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Updated: May 10, 2025
In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or even possible way of attaining the revelation of love.
Heretics frequently arise, both in ethics and in the arts, who say: "No more restraints! Give the bean its head." There are psycho-analysts who appear to regard frustration as the one serious evil in life, and the apostles of vers libre denounce metre and rhyme because these merely serve to frustrate the natural impulses of the imagination.
An examination of the methods they exemplify in individual practice and in the large literature of the psycho-analytic movement shows sufficient reason, in my view, why the psycho-analytic theory of dreams should still be greeted with skepticism. Psycho-analysts tell us that repugnance for the subject-matter has delayed acceptance of their essentially sexual interpretations.
So was cultivated that undue tenderness, deplored by Montaigne, which we now regard as almost normal in family life, and solemnly label, if we happen to be psycho-analysts, the Oedipus-complex or the Electra-complex.
The ambiguity which has resulted from this condition of affairs, maintains the Psychoanalytic Dilemma: that of not knowing when to stop in apperceiving sexual allusions. Indeed, it is part of the interpretative policy of psycho-analysts not to exclude sexual meanings, in case of doubt; but rather to take the sexual sense for granted.
Since then, a more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human activity.
Freud's fertility in such interpretations has led one of our best-known experimental psychologists to say, in mingled admiration and impatience: "His utterances are those of a poet, not of a scientist." As spokesman of the Zurich group of psycho-analysts, Dr. Jung has lately protested against these arbitrary translations, which he calls Freud's "reductive method."
But the psycho-analyst doctor would really want to hear details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was what psycho-analysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences were pale in comparison; but psycho-analysts could and did make much out of little, bricks without clay.
That was for psycho-analysts to discover; Gerda only knew the fact. And Barry, after he had spoken sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even kinder than usual, and that was the best of all. There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy, efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising. They were kind, pleasant people.
Thus the therapeutical experience of the psycho-analysts reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the intimate experiences of life. See, for instance, H.W. Frink, Morbid Fears and Compulsions, 1918, Ch. Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels.
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