrary I like it profoundly. Slang means a language in the making, 
504 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 
--- 
a thing fully alive. Its images are not worn-out and worm-eaten 
metaphors, pale reflections hallowed by immemorial age, smooth, correct, and concise conventions, but figures full of life, carrying all the stamina of their earthly origin, and the incomparable flavour of local conditions peculiar to the strange and unprejudiced soil of a new country. One feels a new current of strange life in the flow of the old English language, and one wonders where it comes from. Is it the new country only? I doubt it. 
	956 	The way the American moves shows a strong tendency to 
nonchalance. vVhen we analyse the way he walks, how he wears his hat, how he holds his cigar, how he speaks, we discover a marked nonchalance. One hears an unusual amount of unrestrained voices in the talk going on around one. There is a lack of restraint in the way people sit, sometimes at the expense of your furniture, or on Sundays you see streets punctuated with feet showing over the window-sills. There is a tendency to move with loose joints, with a minimum of innervation. In speech one notices this nonchalance in an insufficient innervation of the soft palate, which causes the nasal intonation that is so common with Americans. The swaying hip which you can observe in primitive, particularly Negro women is frequently seen in American women, and the swinging gait of the man is fairly usual. 
	957 	The most amazing feature of American life is its boundless 
publicity. Everybody has to meet everybody, and they even seem to enjoy this enormity. To a central European such as I am, this American publicity of life, the lack of distance between people, the absence of hedges or fences round the gardens, the belief in popularity, the gossip columns of the newspapers, the open doors in the houses (one can look from the street right through the sitting-room and the adjoining bedroom into the backyard and beyond), the defencelessness of the individual against the onslaught of the press, all this is more than disgusting, it is positively terrifying. You are immediately swallowed by a hot and all-engulfing wave of desirousness and emotional incontinence. You are simply reduced to a particle in the mass, with no other hope or expectation than the illusory goals of an eager and excited collectivity. You just swim for life, that's all. You feel free-that's the queerest thing-yet the collective movement grips you faster than any old gnarled roots in European soil 
5°5 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
would have done. Even your head gets immersed. There is a peculiar lack of restraint about the emotions of an American collectivity. You see it in the eagerness and in the hustle of everyday life, in all sorts of enthusiasms, in orgiastic sectarian outbursts, in the violence of public admiration and opprobrium. The overwhelming influence of collective emotions spreads into everything. If it were possible, everything would be done collectively, because there seems to be an astonishingly feeble resistance to collective influences. It is true that collective action is always less laborious than an individual attempt. The momentum of collective action carries much further than even concentrated individual effort, since it makes people unaware of themselves and heedless of risks. On the other hand, it easily goes too far and leads people into situations which individual deliberation would hardly ever have chosen. It has a decidedly flattening influence on people's psychology. 
	958 	You see this particularly in the American sex problem as it 
had developed since the war. There is a marked tendency to promiscuity, which shows not only in the frequency of divorces but quite particularly in the peculiar liberation from sex prejudices in the younger generation. As an inevitable consequence the individual rapport between the sexes will suffer. An easy access never calls forth and therefore never develops the values of character, and at the same time it is a most serious obstacle to any deeper mutual understanding. Such an understanding, without which no real love can exist, is reached only by overcoming all the difficulties due to the psychological difference between the sexes. Promiscuity paralyses all these efforts by offering easy opportunities of escape. Individual rapport becomes quite superfluous. But the more a so-called unprejudiced freedom and easy promiscuity prevail, the more love becomes flat and degenerates into transitory sex interludes. The most recent developments in the field of sexual morality tend toward sexual primitivity, analogous to the instability of the moral habits of primitive peoples, where under the influence of collective emotion all sex taboos instantly disappear. 
	959 	All American life seems to be the life of the big settlement- 
real town-life. Even the smallest settlement denies itself the character of a village and tends to become a city. The town rules the whole style of living, even in the country. It seems as though 
5°6 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY everything were collective and standardized. Once on a visit to a so-called camp with so-called country life, a European friend who was travelling with me whispered to me in a quiet moment: 
"I bet they even have a text-book on how to camp," and-there it was, evilly glistening in red and gold upon the shelf! 
	960 	The country is wonderful, nay, just divine, still with the 
faint perfume of unhistorical eternity in the air, and those lovely crickets not yet shy of man. They don't know yet that they are living in America, like some Navahos. And the bullfrog talks in the night with his prehistoric booming voice. Beautiful immense nights, and days blessed with sunshine. There is real country and nobody seems to be up to it, certainly not that hustling, noisily chattering, motoring townfolk. They are not even down to it, as the Red Indians are, with whom one feels peculiarly at ease because they are obviously under the spell of their country and not on top of it. So there at last is the peace of God. 
	961 	I know the mother-nations of North America pretty well, 
but I would be completely at a loss to explain, if I relied solely on the theory of heredity, how the Americans descended from them acquired their striking peculiarities. One might suppose that some of them were the product of the old pioneer and colonist attitude. But I fail to see how the particular qualities I have mentioned have anything to do with the character of the early farmer colonist. There is a much better hypothesis to explain the peculiarities of the American temperament. It is the fact that the States are pervaded by the Negro, that most striking and suggestive figure. Some States are particularly black, a fact that may astonish the naIve European, who thinks of America as a white nation. It is not wholly white, if you please, but piebald. It cannot be helped, it just is so. 
	962 	What is more contagious than to live side by side with a 
rather primitive people? Go to Africa and see what happens. When it is so obvious that you stumble over it, you call it "going black." But if it is not so obvious it is eXplained as "the sun." In India it is always the sun. In reality it is a mitigated going black, counterbalanced by a particularly stiffnecked conventionality (with its subdivisions of righteousness and conspicuous respectability). Under the pressure of all this conventionality people simply dry up, though they make .the sun responsible. It is much easier for us Europeans to be a trifle 
507 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
immoral, or at least a bit lax, because we do not have to maintain the moral standard against the heavy downward pull of primitive life. The inferior man has a tremendous pull because he fascinates the inferior layers of our psyche, which has lived through untold ages of similar conditions-"on revient toujours a ses premiers amours." He reminds us-or not so much our conscious as our unconscious mind-not only of childhood but of our prehistory, which would take us back not more than about twelve hundred years so far as the Germanic races are concerned. The barbarian in us is still wonderfully strong and he yields easily to the lure of his youthful memories. Therefore he needs very definite defences. The Latin peoples being older don't need to be so much on their guard, hence their approach to the coloured man is different. 
	963 	But the defences of the Germanic man reach only as far as 
consciousness reaches. Below the threshold of consciousness the contagion meets with little resistance. Just as the coloured man lives in your cities and even within your houses, so also he lives under your skin, subconsciously. Naturally it works both ways. Just as every Jew has a Christ complex, so every Negro has a white complex and every American a Negro complex. As a rule the coloured man would give anything to change his skin, and the white man hates to admit that he has been touched by the 
black. 
	964 	Now for the facts. What about that American laughter? 
What about the boundless noisy sociality? The pleasure in movement and in stunts of all sorts? The loose-jointed walk, the Negroid dancing and music? The rhythm of jazz is the same as the n'goma) the African dance. You can dance the Central African n' goma with all its jumping and rocking, its swinging shoulders and hips, to American jazz. American music is most obviously pervaded by the African rhythm and the African 
melody. 
	965 	It would be difficult not to see that the coloured man, with 
his primitive motility, his expressive emotionality, his childlike directness, his sense of music and rhythm, his funny and picturesque language, has infected the American "behaviour." As any psychologist and any doctor knows, nothing is more contagious than tics, stammering, choreic movements, signs of emotion, above all laughter and peculiarities of speech. Even if your 
508 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 
mind and heart are elsewhere, even if you don't understand a joke in a foreign language, you can't help smiling when everybody else smiles. Stammering can have a most infectious quality, so that you hardly can refrain from imitating it involuntarily. Melody and rhythm are most insidious, they can obsess you for days, and as to language it is most disturbing how its metaphors and different ways of pronunciation affect you, beginning with some apologetic quotation, and then because you just can't help it. 
	966 	The white man is a most terrific problem to the N egTo, and 
whenever you affect somebody so profoundly, then, in a mysterious way, something comes back from him to yourself. The Negro by his mere presence is a source of temperamental and mimetic infection, which the European can't help noticing just as much as he sees the hopeless gap between the American and the African N egTo. Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white man. America has this problem only in a relative degree, because the whites far outnumber the coloured. Apparently he can assimilate the primitive influence with little risk to himself. What would happen if there were a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter. 
	967 	I am quite convinced that some American peculiarities can 
be traced back directly to the coloured man, while others result from a compensatory defence against his laxity. But they remain externals leaving the inner quick of the American character untouched, which is not the case where "going black" is concerned. Since I am not a behaviourist, I take leave to suppose that you are still very far from the real man when you observe only his behaviour. I regard behaviour as a mere husk that conceals the living substance within. Thus I can discern the white man clearly enough through his slightly NegToid mannerisms, and my question is: Is this American white man nothing but a simple white man, or is he in some way different from the European representative of the species? I believe there is a marked difference between them within as well as without. European ~agazines have recently published pictures of well-known AmerIcans in Indian headdress, and some Red Indians in European COstume in the opposite column, with the question: Who are the Indians? 
509 

968 
969 
97° 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
This is not just a joke. There is something in it that can hardly be denied. It may seem mysterious and unbelievable, yet it is a fact that can be observed in other countries just as well. Man can be assimilated by a country. There is an x and a y in the air and in the soil of a country, which slowly permeate and assimilate him to the type of the aboriginal inhabitant, even to the point of slightly remodelling his physical features. The verification of such facts in terms of exact measurement, overwhelmingly obvious though they sometimes are, is-I admitexceedingly difficult. But there are many such things that elude all our means of exact scientific verification despite their obvious and indubitable character. Think of all the subtleties of expression in the eyes, gestures, and intonation. In practice everybody goes by them and no idiot could misunderstand them, yet one is faced with a most ticklish task when it comes to giving an absolutely scientific description of them. I know a man who could tell from a series of photographs of Jews of different countries with almost infallible certainty: This is a Polish, that a Cossack, and that a German Jew, and so on. 
Undoubtedly there are these subtle indications in man: sometimes they lurk in the lines of his face, sometimes in his gestures, his facial expression, the look in his eyes, and sometimes in his psyche, that shines forth through the transparent veil of his body. At all events it is often possible to tell in what country he was born. I know quite a number of cases where children of purely European parents were born in Eastern countries and exhibited the marks of their respective birthplaces either in the imponderabilia of their appearance or in their mental make-up or in both, a.nd to such a degree that not only I myself but other people who were entirely ignorant of the circumstances could make the diagnosis. The foreign country somehow gets under the skin of those born in it. Certain very primitive tribes are convinced that it is not possible to usurp foreign territory, because the children born there would inherit the wrong ancestor-spirits who dwell in the trees, the rocks, and the water of that country. There seems to be some subtle truth in this primitive intuition. 
That would mean that the spirit of the Indian gets at the American from within and without. Indeed, there is often an astonishing likeness in the cast of the American face to that of 
510 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 
the Red Indian, more I think in the men's faces than in the women's. But women are always the more conservative element in spite of their conspicuous affectation of modernity. It is a paradox certainly, yet such is human nature. 
	971 	The external assimilation to the peculiarities of a Country 
is a thing one could almost expect. There is nothing astonishing in it. But the external similarity is feeble in comparison with the less visible but all the more intense influence on the mind. It is just as though the mind were an infinitely more sensitive and suggestible medium than the body. It is probable that long before the body reacts the mind has already undergone considerable changes, changes that are not obvious to the individual himself or to his immediate circle, but only to an outsider. Thus I would not expect the average American, who has not lived for some years in Europe, to realize how different his mental attitude is from the European's, just as I would not expect the average European to be able to discern his difference from the American. That is the reason why so many things that are really characteristic of a country seem to be merely odd or ridiculous: the conditions from which they arise are either not known or not understood. They wouldn't be odd or ridiculous if one could feel the local atmosphere to which they belong and which makes them perfectly comprehensible and logical. 
	972 	Almost every great country has its collective attitude, which 
one might call its genius or sPiritus loci. Sometimes you can catch it in a formula, sometimes it is more elusive, yet nonetheless it is indescribably present as a sort of atmosphere that permeates everything, the look of the people, their speech, behaviour, clothing, smell, their interests, ideals, politics, philosophy, art, and even their religion. In a well-defined civilization with a solid historical background, such as for instance the French, you can easily discover the keynote of the French esprit: it is "la gloire," a most marked prestige psychology in its noblest as well as its most ridiculous forms. You find it in their speech, gestures, beliefs, in the style of everything, in politics and even in science. 
	973 	In Germany it is the "Idea" that is impersonated by every- 
body. There are no ordinary human beings, you are "Hen ProfeSsor" or "Hen Geheimrat," "Herr Oberrechnungsrat," and eVen longer things than that. Sometimes the German idea is 
5Il 

