23

nach dem Urgeschehen. Im Altertum war jedes Fest wesentlich eine
theatralische Angelegenheit, ein Maskenspiel, die von Priestern voll-
zogene szenische Darstellung von Göttergeschichten, zum Beispiel der
Lebens- und Leidensgeschichte des Osiris. Das christliche Mittelalter
hatte dafür das Mysterienspiel mit Himmel, Erde und greulichem Höllen-
rachen, wie es noch in Goethes "Faust" wiederkehrt; es hatte die
Fastnachtsfarce, den populären "imus. Es gibt eine mythische Kunst-
optik auf das Leben, unter der dieses als farcenhaftes Spiel, als
theatralischer Vollzug von etwas festlich Vorgeschriebenem, als
Kasperliade erscheint, worin mythische Charaktermarionetten eine
oft dagewesene, feststehende und spasshaft wieder Gegenwart werdende
"Handlung" abhaspeln und vollziehen. Und es fehlt nur, dass diese
Optik in die Subjektivität der handelnden Personagen selbst eingeht,
in ihnen selbst als Spielbewusstsein, festlich-mythisches Bewusstsein
vorgestellt wird, damit eine Epik gezeitigt werde, wie sie sich in den
"Geschichten Jaakobs" wunderlich genug ergibt, besonders in dem Kapitel
"Der grosse Jokus", worin zwischen Personen, die alle wohl wissen, was
sie sind und in welchen Spuren sie gehen, zwischen Isaak, Esau und
Jaakob, die bitter-komische Geschichte, wie Esau, der Rote, der genas-
führte Teufel, geprellt wird um seines Vaters Segen, zum Gaudium des
Hofvolks als mythische Festfarce jokos und tragisch sich abspielt.-

Und ist nicht vor allem der Held dieses Romans ein solcher Zelebrant
des Lebens: Joseph selbst, der mit einer anmutigen Art von religiöser
Hochstapelei den Tammuz=Osiris=Mythos in seiner Person vergegenwärtigt
sich das Leben des Zerrissenen, Begrabenen und Auferstehenden "gesche-
hen lässt" und sein festliches Spiel treibt mit dem, was gemeinhin nur
aus der Tiefe heimlich das Leben bestimmt und formt: dem Unbewussten?
Das Geheimnis des Metaphysikers und des Psychologen, dass die Geberin

27

feuchten Breite Grenze zu verengen".

"Eröffn' ich Räume vielen Millionen,
Nicht sicher zwar, doch tätig=frei zu wohnen.

Solch ein Gewimmel möcht' ich sehn,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn."

Es ist das Volk einer angst= und hassbefreiten, zum Frieden
gereiften Zukunft.

FREUD AND THE FUTURE

by
Thomas Mann

As a deliver into the depths, a researcher into the psychology of instinct, Freud unquestionably belongs with those writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, who, be it as historians, critics, philosophers or archaeologists, stand opposed to rationalism, all of whom are opposed to the belief in mind held by the 18th and to some extent also by the 19th century. They emphasize instead the night side of nature and the soul, as the actually life-giving and life-conditioning element; they cherish it, scientifically foster it, represent in the most revolutionary sense the divinity of the earth, and exalt the primacy of the unconscious, the pre-mental, the will, the passions, or, as Nietzsche says, the "feeling", above the "reason". I have used the word "revolutionary" in a paradoxical and logically perverse sense; for we are used to associate the idea with the powers of light, with the emancipation of the understanding and with conceptions looking towards the future, whereas here the leading is in just the opposite direction. Back, back, is the cry: back into the night, the sacred primitive, the fore-known, the life-bearing; back into the romantical, pre-historical mother-womb.

But Freud's scientific interest does not degenerate into a glorification of its object at the expense of the intellectual

2

sphere. His anti-rationalism consists in seeing the actual pre-
dominance of the instinct over the mind, power for power; but not
at all in lying down and grovelling before that predominance, or
in contempt for mind. It gives no occasion for confusion, nor is
itself prey to any. Its interest in the instinctive is unmis-
takably and unchangeably not a subserviency which denies mind and
clings to "nature". On the contrary, it works in the interest of
the future triumph it envisages for mind and reason; it serves -
I use the poor proscribed word in its largest sense, independent of
the ups and downs of the time - it serves "enlightenment". "We
may," says Freud, emphasize as often as we like the fact that
mind is weak as compared with impulse in human life - we shall be
right. But after all there is something peculiar about this
weakness. The voice of the intellect is low, but it rests not
until it gets a hearing. In the end, after countless repulses,
it gets one after all." Those are his words. And it would be
hard to draw any comfort for reaction from a doctrine in which
the primacy of reason is concisely stated to be "the psychological
ideal".

We know that Sigmund Freud, the possessor of that great
mind which we are this evening honoring, founder of psychoanalysis
as a general method of research and as a therapeutic technique,
trod the steep path to knowledge alone and independently, as
physician and natural scientist, without knowing that reinforce-

3

ment and encouragement lay ready to his hand in literature. He did not know Nietzsche, scattered throughout whose pages one finds premonitory flashes of truly Freudian insight. He did not know Novalis, whose romantic-biologic fantasies so often approach astonishingly close to analytic conceptions. He did not know Kierkegaard, whom he must have found profoundly sympathetic and encouraging, for the Christian zeal which urged him on to psychological extremes; and finally, he did not know Schopenhauer, the melancholy symphonist of a philosophy of the instinct, groping for change and redemption. Probably it must be so. By his unaided effort, without knowledge of any previous intuitive achievement, Freud had methodically to follow out the line of his own researches; and the driving force of his energy was probably increased by this very freedom from special advantage. We think of him as solitary - the attitude is inseparable from our earliest picture of the man. (Solitary in the sense employed by Nietzsche in that enchanting essay: "What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals", where he characterizes Schopenhauer as "a genuine philosopher, a self-poised mind, a man and gallant knight, stern-eyed, with the courage of his own strength, who knows how to stand alone and not wait on the beck and nod of superior officers.") In this guise of man and gallant knight, a knight between Death and the Devil, I have been used to picture to myself our psychologist of the unconscious, ever since his figure first swam into my mental ken.

That happened late - much later than one might have expected,

4

considering the connection between this science and the creative
and poetic impulse in general and my own in particular. The
connection, the bond between them is twofold: it consists first
in a love of truth, in a sense of truth, a sensitiveness and
receptivity for truth's sweet and bitter, which largely expresses
itself in a psychological excitation, a clarity of vision, to
such an extent that the conception of truth actually almost coincides with that of psychological perception and recognition. And
secondly it consists in an understanding of disease, a certain
affinity with it, outweighed by fundamental health, yet fully
comprehending its productive significance.

As for the love of truth: the suffering, morally conditioned
love of truth as psychology - that has its origin in Nietzsche's
high school, where in fact the coincidence of "truth" and
"psychological truth", the knower of truth and the psychologist,
is striking indeed. His haughty truthfulness, his very conception
of intellectual honesty, his conscious and melancholy fearlessness
in its service; his self-knowledge, self-crucifixion - all this
has psychological intention and bearing. Never shall I forget
the deepening, strengthening, formative effect upon my own
powers induced by my acquaintance with Nietzsche's psychological
agony.

I spoke of a second connecting link between analysis and
the creative impulse: that is, the understanding of disease,
or, more precisely, disease itself as an instrument of knowledge.
That too one may derive from Nietzsche. He well knew what he

5

owed to his morbid state; and on every page he seems to instruct us
that there is no deeper knowledge without experience of disease,
and that all heightened health must be achieved by the route of
illness. This attitude might be referred to his own experience,
were it not that it shows itself so clearly bound up with the
nature of the intellectual man in general and of the creative
artist in particular; yes, with the nature of humanity and the
human being - of which last, of course, the creative artist is an
extreme manifestation. "L'humanité," says Victor Hugo, "s'affirme
par l'infirmité". A saying which frankly and proudly admits the
delicate constitution of all higher humanity and culture and their
connoisseurship in the realm of disease. Man has been called
"das kranke Tier" (the ailing animal) because of the burden of
strain and the explicit difficulty laid upon him by his position
between nature and spirit, between angel and brute. What wonder,
then, that by the approach through abnormality we have succeeded
in penetrating most deeply into the darkness of human nature; (hanee)
that the study of disease - that is to say the neuroses - has
revealed itself as a first-class technique of anthropological
research?