CIVILIZA nON IN TRANSITION 
right and sometimes it is wrong, but it never ceases to be an idea whether it belongs to the highest philosophy or is merely a foolish bias. Even when you die in Germany, you don't die in mere human misery, you die in the ideal form of "Hausbesitzersgattin" or something of the sort. 
	974 	England's innermost truth and at the same time her most 
valuable contribution to the assets of the human family is the "gentleman," rescued from the dusty chivalry of the early Middle Ages and now penetrating into the remotest corner of modern English life. It is an ultimate principle that never fails to carry conviction, the shining armour of the perfect knight in soul and body, and the miserable coffin of poor natural feelings. 
	975 	But could one "size up" other countries like Italy, Austria, 
Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, just as easily? They are all very characteristic countries, yet their spirit is more difficult to catch. It would need not one word but at least a couple of sentences. America is also one of those countries that are not settled by one shot. European prejudice would say: Money. But only people who have no idea of what money means to Americans can think like that. Yes, if they themselves are Americans, it would be money. But America is not as simple as that. Of course there is any amount of ordinary materialism in America as everywhere else, but also a most admirable idealism which hardly finds its equal anywhere else. Money with us has still something of the magic of the old taboo, dating from the times when any money business like banking, or usury, was considered dishonest. It is still something of a forbidden pleasure in the old countries. That is why it is good form with us to hush up money matters. The American, unhampered by the burden of historical conditions, can make and spend money for what it is worth. America is peculiarly free from the spell of money, yet she makes a lot of it. How can the European understand this puzzle? 
	976 	America has a principle or idea or attitude, but it is surely 
not money. Often, when I was searching through the conscious and the unconscious mind of my American patients and pupils, I found something which I can only describe as a sort of Heroic Ideal. Your most idealistic effort is concerned with bringing out the best in every man, and when you find a good man you naturally support him and push him on, until at last he is liable to collapse from sheer exertion, success, and triumph. It is done 
512 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY 
in every family, where ambitious mothers egg their boys on with the idea that they must be heroes of some sort, or you find it in the factory, where the whole system anxiously tries to get the best man into the best place. Or again in the schools where every child is trained to be brave, courageous, efficient, and a "good Sport," a hero in short. There is no record which people will not kill themselves to break, even if it is the most appalling nonsense. The moving pictures abound with heroes of every description. American applause holds the world's record. The "great" and "famous" man gets mobbed by enthusiastic crowds, whatever he may be "great" in; even Valentino got his full share. In Germany you are great if your titles are two yards long, in England if you are a gentleman as well, in France if you coincide with the prestige of the country. In small countries there is, as a rule, no greatness when you are alive, because things need to be small, therefore it is usua]]y posthumous. America is perhaps the only country where "greatness" is unrestricted, because it expresses the most fundamental hopes, desires, ambitions, and convictions of the nation. 
	977 	I admit that to an American these things seem to be fairly 
natural, but not to a European. There are many Europeans who are infected by feelings of inferiority when they contact America and meet her heroic ideal. As a rule they don't admit it, and so they boast of Europe all the louder or begin to ridicule the many things in America which are open to criticism, such as roughness, brutality and primitivity. Often they get their first and decisive shock in the custom-house, so that their appetite is ruined for the rest of the States. It is inevitable that the heroic attitude should be coupled with a sort of primitivity, because it has always been the ideal of a somewhat sporty, primitive society. And this is where the real historical spirit of the Red Man enters the game. Look at your sports! They are the toughest, the most reckless, and the most efficient in the world. The idea of mere play has almost entirely disappeared, while in other parts of the world the idea of play still prevails rather than that of professional sport. Your sport demands a training that is almost cruel and an application that is almost inhuman. Your sportsmen are gladiators, every inch of them, and the excitement of the spectators derives from ancient instincts that are akin to bloodlust. Your students go through initiations and form secret 
513 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
societies like the best among barbarous tribes. Secret societies of every description abound all over the country from the Ku Klux Klan to the Knights of Columbus, and their rites are analogous to any primitive mystery religion. America has resuscitated the ghosts of Spiritualism, of which she is the original home, and cures diseases by Christian Science, which has more to do with the shaman's mental healing than with any recognizable kind of science. Moreover it is proving to be pretty effective, just as were the cures of the shaman. 
	978 	The old European inheritance looks rather pale beside these 
vigorous primitive influences. Have you ever compared the skyline of New York or any great American city with that of a pueblo like Taos? And did you see how the houses pile up to towers towards the centre? Without conscious imitation the American unconsciously fills out the spectral outline of the Red Man's mind and temperament. 
	979 	There is nothing miraculous about this. It always has been 
so: the conqueror overcomes the old inhabitant in the body but succumbs to his spirit. Rome at the zenith of her power contained within her walls all the mystery cults of the East; yet the spirit of the humblest among them, a Jewish mystery society, transformed the greatest of all cities from top to bottom. The conqueror gets the wrong ancestor-spirits, the primitives would say: I like this picturesque way of putting it. It is pithy and expresses every conceivable implication. 
	980 	People rarely want to know what a thing is in itself, they 
want to know whether it is favourable or unfavourable, advisable or evil, as if there were indubitably good or bad things. Things are as we take them. Moreover, anything that moves is a risk. Thus a nation in the making is naturally a big risk, to itself as well as others. It is certainly not my task to play the role of a prophet or of a ridiculous adviser of nations, and moreover there is nothing to give advice about. Facts are neither favourable nor unfavourable; they are merely interesting. And the most interesting of all is that this childlike, impetuous, "naIve" America has probably the most complicated psychology of all nations. 
514 

THE DREAMLIKE WORLD OF INDIA 1 
	981 	A first impression of a country is very often like meeting a 
person for the first time: your impression may be quite inaccurate, even definitely wrong in many respects, yet you are likely to perceive certain qualities or certain shadows which would very probably be blurred by the more accurate impressions of a second or third visit. My reader would make a great mistake if he were to take any statements I make about India for gospel truth. Think of a man coming to Europe for the first time in his life; he spends some six to seven weeks travelling from Lisbon to Moscow and from Norway to Sicily, he does not understand a single European language except English and he has a most superficial knowledge of the peoples, their history, and their actual life. Would he be likely to produce anything more than a mildly delirious phantasmagoria of hasty impressions, snapshot sentiments, and impatient opinions? I am afraid he would have little chance of escaping the charge of utter incompetence and inadequacy. I am very much in the same position in daring to say anything about India. I am told that I have the excuse of being a psychologist, and therefore am supposed to see more, or at least something peculiar which other fellows might be expected to overlook. I do not know. I must leave the final verdict to my reader. 
	982 	The flat expanse of Bombay and its low dark green hills, ris- 
ing almost suddenly above the horizon, give you< the feeling of the vastness of a continent behind. This impression explains my first reaction directly I disembarked: I took a car and went out of town, away into the country. That felt a great deal betteryellow grass, dusty fields, native huts, great, dark-green, weird banyan trees, sickly palmyra palms sucked dry of their life-juice 1 [Written in English and first published in Asia (New York), XXXIX (1939): 1,5-8. -EDITORS.] 
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(it is run into bottles near the top to make palm-wine, which I never tasted), emaciated cattle, thin-legged men, the colourful saris of women, all in leisurely haste or in hasty leisure, with no need of being explained or of explaining themselves, because obviously they are what they are. They were unconcerned and unimpressed; I was the only one who did not belong to India. We drove through a strip of jungle near a blue lake. We pulled up suddenly, but instead of having run over a lurking tiger we found ourselves in the midst of a native movie-scene: something presumably was going to happen to a white girl, dressed up as a dompteuse escaped from a circus. Cameras, megaphone, and excited shirt-sleeves were in full action-the shock was so great that we instinctively stepped on the gas. After this I felt that I could go back to the city, which I had not yet really seen. 
	983 	The Anglo-Indian style of architecture of the past fifty years 
is not interesting, but it gives a peculiar character to Bombay, as if one had already seen it somewhere else. It has more to do with the "English character" than with India. I make an exception of the "Gateway of India," that huge portal at the head of the royal road to Delhi. In a way it repeats the splendid ambition to be found in the "Gate of Victory," built by Akbar the Great in Fatehpur-Sikri, that soon-deserted town lying in ruinsred sandstone glowing in the Indian sun for long centuries, past and to come-a wave that crashed on the shore of time and left a strip of foam. 
	984 	That is India, as I saw her: certain things last forever- 
yellow plains, green spirit-trees, dark-brown boulders of gigantic size, emerald-green watered fields, crowned by that metaphysical fringe of ice and rock away up north, that inexorable barrier beyond human conception. The other things unroll like a film, unimaginably rich in colour and shape, ever-changing, lasting a few days or a few centuries, but essentially transitory, dreamlike, a multi-coloured veil of maya. Today it is the still youthful British Empire that is going to leave a mark on India, like the empire of the Moguls, like Alexander the Great, like numberless dynasties of native kings, like the Aryan invaders-yet India somehow never changes her majestic face. Human life appears to be curiously flimsy in every respect. The native town of Bombay seems to be a jumble of incidentally piled-up human habitations. The people carry on an apparently meaningless life, 
516 

THE DREAMLIKE WORLD OF INDIA 
- 
eagerly, busily, noisily. They die and are born in ceaseless waves, 
always much the same, a gigantic monotony of endlessly repeated life. 
	985 	In all that flimsiness and vain tumult, one is conscious of 
immeasurable age with no history. After all why should there be recorded history? In a country like India one does not really miss it. All her native greatness is in any case anonymous and impersonal, like the greatness of Babylon and Egypt. History makes sense in European countries, where, in a relatively recent, barbarous, and unhistorical past, things began to take shape. Castles, temples, and cities were built, roads and bridges were made, and the peoples discovered that they had names, that they lived somewhere, that their cities multiplied and that their world grew bigger every century. When they saw that things developed, they naturally became interested in the changes of things, and it seemed worth while to record beginnings and later developments-for everything was going somewhere, and everybody hoped for unheard-of possibilities and improvements in the future, spiritual as well as secular. 
	986 	But in India there seems to be nothing that has not lived a 
hundred thousand times before. Even the unique individual of today has already lived innumerable times in past ages. The world itself is nothing but a renewal of world existence, which has happened many times before. Even India's greatest individual, the unique Gautama Buddha, was preceded by more than a score of other Buddhas and is still not the last. No wonder, then, that the gods too have their numerous avatars. Plus ra change> Plus c' est la meme chose-why any history under such circumstances? Moreover, time is relative: the yogi sees the past as well as the future. If you walk the "noble eightfold path," you will remember what you were ten thousand lives ago. Space is relative: the yogi walks in his spirit-body with the speed of thought over lands, seas, and heavens. What you call real-all the good and ill of human life-is illusion. What you call unreal -sentimental, grotesque, obscene, monstrous, blood-curdling gods-unexpectedly becomes self-evident reality when you listen for half a hot night to an incessant, clever drumming that shakes up the dormant solar plexus of the European. He is used to re. garding his head as the only instrument for grasping the world, and the kathakali> as he follows it with his eyes, would remain 
517 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
a grotesque dance were it not for the drumming that creates a new reality rising from the bowels. 
	987 	A walk through the bustle of Bombay's bazaars set me think- 
ing. I had felt the impact of the dreamlike world of India. I am convinced that the average Hindu does not feel his world as dreamlike: on the contrary, his every reaction shows how much he is impressed and gripped by its realities. If he were not enthralled by his world, he would not need his religious and philosophic teaching about the Great Illusion, any more than we ourselves would need the Christian message of love if we were other than we are. (The essence of teaching is to convey knowledge of things about which we know too littlel) Perhaps I myself had been thrown into a dreamlike state by moving among fairytale figures of the Thousand and One Nights. My own world of European consciousness had become peculiarly thin, like a network of telegraph wires high above the ground, stretching in straight lines all over the surface of an earth looking treacherously like a geographic globe. 
	988 	It is quite possible that India is the real world, and that the 
white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions. To be born, to die, to be sick, greedy, dirty, childish, ridiculously vain, miserable, hungTY, vicious; to be manifestly stuck in illiterate unconsciousness, to be suspended in a narrow universe of good and evil gods and to be protected by charms and helpful mantras, that is perhaps the real life, life as it was meant to be, the life of the earth. Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head. It is still the whole body that lives. No wonder the European feels dreamlike: the complete life of India is something of which he merely dreams. When you walk with naked feet, how can you ever forget the earth? It needs all the acrobatics of the higher yoga to make you unconscious of the earth. One would need some sort of yoga if one tried seriously to live in India. But I did not see one European in India who really lived there. They were all living in Europe, that is, in a sort of bottle filled with European air. One would surely go under without the insulating glass wall; one would be drowned in all the things which we Europeans have conquered in our imagination. In India they become formidable realities directly YOU step beyond the glass wall. 
'*' 
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THE DREAMLIKE WORLD OF INDIA 
--- 
	989 	Northern India is characterized by the fact that it is part of 
the immense Asiatic continent. I noticed a frequent note of harshness in the way the people talked to each other, recalling harassed camel-drivers or irritable horse-dealers. The variety of Asiatic costumes here supersedes the immaculate whiteness of the mild plant-eaters. Women's dresses are gay and provocative. The many Pathans, proud, unconcerned, and ruthless, and the bearded Sikhs, with their contradictory character-over-masculine brutality combined with melting sentimentality-give a strong Asiatic tinge to the appearance of the masses. The architecture shows clearly how much the Hindu element has succumbed to the predominating Asiatic influence. Even the temples of Benares are small and not very impressive, if it were not for their noisiness and dirt. Shiva, the destroyer, and the bloodthirsty and blood-curdling Kali seem to be in the foreground. The fat, elephant-headed Ganesha is also much in demand to bring good luck. 
	990 	In comparison, Islam seems to be a superior, more spiritual, 
and more advanced religion. Its mosques are pure and beautiful, and of course wholly Asiatic. There is not much mind about it, but a great deal of feeling. The cult is one wailing outcry for the All-Merciful. It is a desire, an ardent longing and even greed for God; I would not call it love. But there is love, the most poetic, most exquisite love of beauty in these old Moguls. In a world of tyranny and cruelty, a heavenly dream crystallized in stone: the Taj Mahal. I cannot conceal my unmitigated admiration for this supreme flower, for this jewel beyond price, and I marvel at that love which discovered the genius of Shah J ehan and used it as an instrument of self-realization. This is the one place in the world where the-alas-all too invisible and all too jealously guarded beauty of the Islamic Eros has been revealed by a well-nigh divine miracle. It is the delicate secret of the rose gardens of Shiraz and of the silent patios of Arabian palaces, torn out of the heart of a great lover by a cruel and incurable loss. The mosques of the Moguls and their tombs may be pure and austere, their divans, or audience halls, may be of impeccable beauty, but the Taj Mahal is a revelation. It is thoroughly ~m-Indian. It is more like a plant that could thrive and flower m the rich Indian earth as it could nowhere else. It is Eros in its purest form; there is nothing mysterious, nothing symbolic 
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about it. It is the sublime expression of human love for a human being. 
	991 	On the same plains of N orthem India, almost two thousand 
years before the time of the Moguls, the spirit of India had borne its ripest fruit, the very essence of its life, the perfect Lord Buddha. Not very far from Agra and Delhi is the hill of Sanchi with its famous stupa. We were there on a brisk morning. The intense light and the extraordinary clarity of the air brought out every detail. There on the top of a rocky hill, with a distant view over the plains of India, you behold a huge globe of masonry, half· buried in the earth. According to the MahaParinibbana-Sutta) Buddha himself indicated the way in which his remains were to be buried. He took two rice bowls and covered the one with the other. The visible stupa is just the bowl on top. One has to imagine the lower one, buried in the earth. The roundness, a symbol of perfection since olden days, seems a suitable as well as an expressive monument for a Tathagata. It is of immense simplicity, austerity, and lucidity, perfectly in keeping with the simplicity, austerity, and lucidity of Buddha's teaching. 
	992 	There is something unspeakably solemn about this place in 
its exalted loneliness, as if it were still witnessing the moment in the history of India when the greatest genius of her race formulated her supreme truth. This place, together with its architecture, its silence, and its peace beyond all turmoils of the heart, its very forgetfulness of human emotions, is truly and essentially Indian; it is as much the "secret" of India as the Taj Mahal is the secret of Islam. And just as the perfume of Islamic culture still lingers in the air, so Buddha, though forgotten on the surface, is still the secret breath of life in modern Hinduism. He is suffered at least to be an avatar of Vishnu. 
* 
	993 	Travelling with the British delegates to the Indian Science 
Congress in Calcutta, I was hustled through a good many dinners and receptions. I had a chance at these to talk to educated Indian women. This was a novelty. Their costume stamps them as women. It is the most becoming, the most stylish and, at the same time, the most meaningful dress ever devised by women. I hope fervently that the sexual disease of the West, which tries to transform woman into a sort of awkward boy, will not creep into 
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--- 
India in the wake of that fad "scientific education." It would be 
a loss to the whole world if the Indian woman should cease to wear her native costume. India (and perhaps China, which I do not know) is practically the only civilized country where one can see on living models how women can and should dress. 
	994 	The costume of the Indian woman conveys far more than the 
meaningless half-nakedness of the Western woman's evening dress. There is something left which can be unveiled or revealed, and, on the other hand, one's taste is not offended by the sight of aesthetic flaws. The European evening dress is one of the most obvious symptoms of our sexual morbidity: it is compounded of shamelessness, exhibitionism, impotent provocation, and a ridiculous attempt to make the relation between the sexes cheap and easy. Yet everybody is, or ought to be, profoundly aware of the fact that the secret of sexual attraction is neither cheap nor easy, but is one of the demons which no "scientific education" has yet mastered. Women's fashions with us are mostly invented by men: you can guess the result. After having exhausted all the means of producing the semblance of a fertile brood-mare with corsets and bustles, they are now trying to create the adolescent hermaphrodite, an athletic, semimasculine body, despite the fact that the body of the Northern woman already has a painful tendency toward bony coarseness. They try coeducation in order to make the sexes equal to each other, instead of stressing the difference. But the worst sight-oh-is the women in trousers parading the decks! I often wondered if they knew how mercilessly ugly they looked. Usually they were very decent middleclass types and were not smart at all, but only touched by the current rage for hermaphroditosis. It is a sad truth, but the European woman, and particularly her hopelessly wrong dress, put up no show at all when compared with the dignity and elegance of the Indian woman and her costume. Even fat women have a chance in India; with us they can only starve themselves to death. 
	995 	Talking of costumes, I must say that the Hindu man is too 
fond of ease and coolness. He wears a long piece of cotton cloth wound round and between his legs. The front of the legs is well covered, but the back is ridiculously bare. There is something effeminate and babyish about it. You simply cannot imagine a Soldier with such garlands of cloth between his legs. Many wear 
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a shirt over this or a European jacket. It is quaint, but not very masculine. The northern type of costume is Persian and looks fine and manly. The garland type is chiefly southern, perhaps because of the matriarchal trend which prevails in the south. The "garland" looks like a sort of overgrown diaper. It is an essentially unwarlike dress and suits the pacifist mentality of the Hindu perfectly. 
	996 	A real fight, in such a contrivance, is well-nigh impossible. 
The combatants would be trapped in no time by the many circumvolutions of their ridiculous sheets. Yet they are free with words and gestures, but, when you are expecting the worst, they confine themselves to attacking the other's shirt and diaper. I once watched two boys of about eight or nine having a heated quarrel over a game. They came to blows. 'Ve can all remember pretty well what a fight between boys at that age means. But the performance of the Hindu boys was really worth seeing: they struck out violently, but the dangerous-looking fists remained miraculously arrested about an inch from the enemy's face-and afterwards it was exactly as if they had had a really good fight! They are profoundly civilized. This was in the south; the Mohammedan element in the north is probably much nearer the real stuff when it comes to a fight. 
* 
	997 	The impression of softness that the Hindu conveys points to 
a predominance of the feminine element in the family, presumably of the mother. It seems to be a style which is dependent on old matriarchal traditions. The educated Hindu has very much the character of the "family boy," of the "good" son, who knows that he has to deal with a mother and, moreover, knows how to do it. But one gets much the same impression from the women. They show a studied and stylish kind of modesty and inconspicuousness, which immediately gives you the feeling of dealing with an extremely domesticated and socialized person. There is no harshness or arrogance, no mannishness or stridency in their voice. This is a most agreeable contrast to certain European women I have known, whose strained, overloud, and spastic voices betray a peculiarly forced and unnatural attitude .. 
	998 	I had many opportunities to study the English voice III 
India. Voices are treacherous; they reveal far too much. You marvel at the fantastic efforts people make to sound gay, fresh, 522 