The literary artist should be the last person in the world
to wonder at the fact. Sooner might he be surprised that he,
considering his strong general and individual tendency, should
have so late become aware of the close sympathetic relations
which connected his own existence with psychoanalytic research

6

and the life-work of Sigmund Freud. It happened, indeed, only at
a time when Freud's achievement was no longer thought of as
merely a therapeutic method, whether recognized or disputed; when
it had long since outgrown its purely medical implications and
become a world-movement which penetrated into every field of
science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the
history of art, religion and pre-history, mythology and folk-lore,
pedagogy and what-not - thanks to the practical and constructive
zeal of experts who erected a structure of more general investi-
gation round the psychiatric and therapeutic core.

More than once, in the course of various personal reminiscences,
I have confessed to the profound, even shattering impression
made on me as a young man by my contact with the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer - to which, then, a monument was erected in
the pages of BUDDENBROOKS. Here first, in the pessimism already
well equipped on the natural-science side, I encountered the
dauntless zeal for truth which stands for the moral aspect of the
psychology of the unconscious. This metaphysics, in obscure
revolt against centuries-old beliefs, preached the primacy of the
instinct over mind and reason. It recognized the Will as the core
and the essential basis of the world, in man as in the rest of
creation; and the intellect as secondary and accidental, servant
of the Will and its pale luminary. This it preached not in
malice, not in the anti-human spirit of the anti-mind doctrines
of today, but in the stern love of truth characteristic of a
century which combated idealism out of love for the ideal. It was

7

so sincere, that 19th century, that - through the mouth of Ibsen -
it proclaimed the lie, the "life-lie", to be indispensable. Clearly
there is a vast difference whether one assents to a lie out of
sheer hatred of mind and truth, or for the sake of the spirit, in
bitter irony and anguished pessimism: Yet the distinction is
not clear to everybody today.

Freud, then, the psychologist of the unconscious, is a true
son of the century of Schopenhauer and Ibsen. He was born in the
middle of it. And how closely related is his revolution to
Schopenhauer's - not only in its content but also in its moral
attitude! His discovery of the great role played by the uncon-
scious, the Id, in the soul-life of man, challenged and
challenges classical psychology, to which the consciousness and
the psyche are one and the same. The challenge is as offensive
to classical psychology as was Schopenhauer's earlier doctrine
of the Will to the philosophical belief in reason and the intellect.
Certainly an admirer of THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA is perfectly
at home in the admirable essay which is included in Freud's NEW
INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS under the title "The
Anatomy of the Mental Personality". That essay describes the
soul-world of the unconscious, the Id, in language as strong,
and at the same time in a tone as coolly intellectual, objective
and professional, as Schopenhauer could ever have used in
describing his sinister kingdom of the Will. "The domain of the
Will," he says, "is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality;
the little that we know of it we have learned through the study

9

decade after decade as though they had just happened. They can
only be recognized as belonging to the past, devalued and robbed
of their charge of energy, by becoming conscious through the
analytic procedure." And he adds that therein lies preeminently
the healing effect of analytic treatment. We perceive accordingly
how repugnant deep analysis must be to an Ego which is intoxicated
by worship of the unconscious to the point of being in a condition
of subterranean dynamic. It is only too clear that such an Ego
must be deaf to analysis - and why the name of Freud must not be
mentioned in its hearing.