THE DREAMLIKE WORLD OF INDIA 
welcoming, enterprising, jolly, benevolent, full of good comradeship, and so on. And you know it is merely an attempt to cover up the real truth, which is very much the reverse. It makes you tired listening to those unnatural sounds, and you long for somebody to say something unkind or brutally offensive. You cannot help noticing how a great number of perfectly nice and decent Englishmen elaborately imitate a he-man voice, God knows why. It sounds as if they were trying to impress the world with their throaty rumbling tones, or as if they were addressing a political meeting, which has to be convinced of the profound honesty and sincerity of the speaker. The usual brand is the bass voice, of the colonel for instance, or the master of a household of numerous children and servants who must be duly impressed. The Father Christmas voice is a special variety, usually affected by academically trained specimens. I discovered that particularly terrific boomers were quite modest and decent chaps, with a noticeable feeling of inferiority. What a superhuman burden it is to be the overlords of a continent like India! 
	999 	The Indians speak without affectation. They represent noth- 
ing. They belong to the three hundred and sixty million people of India. The women represent less than nothing. They belong to large families incidentally and geographically living in a country called India. And you have to adapt yourself to the family and know how to talk and how to behave, when twentyfive to thirty members of a family are crowded together in a small house, with a grandmother on top. That teaches you to speak modestly, carefully, politely. It explains that small twittering voice and that flowerlike behaviour. The crowding together in families has the contrary effect with us. It makes people nervous, irritable, rough, and even violent. But India takes the family seriously. There is no amateurishness or sentimentality about it. It is understood to be the indispensable form of life, inescapable, necessary, and self-evident. It needs a religion to break this law and to make "homelessness" the first step to saintliness. It certainly seems as if Indians would be unusually pleasant and easy to live with, particularly the women; and, if the style were the whole man, Indian life would be almost ideal. But softness of manners and sweetness of voice are also a part of secrecy and diplomacy. I guess Indians are just human, and so no generalization is quite true .. 
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	1000 	As a matter of fact, you stub your toes time and again against 
a peculiar obliqueness when you ask for definite information. You often find then that people are less concerned with your question than with deliberations about your possible motives or about how it would be possible to wriggle out of a tight corner without getting hurt. Overcrowding has surely much to do with this widespread and very characteristic defect in the Indian character, for only the art of deception can preserve the privacy of the individual in a crowd. The woman's whole manner is directed towards the mother as well as the man. To the former she is a daughter, to the latter the woman whose skilful behaviour gives him a reasonable chance to feel like a man. At least I did not meet a single "battleship," so typical of the Western drawing-room, the sight of which makes a man feel about as comfortable as a mouse drowning before breakfast in cold water. 
	1001 	The Indians mean and are meant to live in India. Therefore 
they have settled down to a degree of domestication which we cannot attain, even with the aid of ideals and frantic moral efforts. Our migrations have not yet come to an end. It was only a short while ago that the Anglo-Saxons immigrated from northern Germany to their new homeland. The N or mans arrived there from Scandinavia, via northern France, quite a while later, and it is much the same with practically every nation in Europe. Our motto is still: ubi bene) ibi patria. Because of this truth we are all fervent patriots. Because we still can and will wander, we imagine that we can live more or less anywhere. Not yet convinced that we ought to be able to get along with one another in closely packed families, we feel that we can afford to quarrel, for there is still good open country "out 'Vest" if things come to the worst. At least it seems so. But it is no longer quite true. Even the Englishman is not settled in India; he is really condemned to serve his term there and to make the best of it. Hence all those hopeful, jolly, eager, energetic, powerful voices issue from people who are thinking and dreaming of spring in Sussex. 
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WHAT INDIA CAN TEACH US 1 
	1002 	India lies between the Asiatic north and the Pacific south, 
between Tibet and Ceylon. India ends abruptly at the foothills of the Himalaya, and at Adam's Bridge. At one end, a Mongolian world begins, at the other, the "paradise" of a South Sea island. Ceylon is as strangely different from India as is Tibet. Curiously enough, at either end one finds the "spoor of the elephant," as the Pali Canon 2 calls the teaching of the Lord Buddha. 
	10°3 	Why has India lost her greatest light, Buddha's path of re- 
demption, that glorious synthesis of philosophy and opus divinum? It is common knowledge that mankind can never remain on an apex of illumination and spiritual endeavour. Buddha was an untimely intruder, upsetting the historical process, which afterwards got the better of him. Indian religion is like a vimana) or pagoda. The gods climb over one another like ants, from the elephants carved on the base to the abstract lotus which crowns the top of the building. In the long run, the gods become philosophical concepts. Buddha, a spiritual pioneer for the whole world, said, and tried to make it true, that the enlightened man is even the teacher and redeemer of his gods (not their stupid denier, as Western "enlightenment" will have it). This was obviously too much, because the Indian mind was not at all ready to integrate the gods to such an extent as to make them psychologically dependent upon man's mental condition. How Buddha himself could obtain such insight without losing himself in a complete mental inflation borders on a miracle. (But any genius is a miracle.) 
	1°°4 	Buddha disturbed the historical process by interfering with 
1 [Written in English and first published in Asia (New York). XXXIX (1939):2, 97-98.- EDITORS.] 
2 [The body of Southern Buddhist Sacred Writings.-EDITORS.] 
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the slow transformation of the gods into ideas. The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. Thus he says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. 
	1005 	The remote goal of the transformation process, however, is 
very much what Buddha intended. But to get there is possible neither in one generation nor in ten. It obviously takes much longer, thousands of years at all events, since the intended transformation cannot be realized without an enormous development of human consciousness. It can only be "believed," which is what Buddha's, as well as Christ's, followers obviously did, assuming-as "believers" always do-that belief is the whole thing. Belief is a gTeat thing, to be sure, but it is a substitute for a conscious reality which the Christians wisely relegate to a life in the hereafter. This "hereafter" is really the intended future of mankind, anticipated by religious intuition. 
	1006 	Buddha has disappeared from Indian life and religion more 
than we could ever imagine Christ disappearing in the aftermath of some future catastrophe to Christianity, more even than the Greco-Roman religions have disappeared from present-day Christianity. India is not ungrateful to her master minds. There is a considerable revival of interest in classical philosophy. Universities like Calcutta and Benares have important philosophy departments. Yet the main emphasis is laid on classical Hindu philosophy and its vast Sanskrit literature. The Pali Canon is not precisely within their scope. Buddha does not represent a proper philosophy. He challenges man! This is not exactly what philosophy wants. It, like any other science, needs a good deal of intellectual free play, undisturbed by moral and human entanglements. But also, small and fragmentary people must be able to "do something about it" without getting fatally involved in big issues far beyond their powers of endurance and accomplishment. This is on the right road after all, though it is indeed a longissima via. The divine impatience of a genius may disturb 
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WHAT INDIA CAN TEACH VS 
or even upset the small man. But after a few generations he will reassert himself by sheer force of numbers, and this too seems to be right. 
	10°7 	I am now going to say something which may offend my In- 
dian friends, but actually no offence is intended. I have, so it seems to me, observed the peculiar fact that an Indian, inasmuch as he is really Indian, does not think, at least not what we call "think." He rather perceives the thought. He resembles the primitive in this respect. I do not say that he is primitive, but that the process of his thinking reminds me of the primitive way of thought-production. The primitive's reasoning is mainly an unconscious function, and he perceives its results. We should expect such a peculiarity in any civilization which has enjoyed an almost unbroken continuity from primitive times. 
	1008 	Our western evolution from a primitive level was suddenly 
interrupted by the invasion of a psychology and spirituality belonging to a much higher level of civilization. Our case was not so bad as that of the Negroes or the Polynesians, who found themselves suddenly confronted with the infinitely higher civilization of the white man, but in essence it was the same. We were stopped in the midst of a still barbarous polytheism, which was eradicated or suppressed in the course of centuries and not so very long ago. I suppose that this fact has given a peculiar twist to the Western mind. Our mental existence was transformed into something which it had not yet reached and which it could not yet truly be. And this could only be brought about by a dissociation between the conscious part of the mind and the unconscious. It was a liberation of consciousness from the burden of irrationality and instinctive impulsiveness at the expense of the totality of the individual. Man became split into a conscious and an unconscious personality. The conscious personality could be domesticated, because it was separated from the natural and primitive man. Thus we became highly disciplined, organized, and rational on one side, but the other side remained a suppressed primitive, cut off from education and ci viliza tion. 
	IOog 	This explains our many relapses into the most appalling bar- 
barity, and it also explains the really terrible fact that, the higher we climb the mountain of scientific and technical achieve527 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
ment, the more dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inventions. Think of the great triumph of the human mind, the power to fly: we have accomplished the age-old dream of humanity! And think of the bombing raids of modern warfare! Is this what civilization means? Is it not rather a convincing demonstration of the fact that, when our mind went up to conquer the skies, our other man, that suppressed barbarous individual, went down to hell? Certainly our civilization can be proud of its achievements, yet we have to be ashamed of ourselves. 
	1010 	This surely is not the only way in which man can become 
civilized, at all events it is not an ideal way. One could think of another more satisfactory possibility. Instead of differentiating only one side of man, one could differentiate the whole man. By burdening the conscious man with the earthbound weight of his primitive side one could avoid that fatal dissociation between an upper and a lower half. Of course it would be no mean tour de force to experiment with the white man of today along these lines. It would obviously lead to devilishly intricate moral and intellectual problems. But, if the white man does not succeed in destroying his own race with his brilliant inventions, he will eventually have to settle down to a desperately serious course of self-education. 
	10] 1 	Whatever the ultimate fate of the white man may be, we can 
at least behold one example of a civilization which has brought every essential trace of primitivity with it, embracing the whole man from top to bottom. India's civilization and psychology resemble her temples, which represent the universe in their sculptures, including man and all his aspects and activities, whether as saint or brute. That is presumably the reason why India seems so dreamlike: one gets pushed back into the unconscious, into that un~edeemed, uncivilized, aboriginal world, of which we only dream, since our consciousness denies it. India represents the other way of civilizing man, the way without suppression, without violence, without rationalism. You see them there side by side, in the same town, in the same street, in the same temple, within the same square mile: the most highly cultivated mind and the primitive. In the mental make-up of the most spiritual you discern the traits of the living primitive, and in the melan- 
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WHAT INDIA CAN TEACH us 
choly eyes of the illiterate half-naked villager you divine an unconscious knowledge of mysterious truths. 
	1012 	I say all this in order to explain what I mean by not-think- 
ing. I could just as well say: Thank heaven there is a man left who has not learned to think, but is still able to perceive his thoughts, as if they were visions or living things; a man who has transformed, or is still going to transform, his gods into visible thoughts based upon the reality of the instincts. He has rescued his gods, and they live with him. It is true that it is an irrational life, full of crudeness, gruesomeness, misery, disease, and death, yet somehow complete, satisfactory and of an unfathomable emotional beauty. It is true that the logical processes of India are funny, and it is bewildering to see how fragments of Western science live peacefully side by side with what we, shortsightedly, would call superstitions. Indians do not mind seemingly intolerable contradictions. If they exist, they are the peculiarity of such thinking, and man is not responsible for them. He does not make them, since thoughts appear by themselves. The Indian does not fish out infinitesimal details from the universe. His ambition is to have a vision of the whole. He does not yet know that you can screw the living world up tightly between two concepts. Did you ever stop to think how much of the conqueror (not to say thief or robber) lies in that very term "concept"? It comes from the Latin concipere) 'to take something by grasping it thoroughly.' That is how we get at the world. But Indian "thinking" is an increase of vision and not a predatory raid into the yet unconquered realms of nature. 
	1013 	If you want to learn the greatest lesson India can teach you, 
wrap yourself in the cloak of your moral superiority, go to the Black Pagoda of Konarak, sit down in the shadow of the mighty ruin that is still covered with the most amazing collection of obscenities, read Murray's cunning old Handbook f01' India) which tells you how to be properly shocked by this lamentable state of affairs, and how you should go into the temples in the evening, because in the lamplight they look if possible "more [and how beautifully!] wicked"; and then analyse carefully and With the utmost honesty all your reactions, feelings, and thoughts. It will take you quite a while, but in the end, if you have done good work, you will have learned something about 
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yourself, and about the white man in general, which you have probably never heard from anyone else. I think, if you can afford it, a trip to India is on the whole most edifying and, from a psychological point of view, most advisable, although it may give you considerable headaches. 
53° 

APPENDIX 

EDITORIAL (1933) 1 
	1014 	Owing to the resignation of Professor Kretschmer, the presi- 
dent of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy,2 the presidency and with it the administration of the Zentralblatt fur PsychotheraPie have fallen to me. This change coincided with the great political upheaval in Germany. Although as a science psychotherapy has nothing to do with politics, fate has willed it that I should take over the editorship of the Zentralblatt at a moment when the state of affairs in psychotherapy is marked by a confusion of doctrines and views not unlike the previous state of affairs in politics. One-sided and mutually exclusive methods of observation have exerted too far-reaching an influence not only on specialized medical opinion but also on the psychological views of many educated laymen. The resulting contradictions have only been sharpened by the spread of my ownvery different-ideas, so that we can well speak of confusion being worse confounded. It will therefore be the primary task of the Zentralblatt to give impartial appreciation to all objective contributions, and to promote an over-all view which will do greater justice to the basic facts of the human psyche than has been the case up till now. The differences which actually do exist between Germanic and Jewish psychology and which have long been known to every intelligent person are no longer to be glossed over, and this can only be beneficial to science. In psychology more than in any other science there is a "personal equation," disregard of which falsifies the practical and theoretical findings. 
1 [Published in the Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete (Leipzig), VI:3 (Dec., 1933), 139-4o.-EDlTORS.] 
2 [Allgeroeine Arztliche Gesellschaft fUr Psychotherapie. Founded 1928, with Dr. ~obert Sommer as first president. In 1930, Professor Ernst Kretschroer became presIdent and Jung vice-president.] 
533 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
At the same time I should like to state expressly that this implies no depreciation of Semitic psychology,3 any more than it is a depreciation of the Chinese to speak of the peculiar psychology of the Oriental. 
	1015 	Psychotherapy has long ceased to be an exclusive province for 
specialists. The interest of the whole world is directed upon the psychological discoveries of medical men. Psychotherapy will therefore be obliged to take the whole of the psyche into account when constructing its theories, and to extend its vision beyond the merely pathological and personal. The efforts of the Zentralb latt will be directed to this end. 
C. G. JUNG 
3 Uung implemented this principle in the International Society. Cf. infra, Circular Letter, p. 545, and also p. 558.-EDITORS.] 
534 