As for the Ego itself, in general, its situation is pathetic,
almost alarming. It is an alert, enlightened, prominent little
part of the Id - much as Europe is a small and livelier province
of greater Asia. The Ego is that part of the Id which became
modified by contact with the outer world. It is equipped for the
reception and preservation of stimuli. It is comparable to the
integument with which any piece of living matter will surround
itself. A very perspicuous biological image. Freud writes, indeed,
a most perspicuous prose; he is an artist of thought, like
Schopenhauer, and like him a writer of European rank. The
relation with the outer world is, he says, decisive for the Ego;
it is the Ego's task to represent the world to the Id - for its
own good! For without [näxarndxfar] the superior force in the world
without, the Id, in its blind striving towards the satisfaction
of its instincts, would not escape destruction. The Ego does
take cognizance of the outer world, it is mindful, it honorably

10

tries, to distinguish the objectively real from whatever is an
accretion from its inward sources of stimulation. It is entrusted
by the Id with the lever of action. It can move; but between the
impulse and the action it has interposed the delay of the
thought-process, During which it summons experience to its aid
and thus possesses a certain regulative advantage over the
pleasure principle which rules supreme in the unconscious, cor-
recting it by means of the principle of reality. But even so,
how feeble it is! Hemmed in between the unconscious, the outer
world and what Freud calls the super-Ego, it leads a pretty
nervous and worried existence. Its own dynamic is rather weak. It
derives its energy from the Id, and in general has to carry out the
latter's behests. It would fain regard itself as the rider and
the unconscious as the horse. But many a time it is ridden by the
unconscious, and I take leave to add what Freud's rational
morality prevents him from saying, that under some circumstances
it makes more progress by this illegitimate means.

But Freud's description of the Id and the Ego - is it not to
a hair Schopenhauer's description of the Will and the Intellect,
a translation of the latter's metaphysics into psychology? So a
man who had been initiated into the metaphysics of Schopenhauer
and had tasted in Nietzsche's pages the bitter-sweet charms of
psychology - he must needs have been filled with a sense of
recognition and familiarity when first, encouraged by those
already at home there, he entered the realms of psychoanalysis
and looked about him.

12

being and happening, in the perception of the apparently objective
and accidental as a matter of the soul's own contriving, I see
the innermost core of psychoanalytic theory.

And here there occurs to me a phrase from the pen of C.G.Jung,
an able, though somewhat ungrateful scion of the Freudian school.

It comes in his significant introduction to the Tibetan Book of
the Dead. "It is so much more direct, striking, impressive and
thus convincing," he says, "to see how it happens to me than to
see how I do it." A bold, even a fantastic statement, plainly betray-
ing the calmness with which, in a certain school of psychology,
certain things are regarded, which even Schopenhauer considered
prodigiously daring speculation. Would this unmasking of the
"happening" as in reality "doing" be conceivable without Freud?
Never! It owes him everything. It is freighted with assumptions,
It could not be understood, it could never have been written,
without all that analysis has brought to light about slips of
tongue and pen, the whole field of little blunders, the retreat
into illness, the psychology of accidents, the self-punishment
compulsions - in short, the whole bag of tricks which the uncon-
scious employs. Just as little, moreover, would that close-packed
sentence of Jung's, including its psychological premises, have
been possible without Schopenhauer's adventurous pioneering
speculation.

But it is in line with my general purpose to pause a little
longer at the sentence which I quoted from Jung. His essay is

13

an example of his fondness for employing analytic evidence to make
a bridge between Occidental thought and Oriental esoteric teaching.
Nobody has focused so sharply as he the Schopenhauer-Freud

perception that "the giver of all given conditions resides in
ourselves - a truth which, despite all evidence in the greatest
as in the smallest matters _never_ becomes conscious, though it is
only too often needful, even indispensable, that it should be."