A REJOINDER TO DR. BALLYl 
I 
	1016 	I wish to discuss no surmises with Dr. Bally, but prefer to 
report the facts which led me to take over the editorship of the Zentralblatt fur PsychotheraPie. About three years ago I was elected honorary [vice-] president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. When, owing to the political upheaval, Professor Kretschmer resigned from the presidency, and the Society like so many other scientific organizations in Germany received a profound shock, some leading members pressed me-I may say, fervently-to take the chair. This, I would expressly emphasize, was the presidency not of the German but of the International Society, as is stated in the issue from which Dr. Bally quotes.2 Thus a moral conflict arose for me as it would for any decent man in this situation. Should I, as a prudent neutral, withdraw into security this side of the frontier and wash 
1 [Published under "Zeitgenossisches" in the Neue Zilrcher Zeitung, CLV (1934), no. 437, p. 1, and no. 443, p. 1 (March 13 and 14). The article by the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. G. Bally was published under the title "Deutschstammige Psychotherapie?" in the same periodical, no. 343 (Feb. 27). Cf. infra, p. 543, n. 5.:-EDlTORS.] 2 [Zentralblatt filr PsychotheraPie, VI:3 (Dec., 1933), 142fl'. The confusion no doubt arose because the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy was dominated by the Germans, who held the main executive positions. Its membership was, however, international, and the congresses were international in character. Upon Kretschmer's resignation (Apr. 6, 1933), Jung was probably for a short time acting president, by virtue of his position as vice-president. Almost at once, however, with the agreement of his colleagues, he reorganized the society so as to make it formally international. Jung was then elected president of this International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. The statutes were ratified at a congress at Bad Nauheim, May IQ-13, 1934: cf. the Zentralblatt, VII:3 (1934, month not indicated). The SOciety's headquarters were located in Switzerland. A separate German society, under the presidency of Prof. M. H. Goring, was founded in Berlin on Sept. 15, 1933, as the German section of the International Society (VI:3, pp. 140ff.). -EDITORS.] 
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CIVILIZA nON IN TRANSITION 
my hands in innocence, or should I-as I was well aware-risk my skin and expose myself to the inevitable misunderstandings which no one escapes who, from higher necessity, has to make a pact with the existing political powers in Germany? Should I sacrifice the interests of science, loyalty to colleagues, the friendship which attaches me to some German physicians, and the living link with the humanities afforded by a common language-sacrifice all this to egotistic comfort and my different political sentiments? I have seen too much of the distress of the German middle class, learned too much about the boundless misery that often marks the life of a German doctor today, know too much about the general spiritual wretchedness to be able to evade my plain human duty under the shabby cloak of political subterfuge. Consequently no other course remained for me but to answer for my friends with the weight of my name and independent position. 
	1017 	As conditions then were, a single stroke of the pen in high 
places would have sufficed to sweep all psychotherapy 3 under the table. That had to be prevented at all costs for the sake of suffering humanity, doctors, and-last but not least-science and civilization. 
	1018 	Anybody who has the least notion about present-day Ger- 
many knows that no newspaper, no society, nothing, absolutely nothing can exist unless it has been gleichgeschaltet (conformed) by the government. Consequently the organization of a journal or a society is an affair that has two sides. I can wish, but whether things will turn out as I wish is another question, the decision for which rests neither with me nor with my colleagues. Anyone who has to deal with Germany today knows how rapidly things can alter, how one unforeseen decree follows another, and how the political scene changes like lightning. It is quite impossible to keep abreast of events from abroad, when even inside Germany people are unable, with the best will in the world, to get the political authorities to adopt a clear and binding attitude. 
	1019 	Since the German section of the International Society has to 
be gleichgeschaltet) and since, moreover, the Zentralblatt is published in Germany, there naturally arose so many difficulties that more than once we doubted the possibility of a reorganization. One of these concerned the oath of allegiance and the 3 [In Germany.-E;DlT9RS.J 
,1;36 

A REJOINDER TO DR. BALLY 
"purity of political sentiment" required of the German Society. We in Switzerland can hardly understand such a thing, but we are immediately in the picture if we transport ourselves back three or four centuries to a time when the Church had totalitarian presumptions. Barbed wire had not been invented then, so there were probably no concentration camps; instead, the Church used large quantities of faggots. The "modernist" oath of today is a pale and feeble offshoot of an earlier, much more robust and palpable Gleichschaltung. As the authority of the Church fades, the State becomes the Church, since the totalitarian claim is bound to come out somewhere. First it was Socialism that entered into the Catholic heritage and again is experimenting with the crassest kind of Gleichschaltung-not, indeed, with a view to buttressing up the kingdom of heaven but to producing an equally millenarian state of bliss (or its substitute) on earth. Russian Communism has therefore, quite logically, become the totalitarian Church, where even the poorest mouse emits the Bolshevist squeak. No wonder National Socialism makes the same claims! It is only consistent with the logic of history that after an age of clerical Gleichschaltung the turn should come for one practised by the secular State. 
	1020 	But even in such an age the spirit is at work in science, in 
art, philosophy, and religious experience, heedless of whether the contemporary situation be favourable or unfavourable, for there is something in man that is of divine nature and is not condemned to its own treadmill and imprisoned in its own structure. This spirit wants to live-which is why old Galileo, when they had done torturing him, recanted, and afterwards, so the story goes, said "But it does move"-only very softly, I'll wager. Martyrdom is a singular calling for which one must have a special gift. Therefore it seems to me at least as intelligent not to worry the high inquisition for a while with the exciting news that one has discovered the moons of Jupiter without the authorization of Aristotle. Galileo had the childlike eyes of the great discoverer and was not at all wise to his gleichgeschaltet age. Were he alive today he could sun himself on the beach at Los Angeles in company with Einstein and would be a made man, since a liberal age worships God in the form of science. But the "metamorphosis of the gods" rolls rumbling on and the State becomes lord of this world: more than half Europe is al- 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
ready swallowed up. Science and every healing art get seven fat years, then come the seven lean. They must learn to adapt themselves. To protest is ridiculous-how protest against an ava, lanche? It is better to look out. Science has no interest in calling down avalanches; it must preserve its intellectual heritage even under the changed conditions. 
	1021 	That is how things stand today. Neither I nor my German 
colleagues are responsible for them. If the German section of the Society wants to exist at all the oath of allegiance is inescapable, as any reasonable person will understand. It was therefore planned that the managing editor of the Zentralblatt, Dr. Cimbal of Hamburg, would bring out a special issue with statements by leading German psychotherapists, together with a signed introductory statement by the president of the German Society, Professor Goring of Elberfeld, for exclusive circulation in Germany. Such, too, were the instructions which I gave to the managing editor. To my great surprise and disappointment Professor Goring's political manifesto was suddenly printed in the current issue of the Zentralblatt [VI:3]. I do not doubt that there were inside political reasons for this, but it was one of those lamentable tactical gaffes which were the bane of German foreign policy even in the Wilhelm era. In this way my name unexpectedly appeared over a National Socialist manifesto, which to me personally was anything but agreeable. And yet after allwhat is help or friendship that costs nothing? The incident is naturally so incriminating as to put my editorship seriously in question. 
	1022 	In Germany everything must be "German" at present if it 
is to survive. Even the healing art must be "German," and this for political reasons. From the standpoint of medicine itself, it is unimportant whether it is called "German" or "French," but it is extremely important that it should live, even if under undeniably difficult conditions, as I know only too well. It is a cheap jibe to ridicule "Germanic psychotherapy," but a very different thing to have to rescue medicine for humanity's sake from the seething chaos of revolution. It is easy to stand by and be funny when the main point is to get a young and insecure science into a place of safety during an earthquake, and that was my aim in helping to reorganize the psychotherapeutic movement in Germany. Medicine has nothing to do with politics- 
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A REJOINDER TO DR. BALL Y 
I only wish it had!-and therefore it can and should be practised for the good of suffering humanity under all governments. If the doctors of Petersburg [sic] or Moscow had sought my help I would have acceded without hesitation, because I am concerned with human beings and not with Bolsheviks-and if I was then inevitably branded a Bolshevik it would have bothered me just as little. Man after all still has a soul and is not just an ox fatted for political slaughter. If I am called into the arena for the sake of the soul I shall follow the call wherever it may be. This naIve belief of mine in the human soul may, from the Olympian standpoint of a hypertrophied intellect or of partisan blindness, appear laughable, suspect, unpatriotic, and God knows what. I do not pride myself on being a good Christian, but I do believe in the saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." The doctor who, in wartime, gives his help to the wounded of the other side will surely not be held a traitor to his country. 
II 
	1023 	There is no sense in us doctors facing the National Socialist 
regime as if we were a party. As doctors we are first and foremost men who serve our fellows, if necessary under all the aggravations of a given political situation. We are neither obliged nor called upon to make protests from a sudden access of untimely political zeal and thus gravely to endanger our medical activity. My support of the German doctors has nothing to do with any political attitude. If it is interpreted politicallywhich has doubtless happened already or soon will-the interpretations are a reflection on those who make them. I have never been in a position to stop the formation of myths. 
	1024 	Admittedly I was incautious, so incautious as to do the very 
thing most open to misunderstanding at the present moment: I have tabled the Jewish question. This I did deliberately. My esteemed critic appears to have forgotten that the first rule of psychotherapy is to talk in the greatest detail about all the things that are the most ticklish and dangerous, and the most misunderstood. The Jewish problem is a regular complex, a festering wound, and no responsible doctor could bring himself to apply methods of medical hush-hush in this matter. 
539 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
	1025 	As to the difference between Jewish and "Aryan-Germanic- 
Christian-European" psychology, it can of course hardly be seen in the individual products of science as a whole. But we are not so much concerned with these as with the fundamental fact that in psychology the object of knowledge is at the same time the organ of knowledge, which is true of no other science. It has therefore been doubted in all sincerity whether psychology is possible as a science at all. In keeping with this doubt I suggested years ago that every psychological theory should be criticized in the first instance as a subjective confession. For, if the organ of knowledge is its own object, we have every reason to examine the nature of that organ very closely indeed, since the subjective premise is at once the object of knowledge which is therefore limited from the start. This subjective premise is identical with our psychic idiosyncrasy. The idiosyncrasy is conditioned (1) by the individual, (2) by the family, (3) by the nation, race, climate, locality, and history. 
	1026 	I have in my time been accused of "Swiss wooden-headed- 
ness." Not that I have anything against possessing the national vices of the Swiss; I am also quite ready to suppose that I am a bigoted Swiss in every respect. I am perfectly content to let my psychological confession, my so-called "theories," be criticized as a product of Swiss wooden-headedness or queer-headedness, as betraying the sinister influence of my theological and medical forbears, and, in general, of our Christian and German heritage, as exemplified for instance by Schiller and Meister Eckhart. I am not affronted when people call me "Teutonically confused," "mystical," "moralistic," etc. I am proud of my subjective premises, I love the Swiss earth in them, I am grateful to my theological forbears for having passed on to me the Christian premise, and I also admit my so-called "father complex": I do not want to knuckle under to any "fathers" and never shall (see "q ueer-headedness"). 
	1027 	May it not therefore be said that there is a Jewish psychology 
too, which admits the prejudice of its blood and its history? And may it not be asked wherein lie the peculiar differences between an essentially Jewish and an essentially Christian outlook? Can it really be maintained that I alone among psychologists have a special organ of knowledge with a subjective bias, whereas the Jew is apparently insulted to the core if one assumes him to be 
540 

A REJOINDER TO DR. BALLY 
a Jew? Presumably he would not have one assume that his insights are the products of a mere cipher, or that his brain emerged only today from the featureless ocean of non-history. I must confess my total inability to understand why it should be a crime to speak of "Jewish" psychology. 
	1028 	If I were in the position-as Dr. Bally supposes me to be-of 
not being able to point to a single difference between the two psychologies, it would amount to exactly the same thing as not being able to make plausible the difference between the peculiarities of the English and the Americans, or the French and the Germans. I have not invented these differences; you can read about them in innumerable books and newspapers; as jokes they are on everybody's tongue, and anyone who fails to see that there are one or two psychological differences between Frenchmen and Germans must have come from the back of beyond and know nothing about our European madhouse. Are we really to believe that a tribe which has wandered through history for several thousand years as "God's chosen people" was not put up to such an idea by some quite special psychological peculiarity? 1£ no differences exist, how do we recognize Jews at all? 
	1029 	Psychological differences obtain between all nations and 
races, and even between the inhabitants of Zurich, Basel, and Bern. (Where else would all the good jokes come from?) There are in fact differences between families and between individuals. That is why I attack every levelling psychology when it raises a claim to universal validity, as for instance the Freudian and the Adlerian. All levelling produces hatred and venom in the suppressed and misjudged; it prevents any broad human understanding. All branches of mankind unite in one stem-yes, but what is a stem without separate branches? Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody dares to say anything about the psychological difference between Jews and Christians? Every child knows that differences exist. 
	1°3° 	It seems to be generally assumed that in tabling the discus- 
sion of ethnological differences my sole purpose was to blurt out my "notorious" anti-Semitism. Apparently no one believes that I-and others-might also have something good and appreciative to say. Whatever it be, and however critical it be, I would never have the audacity to maintain that "ten tribes are accursed and 
541 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
two alone holy." That saying comes from no Christian. My criticism and appreciation will always keep well outside this glaring contrast, and will contain nothing that cannot be dis- 
cussed civilly. 
	1031 	I express no value-judgments, nor do I intend any veiled 
ones. I have been engaged for many years on the problem of imponderable differences which everybody knows and nobody can really define. They are among the most difficult problems of psychology and probably for that reason are a taboo area which none may enter on pain of death. To many people it is an insult if one credits them with a special psychological idiosyncrasy, and in dealing with parties and nations one must be even more careful. That is why any investigation of these imponderables is so extraordinarily difficult, because, as well as doing his work, the investigator has to perform a grotesque egg-balancing dance around highly charged sensibilities. It is high time the practising psychologist understood more about these psychic imponderabilia, because from them arise a good half of the things that go wrong in the world. Anyone who could define the nature of these imponderable differences would truly have gazed deep into the mystery of the human soul. For my part, I do not belong to those savants who concern themselves exclusively with what is known already-an extremely useful activity, no doubt-but prefer to sniff around territories where nothing is yet known. 
	1032 	Consequently I am amused to find myself cast in the role of 
the nitwit who is unable to spot a single difference between Jews and Christians. It is, in spite of Bally, an undoubted fact that the difference exists, just as water existed before the chemist discovered H20; but it cannot be grasped as yet, because all the views that have been put forward so far are unsatisfactory. These purely cognitive difficulties have, however, nothing to do with the question of whether the imponderables exist. I intend shortly to publish a few no doubt very inadequate and arguable aper{:us on this subject. I am as little capable as anybody else of putting forward anything final, but I shall be content if I succeed in provoking discussion. I would like to bring the parties together round a conference-table, so that they could at last get to know and acknowledge their differences. Very often this sort of knowledge is the way to understanding. I wish I could 
542 

A REJOINDER TO DR. BALLY 
do the same for the brothers in enmity on the left and right of the Rhine. Naturally nothing like this can be attempted without inviting the kicks of both sides. 
	1033 	Would the cure be successful? The possibility of defeat in a 
good cause has never alarmed me. 
	1034 	But, my public will object, why raise the Jewish problem 
today of all days and in Germany of all places? Pardon me, I raised it long ago, as anybody knows who is acquainted with the literature. I did not speak about it only since the revolution; I have been officially campaigning for criticism of subjective psychological premises as a necessary reform in psychology ever since 1913.4 This has nothing to do with the form of the German state. If I am to be exploited for political ends, there's nothing I can do to stop it. Or can anyone stop anything he pleases in Germany? It is rather late in the day for my critical attitude to attract attention only now, and it is, alas, characteristic that it should be construed in such a way as to suggest that Nazism alone has lent wings to my criticism. It is, I frankly admit, a highly unfortunate and disconcerting coincidence that my scientific programme should, without any assistance of mine and against my express wish, have been lined up with a political manifesto. But an event of this kind, although regrettable in itself, often has the consequence of ventilating problems which would otherwise be sedulously avoided.5 
4 [Actually, a short while before, when Jung stipulated that the analyst must be analysed. The first reference to this occurs in "The Theory of Psychoanalysis" (1913), in Freud and Psychoanalysis, pars. 447-50 (cf. ibid., pp. 252f.). Cf. also "A Contribution to the Study of Psychological Types" (1913; cf. Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, pp. 297f.); "On Psychological Understanding" (1914), in The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, pars. 419f.; Psychological Types (1921 edn., pp. 78f£., 453f.); "A Psychological Theory of Types" (1927; cf. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, pp. 87f.); "Freud and Jung: Contrasts" (1929), in F1'eud and Psychoanalysis; "Introduction to Kranefeldt's 'Secret Ways of the Mind' " (1939), ibid., pars. 747, 757f.-EDITORS.] 
5 [When the foregoing "Rejoinder to Dr. Bally" was published in the Neue Zilrcher Zeitung, a prefatory note by the Editor stated: "Dr. Bally, in his article 'DeutschsUimmige Psychotherapie?', was in our view entitled to take up Dr. Jung's programme as outlined in the Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie [VI:3] and to express his astonishment that though Dr. Jung started from the teachings of Freud and quite legitimately departed from them, he did not in his scientific writings SUpport his opposition with the differences between Christian-Germanic and Semitic psychology, but only at this present juncture acknowledges the 'super- 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
psychology of the racial psychologists.''' In the issue of March 15, 1934 (CLV, 457), Jung replied as follows: 
["In the Editor's prefatory note to my article, it is stated that I started from the teachings of Freud. I did not start from Freud, but from Eugen Bleuler and Pierre Janet, who were my immediate teachers. When I took up the cudgels for Freud in public, I already had a scientific position that was widely known on account of my association experiments, conducted independently of Freud, and the theory of complexes based upon them. My collaboration was qualified by an objection in principle to the sexual theory, and it lasted up to the time when Vreud identified in principle his sexual theory with his method. 
["The assertion that I acknowledge racial psychology only at this present juncture is incorrect. In 1927 I wrote: 'Thus it is a quite unpardonable mistake to accept the conclusions of a Jewish psychology as generally valid. Nobody would dream of taking Chinese or Indian psychology as binding upon ourselves. The cheap accusation of anti-Semitism that has been levelled at me on the ground of this criticism is about as intelligent as accusing me of an anti-Chinese prejudice.' ["The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (Coil. Works, Vo!. 7), p. 149, n. S.] And in June 1915 I wrote: 'In my opinion this problem does not exist for the Jews. The Jew already had the culture of the ancient world and on top of that has taken over the culture of the nations amongst whom he dwells. He has two cultures, paradoxical as that may sound. He is domesticated to a higher degree than we are, but he is badly at a loss for that quality in man which roots him to the earth and draws new strength from below. This chthol1ic quality is found in dangerous concentration in the Germanic peoples. Naturally the Aryan European has not noticed any signs of this for a very long time, but perhaps he is beginning to notice it in the present war; and again, perhaps not. The Jew has too little of this quality-where has he his own earth underfoot? The mystery of the earth is no joke and no paradox: " (Supra, par. IS.)-EDITORS.] 
544 

CIRCULAR LETTER (1934) 1 
Esteemed colleagues: 
	1035 	At the last Congress 2 of the International General Medical 
Society for Psychotherapy, it was decided to constitute the Society in the form of national groups.s Therefore, national groups have now been formed or are being formed in the various countries that were represented at the Congress (Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland). The conditions of membership in these national groups vary according to the local bylaws. Because of the political circumstances and because national groups do not yet exist in all countries, so that individuals as such cannot join their respective groups, it has been decided that association with a national group is on a purely voluntary basis; in other words, individual membership is possible within the framework of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy.4 
1 [Inserted as a separate sheet in the Zentralblatt, VII:6 (Dec., 1934). The stipulations are based on the statutes of the Society, printed ibid., VII:3.-EDITORS.] 
2 [At this, the 7th Congress for Psychotherapy, May, 1934, at Bad Nauheim, the statutes of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy were ratified. Jung's presidential address to the Congress may have been extempore; a ms. cannot be traced, but there is a summary of it in the Zentralblatt, VII:3. It seems to have been much the same in substance as the "Contribution to a Discussion on Psychotherapy" (infra, pars. 1060ff.). 
[At the same Congress, Jung delivered a lecture, "Ober Komplextheorie," previously delivered on May 5 at the Federal Polytechnic Institute, Zurich, and published the same year as "Allgemeines zur Komplextheorie." Cf. "A Review of the Complex Theory," Coil. Works, Vol. 8, pp. 92ff. 
[For Jung's presidential address to the Sth Congress, held in March 1935, also at Bad Nauheim, see pars. 1055ff.] 
3 [In order to prevent any national group dominating the Society, it was stipulated in the statutes that no national group could muster more than 40 per cent Voting strength.] 
4 [By this means, German Jews could remain members of the International So. ciety though ejected £fOUl the German national group (cf. infra, p. 558).] 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
	1036 	The International Society is neutral as to politics and creed. 
Persons wishing to become members of it are invited to communicate with the general secretariat of the International Society, represented by Dr. W. Cimbal, Altona, or with the president's general secretary, Dr. C. A. Meier, Burghi::ilzli, Zurich. 
	1037 	The organ of the Society is the Zentralblatt fur Psychothera- 
pie, Verlag S. Hirzel, Leipzig; subscription to members, 15 Reichsmarks per year, post-paid. 
	1038 	We therefore respectfully invite you to join the International 
General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. 
DR. C. G. JUNG 
Zurich-K usnacht December I, I934 
546 

EDITORIAL (1935) 1 
	1039 	Although severely shaken by contemporary events, the Inter- 
national General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and its organ the Zentralblatt have consolidated their position during the past year, which began with the Congress at Bad Nauheim.2 
	1°40 	Psychotherapy, after outgrowing the initial chaos of un- 
systematized tricks and techniques used by all branches of medicine that came into contact with the neuroses, gradually developed into a discipline whose scope and content entitled it to be called "medical psychology," and to be accounted a specialized subject on its own. At one time its arsenal of knowledge consisted merely of a few tags of popular wisdom, a dose of "sound common sense," and a tip or two from suggestion therapy; but today it has become an extensive field of science with continually widening problems. These undoubtedly raise, and have already raised, philosophical issues. The proper subject of medical psychology-the sick psyche-cannot be artificially separated from its wider background, the human psyche in general, though in practice this separation is effected by the illness itself. And although it is necessary to trace the deviations of pathological psychic development in all its details, in evaluating its findings medical research must in the end take its stand on normal observations and average values. As a result, any psychopathology that claims to be practical is inevitably led beyond itself into the sphere of normal psychology, and thus into the domain of philosophy. This is one of the many overlappings so characteristic of modern medicine: one has only to think of physiological chemistry and microbiology. Thus what began as psychotherapy has become an independent branch of science which has already Swallowed up all that was formerly meant by psychopathology. 
1 [Published in the Zentralblatt, VIII: 1 (1935, month not indicated), 105.-EDlTORS.] 2 [The 7th Congress for Psychotherapy. See supra, pp. 535, n. 2. and 545. n. 2.] 
547 

548 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
Today no psychopathology is conceivable that could get along without the insights and discoveries of the psychotherapists. 
	1°41 	For a long time past, practical psychological treatment has 
driven the specialist to elaborate his views in the form of theories, because these are indispensable for an orderly presentation of the empirical facts. Science cannot exist without hypotheses. But if hypotheses are made, intellectual integrity inevitably demands, in my view, a criticism of the premises. An hypothesis does not rest only on the apparent testimony of experience, it rests also on the judgment of the observer. If criticism of the premises underlying a judgment is needed anywhere, it is needed in psychology. (This is not the place for lengthy philosophical discussions, therefore a hint must suf- 
fice.) 
	1042 	The accusation has been made in certain quarters that the 
newer psychotherapy is concerned too much with philosophical problems and not enough with the minutiae of case-histories. This accusation must be emphatically rebutted, because philosophical problems belong in the highest degree to any empirical study of the psyche, as fit subjects both for research and for philosophical criticism. The empirical intellect, occupying itself with the minutiae of case-histories, involuntarily imports its own philosophical premises not only into the arrangement but also into the judgment of the material, and even into the apparently objective presentation of the data. If psychotherapists today are beginning to talk about a Weltanschauung, a philosophy of life, this merely proves that they have discovered the existence of certain broad assumptions which were formerly overlooked in the most ingenuous manner. What is the use of even the most accurate and punctilious work if it is prejudiced by an unavowed assumption? Any science worthy of the name must criticize its own assumptions. Freud himself did not shrink from the major philosophical task of debunking religious assumptions "once and for all." His intellectual development shows very clearly how the problems of medical psychology logically culminate in criticism, or at any rate polemical discussion, of its own premises. A departure of this kind is not an aberration; it is the positive duty of any growing science, ~nd moreover it brings about a broadening, deepening, and ennch- 
ing of its discoveries. 