A great and dearly-bought conversion, he thinks, is necessary
before we understand how the world is "given" by the nature of the
soul. For man's animal nature strives against seeing himself as
the maker of his own conditions. It is true that the East has
always shown itself stronger than the West in the conquest of our
animal nature; and we need not be surprised to hear that in its
wisdom it conceives even the gods among the "given conditions"
originating from the *auk* and one with her: as the light and re-
flection of the human soul. This knowledge, which according to
the Book of the Dead, one gives to the deceased to accompany him
on his way, is a paradox to the occidental mind, and conflicts
with its logical sense. For logic distinguishes between subject
and object, and refuses to make them coincide or have one proceed
from the other. True, European mysticism too has been aware of
such an attitude; but on the whole a psychological conception of
God, an idea of the godhead which is not pure condition and
absolute reality, but one with the soul itself and bound up with
it, must be intolerable to the religious sense of the Occident.

15

dry title gives no inkling of the remarkable contents. The writer
shows how the older and simpler type of biography, and in
particular the written lives of artists and authors, were nourished
and conditioned by popular legend and tradition, and thus, as
it were, assimilated the life of the subject to the conventionalized
stock-in-trade of biography in general. The result was that a
sort of sanction was imparted to their own performance, establish-
ing it as correct and genuine, and making it authentic in the
sense of "as it was in the beginning" and "as it was written". For
man sets store by recognition; he likes to find the old in the
new, the typical in the individual. On that rests all the homely
familiarity of life; which, if it showed itself as entirely new,
unique and individual, with no hope of anything known and accepted,
could only bewilder and alarm him. - The question, then, which
is raised by the essay, is this: can any line be sharply and
precisely drawn between the formal stock-in-trade of legendary
biography and the characteristics of a single personality - in
other words, between the typical and the individual? A question
negatives as soon as stated. For actually life is a mingling of
conventional and individual elements; a weaving in which, as it
were, the individual merely stands out from the conventional
pattern. Much that is extra-personal, much unconscious identifi-
cation, much that is formal and schematic, is none the less
decisive in the experience not only of the artist but of the human
being in general. "Many of us," says the writer of the article,

16

"'live' even today a biographical type, the lot in life of a given class or rank or calling. The Freedom in the shaping of the human being's life is obviously connected with that bond which we term 'lived vita'."

The essay in question indicates the precise point at which the psychological interest passes over into the mythical. It makes clear that the typical is actually the mythical, and that one may as well say "lived myth" as "lived life". The mythical interest is as native to psychoanalysis as the psychological interest is to the creative artist. Its penetration back into the childhood of the individual soul is at the same time a penetration back into the childhood of mankind, into the primitive and the myth. Freud himself has told us that all natural science, medicine and psychotherapy were for him a life-long journey found and back to his youthful passion for the history of mankind, the origins of religion and morality, an interest which, at the height of his career, burst out to such magnificent effect in TOTEM AND TABOO. The word *Tiefenpsychologie* (deep psychology) has a temporal significance: the primitive depths of the human soul are likewise primitive time. They are those profound time-sources where the myth has its home and shapes the primeval forms and norms of life. For the myth is the basis of life. It is the timeless outline, the sacred formula into which life flows and reproduces its own traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical, that is an epoch in his life; it brings a curious heightening of his

17

artist temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping
powers, which otherwise occurs much later on. For while in the
life of the race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in
the life of the individual it is a late and mature one. What is
gained is an insight into the higher truth depicted in the
actual; a blithe and smiling knowledge of the eternal, the ever-
existent, the authentic. It is a knowledge of the outline, the
plan, in which and by which the supposed individual lives; an
understanding of his naive belief in himself as unique in space
and time, and of the extent to which his life is but formula and
repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod in
it before him. His character is a mythical role, which the actor
just emerged from the depths into the light plays in the illusion
that it is his own and unique; that he, as it were, has invented
it himself. He plays it with a dignity and sure touch, the
source of which is not his supposed unique individuality in time
and space; rather he creates them out of his profounder
consciousness, in order that something which was once founded and
legitimized shall again be represented, worthily or unworthily,
for good or ill, but in any case conducting itself flawlessly
according to the pattern. Actually, if his existence did consist
merely in the unique and the present, he would not know how to
conduct himself at all. He would be confused, helpless, embar-
rassed, unstable in his own attitude towards himself; he would
not know which foot to put foremost or what sort of face to put
on. All unconsciously his dignity and sure touch reside in the
fact that with him something timeless has once more come to light

18

and achieved presentness. A mythical value is added to an otherwise
poor and valueless single character; it is native worth, because
its origin lies in the unconscious.