EDITORIAL (1935) 
	1043 	Since psychotherapy purports to be a method of healing, it 
must include among its aims the need to change a less adapted attitude, such as we see in every morbid state, into a normally adapted attitude. The adaptedness of a psychic system, however, is always related to the situation of the moment, and is therefore not fixed in an unchanging pattern. Adaptedness is not a permanent and permanently valid state which, once reached, can be maintained for ever; it is a continually advancing process which has as its indispensable premise the constant observation of changes occurring both within and without. A system of healing that fails to take account of the epoch-making representations collectives of a political, economic, philosophical, or religious nature, or assiduously refuses to recognize them as actual forces, hardly deserves the name of therapy. It is more a deviation into a pathologically exaggerated attitude of protest which is the very reverse of adapted. Adaptedness as a criterion of cure is absolutely necessary, though of course it is not the only one. 
	1044 	Discussion of general assumptions and leading ideas is a most 
important item in the present phase of psychotherapy, because it brings into the limelight assumptions that tacitly exist and are all the more dangerous for that reason. In no circumstances can psychotherapy be a single method or a single system. Individuals and their temperaments vary so fundamentally that all forms of schematism and dogmatism cannot be got rid of quickly enough if psychotherapy is not to come to a dead end. 
	1045 	The peculiar nature of psychogenic insecurity and disease, as 
well as their enormous incidence, make the extension of psychotherapy to wider fields an urgent necessity, more particularly because paedogogics, by definition, does not bother about the education of adults, and the churches have nothing to say to vast numbers of people. The churches, it is true, have only themselves to blame if people confuse religion with a creed and, seeing no need to believe in anything, promptly take that as a proof that religion is superfluous. Experience shows that religion is, at the very least, a psychic fact that has existed from time immemorial and expresses itself in a thousand different forms. Protestant theology, strangely deluded, calls this view "psychologism" and in so doing robs itself of the most effective means of combatting man's insecurity-the confessional, which the Catholic Church has wisely appropriated for the benefit of 
549 

CIVILIZATION .IN TRANSITION 
mankind. Modern psychotherapy has no such aspirations, but often it is virtually compelled to assume spiritual guidance in a realm that properly and originally belonged to the pastoral cure of souls, and is thus faced with an educative task which makes the most exacting demands on the knowledge and competence of the therapist. Though he may decline to cope with them on the plea of professional incompetence, they are really quite manageable if only he will fulfil the necessary conditions. At this point practical treatment impinges directly upon such questions as a philosophy of life, and there is no sense whatever in brushing them aside as irrelevant, thus cutting the patient off from that much needed relationship and adaptation to the great problems of the age and condemning him to a neurotic hole-and-corner existence. That would be the very thing that psychotherapy does not envisage. 
	1046 	The human psyche, even when in a pathological condition, 
is a complex whole actuated not only by instinctual processes and personal relationships but by the spiritual needs and suprapersonal currents of the time. And just as the general practitioner is rightly expected to know the normal anatomy and physiology of the body he has to treat, so the psychotherapist will sooner or later feel constrained to know everything that is of vital importance to the life of the psyche. He will, in short, have to approach psychology as one of the humane sciences. That this may prove inconvenient to a doctor trained mainly in the natural sciences is altogether understandable; but the growth of medicine has demonstrated again and again that its disciples, after a little hesitation, were ready to learn more. Psychotherapy is an intermediate field of research which requires the collaboration of many different branches of learning. It will be the task of the future to decide very carefully wherein the competence of each branch lies. 
	1047 	In accordance with the line of development suggested here, 
the next Congresses will be concerned on the one hand with the specifically medical relations between psychology and endocrinology, and on the other hand with its relation, as a humane science, to oriental symbolism. 
	1048 	During the past year the organization of the International 
Society has made, in some part, satisfactory progress. The German group was, at the time of the last Congress, already firmly 
550 

EDITORIAL (1935) 
organized under the direction of Professor Goring. Since then there have been added a Dutch group, the "Netherlands Society for Psychotherapy," with thirty-two members under the presidency of Dr. van der Hoop in Amsterdam, and a Danish group with ten members under the presidency of Dr. O. Briiel in Copenhagen. Finally, a Swiss group with fourteen members under the presidency of the undersigned was recently founded in Zurich, bearing the name of the "Swiss Society for Practical Psychology.' , 
	1049 	The difficulties of establishing relations with neurological 
and psychiatric societies, not unknown elsewhere, have placed considerable obstacles in the way of founding a Swedish group by Dr. Poul Bjerre in Stockholm, so that no agreement has been reached up to the present. 
	1050 	The work of the groups outside Germany is organized in dif- 
ferent ways. Copenhagen has two or three meetings a year, with lectures on specialized subjects. Amsterdam has four meetings a year. Zurich has a meeting every month, with a common programme of work in which, at present, the psychology of dreams is being worked out systematically. 
	1°51 	The fragmentation of psychology into various schools and 
into even more numerous separate theories makes it desirable that discussion in the spirit of collaboration among colleagues should be fostered more than ever in the future. In this way certain misunderstandings would be removed and many questions clarified which at present remain unsolved for want of cocoperation. 
C. G. JUNG 
55l 

EDITORIAL NOTE (1935) 1 
	1052 	Earlier, a Scandinavian and a Dutch issue were published by 
the Zentralblatt) and a Swiss issue is now being presented this year. As Switzerland is a trilingual country, we have not hesitated to include a contribution in French (by Professor Baudouin, Geneva). There are also two contributions in English by two writers who have spent several years studying in Zurich. They are H. G. Baynes, London, who was my assistant for several years, and Esther Harding, N ew York, author of the deservedly well-known works The Way of All Women and Woman's Mysteries. Although English is not one of the three official languages of Switzerland, unofficially it is the fourth, as is shown among other things by the fact that for years I have been invited to give English lectures in Zurich. 
	1053 	The greatest danger that threatens psychology is one-sided- 
ness and insistence on a single standpoint. In order to do justice to the phenomena of the psyche, a variety of viewpoints is needed. Just as there are points of view based on race psychology, so also there are national ones, and we may welcome it as an enrichment of our experience that we have succeeded in including in our issues contributions from the Romance and the Anglo-Saxon mind. 
	1054 	The problems of psychiatry are not simplified by concen- 
trating on one single aspect to the exclusion of all the others, for each individual psychic fact is decisively influenced by its relation to the whole; indeed, its real significance can be discovered only when its position in the whole has been ascertained. It would therefore seem more valuable at present to map out the scope of the whole than to investigate individual psychic processes in detail, on a general assumption that is as uncon- 
1 [Published in !he Zentralblatt, VIII:2 (1935, month not indicated), 165·-EDlTORS.] 
552 

EDITORIAL NOTE (1935) 
scious as it is incorrect. To this end we need the consensus gentium) which is in any case the foundation stone of an international Society and its organ. To promote international collaboration is one of the cultural characteristics of Switzerland, and this should also give the Swiss issue its own peculiar stamp. 
C. G. JUNG 
553 

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE 8TH GENERAL MEDICAL CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY, BAD NAUHEIM, 19351 
	1055 	It is now a year since the International Medical Society for 
Psychotherapy was founded. During that year the German group has been organized under the successful leadership of Dr. Goring. Then the Netherlands Society for Psychotherapy joined the International Society under the leadership of Dr. van der Hoop. In Copenhagen, a Danish group was organized by Dr. Briiel. A Swiss group has recently been founded in Zurich under my presidency. Dr. Bjerre writes to me from Stockholm that, owing to external difficulties, it has so far not been possible for him to organize a Swedish group. Let us hope that the second year in the life of our Society will find him more successful. A little while ago Professor Stransky, of Vienna, got in touch with me about the founding of an Austrian group, so there appears to be a good chance that the Society will also include Austria. 
	1056 	It seems, however, that it is not particularly easy to bring all 
those doctors and psychologists who are concerned with psychotherapy or applied psychology into a neutral organization. The reasons for this-apart from the fact that some of them may have become understandably tired of societies-fall into two groupS. The first comprises all those difficulties which a young science always has to contend with. Psychotherapy is still a child that is not very sure of itself. Moreover, it has two elder sisters who watch over its growth with somewhat mixed feelings and often dispute its right to independence. These sisters are psychiatry and neurology. Although there are praiseworthy exceptions among the practitioners of these sciences, psychotherapy, being pre-eminently psychological in its outlook and its methods, has as a rule eked out an exceedingly scanty existence under their 
1 [March 27-30, 1935. Previously unpublished. Cf. supra, par. 1039·-EDITORS.] 
554 

ADDRESS TO THE BAD NAUH~IM CONGRESS (1935) auspices. I do not want to reproach them for this, for both psychiatry and neurology have a perfect right to their own special problems, which have little enough in common with those of psychotherapy. On the other hand, it is not permissible for them to claim a right to take psychotherapy under their wing merely because the one is concerned with mental diseases and the other with nervous diseases. The functional psychological disturbances, or psychoneuroses, are by nature a special field impinging neither on the psychiatric clinic nor on the domain of neurology. Modern psychotherapy has developed beyond that early stage of its career when it was nothing more than fatherly advice or suggestion, with or without hypnosis, and has become a proper method of psychological treatment for the use of specialists. This fact is overlooked not only by the public but, all too often, by doctors as well. 
	1057 	The other reasons why the organization of our professional 
colleagues meets with difficulties have to do with psychological cross-currents within the profession itself. Objective discussion among professionals is not yet possible to the degree that a strictly scientific approach would require. There are certain groups of doctors who put forward theories with .totalitarian pretensions and barricade themselves against criticism to such an extent that their scientific convictions are more like a confession of faith. This kind of attitude is a substitute for religion, though no objection could be made to this if only it were admitted. On the contrary, we could understand very well that it is the psychotherapists who feel most acutely the need for religious convictions, since the religions are in fact the oldest systems for healing the sufferings of the soul. But unlike religious ideas, these psychological theories are notably intellectualistic as well as anti-religious. Thus, we are confronted with the uncomfortable fact that in psychotherapy there are not only different theories-which in itself would be a matter for congratulation-but different convictions which are apparently indisputable-a phenomenon that is otherwise found only in the realm of political or religious controversy. 
	1°58 	In the face of all these difficulties, the International Society 
maintains, first of all, that psychotherapy is an independent branch of medicine and, secondly, that scientific truths cannot be substantiated by uncritical and one-sided convictions. Ac- 
555 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
cordingly, it welcomes adherents of all schools so far as they are willing to adopt an objective standpoint. 
	1059 	I therefore earnestly hope that in the course of time all those 
of our colleag-ues who wish to see psychotherapy developing along broader lines will associate themselves with us. 
556 

CONTRIBUTION TO A DISCUSSION ON PSYCHOTHERAPY 1 
	1060 	I can only agree with the general statements and intentions 
of the report we have just heard.2 The same difficulties that exist in Switzerland for psychotherapy also exist abroad. As a member of the board of the International Society I have sought for years to bring about understanding between the different schools of psychotherapy. No less than three works have been written by members of my school (W. M. Kranefeldt, G. R. Heyer, Gerhard Adler), which all endeavour to give a fair survey of the different scientific standpoints. I had been honorary president of the Society for several years when the revolution in Germany broke out. The then president resigned, and a group of leading German psychotherapists came to me with the request that I take over the presidency, firstly in order to support a beleaguered psychotherapy in its struggle for existence, and secondly in order to preserve its international contacts. Out of regard for the position of psychotherapy in Europe I felt I had no right to withdraw from this difficult and painful task, and therefore decided to accept the presidency of the International Society. In doing so, I was not for one moment unaware that in these days it is a matter of the greatest difficulty to establish an international association without excluding Germany, although it is a medical society far removed from any political activity. The Gleich- 
1 [In May 1935, Dr. W. Morgenthaler, an official of the Swiss section of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, organized a symposium on "Psychotherapy in Switzerland." Jung delivered a lecture entitled "What Is Psychotherapy?" (Coil. Works, Vol. 16, pp. 21ff.). A discussion followed, and Jung contributed the present remarks (styled "Votum C. G. Jung"), which were published in the Schweizerische ;l'rztezeitung fur Standesfragen (Bern), XVI (1935): 26, 345f., together with his lecture (pp. 335ff.).-EDITORS.] 
2 [By Dr. Morgenthaler.-ED1TORS.] 
557 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
schaltung 3 of the German group was inevitable. Protest would simply have put an end to psychotherapy in Germany. In these circumstances one had to be content with saving what was possible. Jewish doctors are excluded from the German group by the Aryan regulations, but I have succeeded in getting the draft of the international statutes amended so that German Jewish doctors can individually become members of the Society as a whole.4 National groups now exist in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland. The Freudian spirit of sectarianism put the greatest obstacles in the way of an Austrian group, and a political campaign was started in the press by the corresponding elements in Switzerland. These regrettable attempts to render objective discussion impossible from the start by sowing political suspicion on the one hand and sectarian discord on the other should not prevent fair-minded doctors who have the scientific development of their work at heart from doing their utmost to reach agreement. I have therefore gladly accepted the invitation to take part in the programme of work proposed by the planning committee. 
	1061 	For a variety of reasons it is probably better if psychothera- 
pists, with a view to safeguarding their scientific and professional interests, do not constitute a group within a psychiatric society. The divergence of interests is too great for direct collaboration to be profitable. In Germany too the separation of psychotherapy from psychiatry has proved to be a compelling necessity. But if psychotherapy is to achieve its independence, its representatives must for better or worse gather round the conference table and lay aside the autistic fads and fancies which have been so very rightly stressed by Dr. Morgenthaler. 
	1062 	It is, in my humble opinion, high time for psychotherapists 
to become conscious of their social responsibilities. The concept of psychotherapy has reached the wider public; there are large numbers of psychotherapists-so many that one can without exaggeration speak of them as a "profession"; a copious literature exists and has an eager following; and finally psychotherapy, originally the concern of medical men, has come to extend so far beyond its original boundaries that its oldest initia- 
3 [See supra, par. 1018.] 
4 [See supra, pars. 1035ff.] 
558 

CONTRIBUTIONS TO A DISCUSSION ON PSYCHOTHERAPY (1935) tor, Freud himself, today thinks very differently about lay therapy from what he did before. The psychotherapist is now firmly entrenched with the public, so his social responsibility has already begun. But it becomes an urgent problem in view of the incontrovertible fact that the practice of psychotherapy today is largely in the hands of "medical laymen." To anticipate at once, I am not speaking of those incompetent and irresponsible quacks whom the law is quite capable of catching, but of altogether serious teachers and psychologists whose previous training enables them to exert an educative influence. Since applied psychotherapy is largely educative in essence, it can hardly refrain from collaborating with the educator without impoverishing itself. Just as the medical practitioner makes plentiful use of lay assistants, and is even dependent on them in large measure, so the psychotherapist has need of auxiliary methods which he is bound to leave to helpers who are not medically trained. I need only mention physiotherapy and its various uses, special educative techniques, and so on. In my opinion it would be quite wrong for medical psychotherapists to shun these natural fellow-workers and brand them all quacks. On the other hand, the doctor has every interest in not allowing the pretentious aspirations that are fostered in numerous pedagogic institutes and in certain philosophy departments to run riot; instead, he will gradually confine the various fields of activity within their proper limits by wise collaboration. But if he shuts his eyes to the very existence of legitimate psychological workers, he not only fails to eliminate those tendencies by this ostrich policy, but denies himself the much-needed insight into the manifold branches of educational therapy today, and, furthermore, deprives them of the one essential: eventual medical surveillance and control. The International Medical Society for Psychotherapy is concerning itself in a positive way with the problem of practising psychologists and technical assistants when it clearly recognizes the dangers of a wildly proliferating and medically uncontrollable psychological lay movement. 
	1063 	Recently, as so often in the course of the last twenty years, it 
has been asserted that lay interest in psychological questions is on the decrease and that, because neuroses are either endocrine disturbances or mild forms of psychosis, all psychotherapy is SUperfluous. I would like to utter an urgent warning against 
559 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
such errors. Various psychological trends may fall out of fashion, but psychological problems in general are far more deeply rooted in the public than is realized outside the psychotherapeutic profession. In this respect the psychotherapist is faced with social responsibilities which sooner or later will make closer association with his fellow-workers an absolute necessity, quite apart from the economic considerations to which Dr. Morgen- 
thaler has drawn attention. 
560 

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE 
9TH INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY, COPENHAGEN, 19371 
	1064 	For the first time our Society is convening here in Copen- 
hagen, at the friendly invitation of the Scandinavian national groups. Our decision to hold the CongTess outside its previous confines demonstrates its international nature. The Society has long felt the need not only to overcome the geographical and linguistic barriers but, even more important, to extend the frontiers of medical psychotherapy as a science. However much the psychotherapist in his practical work must concentrate on the individual patient and on the most minute details, as a scientist he needs a viewpoint that widens his horizon, not just for his own sake, but for that of his patients, whose almost limitless differences demand of him a correspondingly broad understanding. Any narrow adherence to artificial limits would be a catastrophe for our science, whether these limits be national, political, linguistic, religious, or philosophical. Although every investigator is limited as an individual, and must work within his individual limits, his self-limitation loses all meaning if there is no living contact with the diversity of other points of view. So if in the course of the last few years we have succeeded, despite considerable external difficulties, not only in preserving our original Society but in establishing its internationality on a series of national groups-German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Austrian, and Swiss-we have at least laid the foundations of its further development. It is our liveliest wish to welcome our French and English colleagues also as future members of our Society. At a time like this, when historical necessity lays so much stress on the development of national individuality, the problem of international relationships becomes equally urgent by way of compensation. The nations of Europe form a Euro- 
1 [October 2-4,1937. Previously unpublished.] 561 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
pean family, which like every family has its own special spirit. However far apart the political goals may lie, they rest ultimately on the common European psyche, with whose aspects the practising psychologist should be familiar. 
	1065 	You will I am sure agree with me that the conditions for an 
international organization are extremely precarious today. But this should not deter us from doing everything in our power, however limited it may be in these unfavourable times, to preserve the human and psychic ties of the European family and also to practise in the international sphere what we daily seek to inculcate in our patients. By this I mean the avoidance of that basic evil, projections upon our neighbour. For everything that exists there are, as we know only too well, sufficient reasons, and only a bad psychologist will fail to appreciate their full significance. It is the task of our science to understand and classify all varieties of human behaviour. Faced with such a bewildering diversity of aspects and viewpoints, psychology can continue to function only if it abandons all hasty commitment to dogmas and doctrinaire convictions and allows every view to express itself freely so far as there are sufficient reasons to support it. In science there is no spirit of sectarianism which decides the truth. Being the science of the psyche, psychology is the sum total of what the psyche says about itself. Hence everything is psychologically true that psychologically exists. But the things that psychologically exist are innumerable. I can therefore wish nothing better for our Society, and in particular for this Congress, than that every opinion should be expressed and listened to, and that as many nations as possible should make their own particular contribution to the total picture of the European psyche. 
	1066 	I still have the painful duty of recalling a loss that our Society 
has suffered during the past year. Robert Sommer, the co-founder and for many years the first president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, died on February 3rd. Thanks to his wide knowledge of philosophy and psychology, and especially of familial research, he was drawn to our special field and its working hypotheses. His decision to throw in his lot with US and his readiness to collaborate with our endeavours deserve not only our heartfelt thanks but also the highest praise, as this ha~pened at a time when the psychological point of view in med!cine was still open to public attack. In these circumstances It 
562 

ADDRESS TO THE COPENHAGEN CONGRESS (1937) 
was an act of courage that made psychotherapy possible in Germany and to a large extent kept it alive. Sommer's support for psychotherapy was, together with Eugen Bleuler's, of decisive importance for the further development of the new ideas. 
	1067 	I would like to ask you to rise from your seats in memory of 
our loyal friend and supporter. 
	1068 	Ladies and Gentlemen, the 9th Congress of the Inter- 
national General Medical Society for Psychotherapy is opened. To the organizing committee, and to Dr. Briiel and Dr. Bjerre in particular, I express the Society's thanks for the invitation as well as for the work of preparing the Congress. I now leave the floor to Dr. Briiel. 
563 

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE 
10TH INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CONGRESS FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY, OXFORD, 19381 
	1069 	When we met at Copenhagen last year, it was the first time 
that our Congress had been held outside Germany. And soon afterwards our British colleagues suggested arranging a meeting in England. It has always been my desire to establish a line of communication between continental psychological medicine and England, where, within the last ten years, so much has been done for the cause of psychotherapy and where there are already so many physicians interested either in the treatment of neuroses or in the psychological aspect of illness in general. I am sure that I speak in the name of all my continental colleagues when I express my profound gratitude to this good town of Oxford, of ancient fame, to our English friends, and to all those whose benevolence and friendly support has made the organization of the Congress possible. We are deeply indebted to the organizing committee, in particular to Dr. Baynes, Dr. Strauss, and Dr. Squires, for their generous advice and help. 
	1070 	Before we begin the actual work I should like, if you will 
permit me, to make some remarks about the way in which the general intentions of our Congress should be understood. One of the most serious obstacles to collaboration in the field of psychotherapy is the peculiar fact of there being different schools of thought which are apparently incompatible with each other. Not that such a fact would be any novelty in the history of medicine, but it is an annoying encumbrance which has delayed the union and collaboration of the numerous workers in the field of psychotherapy. Medical psychology is still a delicate plant which needs careful nursing if it is to lead a reasonably independent existence in the near future. But how can anyone take care of its development when not even its own representatives are at one among themselves as to what the thing is? It has recently 
1 Uuly 29 - August 2, 1938. Delivered in English; previously unpublished.] 564 

ADDRESS TO THE OXFORD CONGRESS (1938) 
become a serious question, in more countries than one, whether psychotherapy could or should be taught at the universities. Many physicians have realized that quite ordinary diseases are accompanied by psychological disturbances which are causally related to the organic ailment. Psychiatrists have become aware that even psychoses often have a remarkably psychological aspect, and psychotherapists have found that borderline cases, ominously labelled as schizophrenia, are not inaccessible to psychological treatment. In education, considerable use has already been made of the psychological points of view elaborated by medical psychologists. And even the clergy, Catholic as well as Protestant, are beginning to be interested in our work, because they are human beings like ourselves who are burdened and even harassed at times by the intricate moral problems of the people who consult them. We can safely speak of an enormous increase of public interest in our work within the last ten years. Interest in psychology is serious in our day and is no longer a ridiculous fad as it was twenty years ago. Today we ought to think hard and make a serious effort to bring together all men of good will in our profession, in order to meet the needs and demands of the time. In Switzerland we had a committee for psychotherapy elected by the Swiss Society of Psychiatry many years ago. And, as one might expect, for as many years nothing happened. Recently, however, we made a move, but one of our faculties of medicine said: "What are you going to teach? You do not even agree with each other about your own theories." 
	1°71 	This remark hits the nail on the head. Yet the nail of psy- 
chotherapy has several heads and only one of these is struck by this criticism. Those who are not professionally acquainted with psychology do not realize that it includes a very large and equally important practical part which has little or nothing to do with a particular theory. But it is the latter which is loudly proclaimed before the public, and thus the prejudice is aroused that psychotherapy amounts to nothing but the preaching of a particular theory. This is a gross mistake. As a matter of fact each psychotherapist in his practical work follows a line that is more or less common to all his colleagues (provided they do not use hypnotism). And each of them, no matter to what school he belongs, follows his own line because he knows from experience that good work demands the whole man and is never achieved 
565 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
by mere routine or by a theoretical creed. The very nature of the cases we are treating forces us occasionally to change our method or our theoretical explanation. We know that a neurosis is not a typical infection by a specific microbe, but the morbid devel· opment of the whole of a personality. We also know that the originators of psychological theories are human beings with an individual psychic predisposition, the one more prone to a certain kind of opinion or interpretation than the other. On the one hand we have to deal with very individual patients and on the other hand we make use of opinions which are only very relatively valid. These truths are incontestable. They should warn us against any fixed standpoint and they should turn our minds to what we actually do with our patients, rather than to a meaningless dispute about opinions. 
	1072 	The Swiss Committee of Psychotherapy has made the at- 
tempt to formulate those points about which all psychotherapists, working along the lines of psychological analysis, could agree. The democratic spirit of Switzerland has helped us to avoid all absolutism and we succeeded in producing Fourteen Points of mutual agreement.2 President Wilson's noble attempt seems to have stood godfather to our little enterprise. There are people who doubt whether the League of Nations really works. But our enterprise in Switzerland has already worked. We are ready now to start an Institute of Psychotherapy. 
	1073 	Our fourteen points, which I am presently going to discuss, 
have been ridiculed as a lukewarm compromise that skates over the most tremendous differences of opinion. That is exactly what we intended to do. If you want to quarrel about opinions, you can spend the rest of your life doing so. 'But we wanted to get something done, and you cannot do that by endless philosophical discussions about the ultimate meaning of the psyche. Each school had to sacrifice some of its hobby-horses and to abandon stiff-necked resistance to other points of view. Something little short of a miracle happened: our admittedly lukewarm and 
2 ["The fourteen points dealt with medical procedure, psychogenesis, diagnosis, exploration, material (including all possible forms of human expression, behaviour, controlled language, the language of free association, of fantasy, of dreams, of symptoms and symptomatic actions), aetiology, the unconscious, fixation, conscious realization, analysis and interpretation, transference, ontogenic reduction, phylogenic reduction, and therapy."-Zentralblatt, XI (1939): 1-2, p. 2.-EDITORS.] 
566 

ADDRESS TO THE OXFORD CONGRESS (1938) 
superficial formulations brought about a cordial collaboration between people who formerly thought they were miles apart from each other. If my colleagues understand that psychotherapy is our common cause, then there is a hope it will find a wellmerited place among the other branches of medical science. 
567