Such is the gaze which the mythically oriented artist bends
upon the phenomena about him. It is an ironically superior gaze,
as you can see; for the mythical knowledge resides only in the
gazer and not in that at which he gazes. But suppose that the
mythical point of view could become subjective; that it could
pass over into the active Ego and become conscious there, proudly
and darkly, yet with joy, of its recurrence and typical character.
Suppose it could celebrate its rôle and realize its value
exclusively in the knowledge that it was a fresh incarnation of
the traditional upon earth. One might say that such a phenomenon
could be the "lived myth"; nor should we think that it is anything
novel or unknown. Life in the myth, life as a sacred represen-
tation, is a historical form of life, for the man of antiquity
lived thus. Let me take as an instance the figure of the Egyptian
Cleopatra, which is Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite in person. Bachofen,
in his description of the cult of Bacchus, the Dionysiac
religion, regards the Egyptian queen as the consummate picture
of a Dionysiac stimula; he thinks, with Plutarch, that it was
far more her erotic and intellectual culture than her physical
charms that entitled her to represent the female as developed
into the embodiment of Aphrodite. But her nature as Aphrodite,
her role of Hathor-Isis, is not only objective, not only a
critical treatment of her by Plutarch or Bachofen. It was the

19

content of her subjective existence as well. She lived the part.
This we see by the manner of her death: she is supposed to have
killed herself by laying an asp upon her bosom. Sаххат-if
Qisopatra's death was an exilendxronosmenax. But the snake was
the familiar of Ishtar, the Egyptian Isis, who is represented
clad in a scaly garment. Also there exists a statue of Ishtar
holding a snake to her bosom. So that if Cleopatra's death was
as legend represents, the manner of it was a manifestation of her
mythical Ego. Moreover, did she not adopt the falcon hood of
the goddess Isis, and adorn herself with the insignia of Hathor,
the cow's horns with the crescent moon between? And name her two
children by Mark Antony Heldos and Selene? No doubt she was a
very significant figure indeed - significant in the ancient
sense that she was well aware who she was and in whose footsteps
she trod.

The Ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself was
different from our own: less exclusive, less sharply defined. It
was, as it were, open behind; it received much from the past and
by repeating it gave it presentness. The Spanish scholar Ortega y
Gasset puts it that the man of antiquity, before he did anything,
took a step backwards, like a bull-fighter who leaps back to
deliver the mortal thrust. He searched the past for a mould,
into which he might slip as into a diving-bell, and being thus at
once disguised and protected might rush upon his immediate
problem. Thus his life was in a sense an animation and reanimation,
it was an archaizing attitude. But just this life as reanimation

20

it is, that is the life as myth. Alexander walked in the foot-
steps of Miltiades; the ancient biographers of Caesar were
convinced, rightly or wrongly, that he took Alexander as his
prototype. But such imitation meant far more than we mean by
the word today. It was a mythical identification, peculiarly
familiar to antiquity; but it is operative far into modern times,
and at all times it is psychically possible. How often have we
not been told that the figure of Napoleon was cast in the classic
mould! He regretted that the mental atmosphere of his time
forbade him to give himself out as Jupiter Ammon, in imitation of
Alexander. But we need not doubt that - at least at the period
of his Eastern conquests - he mythically confounded himself
with Alexander; while after he turned his face westwards he is
said to have declared: "I am Charlemagne." Just that. Not "I
am like Charlemagne" or my situation is like Charlemagne's", but
quite simply "I am Charlemagne." That is the formula of the myth.

Life, then - at any rate significant life - was in ancient
times the reconstitution of the myth in flesh and blood; it
referred to and appealed to the myth. Only through it, through
reference to the past, could it approve itself as genuine and
significant. The myth is the legitimization of life. Only through
it and in it does life find self-awareness, sanction, consecration.
Cleopatra fulfilled her Aphrodite function even unto death; can
one die more meritoriously or significantly than in the cele-
bration of the myth?

21

Let us consider for a moment this word "celebrate", which I
have used. It is a pardonable, even a justifiable usage, For life
in the myth, life, so to speak, in quotation, is a kind of
celebration, in that it is a making present of the past; it becomes
a religious act, the performance by a celebrant of a prescribed
procedure; it becomes a feast. For the feast is an anniversary, a
renewal of the past in the present. Every Christmas the world-
saving Babe is born again on earth, to suffer, to die and to
arise. The feast is the abrogation of time; it is a procedure, a
solemn narrative, told conformably to an immemorial pattern; the
events in it take place not for the first time but ceremonially,
according to the prototype. It achieves presentness as feasts do,
recurring in time with their phases and hours following on each
other as they did in the original occurrence. In antiquity each
feast was essentially a dramatic performance, a mask. It was
a scenic reproduction, with priests as actors, of stories about
the gods - as for instance the life and sufferings of Osiris. The
Christian Middle Ages had their mystery play, with heaven and
earth and the torments of hell, as it is still appears in Goethe's
Faust. They had their carnival farce, their folk-mime. The
artist eye has its mythical slant upon life, which makes it look
like a farce, like a theatrical performance of a prescribed feast,
like a Punch and Judy epic, wherein mythical character puppets
reel off a plot abiding in past time and now present again in jest.
All that is needed is that what I have called the artist's

22

mythical slant upon life should pass over and become xxfaxbook and
subjective in the performers themselves, as a festal and mythical
consciousness of the play and their own roles in it. Then there
would result a grotesque epic such as that in the first volume of the
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS series, particularly in the chapter
called the Great Hoaxing. There a mythical recurrent farce is
played out, tragically, by persons who well know in whose steps
they tread: by Isaac, Jacob and Esau. They act the cruel and
ludicrous story of how Esau the Red is led by the nose and
cheated of his birthright, to the huge delight of all the onlookers.
Joseph too is the other just such another celebrant of
life. With charming mythological focus, he enacts in his
own person the Tammuz-Osiris myth, "bringing to pass" anew the
story of the mangled, buried and arisen god, playing his festival
game with that which mysteriously and secretly shapes life out of
its own depths - the unconscious. The esoteric doctrine of the
psychologist and metaphysician, that the soul is the giver of all
given conditions, becomes, as Joseph plays it, easy, sportive,
gay. It is like a consummately artistic performance by a fencer
or juggler. It reaches down in him to his infantile nature - and
here, in the word "infantile", which I have used, we see how
closely, despite seeming digressions, we have actually kept to
the subject of this evening's lecture.

Infantilism - in other words regression to childhood - what
a role this genuinely psychoanalytic element plays in all our
lives! What a large share it has in shaping the lot of a human

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being: It operates, indeed, in just the way I have described, as
mythical identification, as survival, as a treading in footprints
already made. The bond with the father, the imitation of the
father, the transference to father-substitute images of a higher
and more developed type - how these infantile traits work upon
the life of the individual to stamp and shape it! I use the word
shape; for to me, in all seriousness, the happiest, most pleasurable
element of what we call education (Bildung), the shaping of the
human being, is just this powerful influence of admiration and
love, this childish identification with a father-image elected out
of profound affinity. The artist in particular, a passionately
childlike and play-possessed being, can tell us of the mysterious,
yet after all obvious effect of such infantile imitation upon his
own life.

The Joseph of the novel is an artist, in that he plays; that
is to say, he plays with his *imitatio dei* upon the unconscious
string. And I myself know not how to express the feelings which
possess me - something like a joyful sense of divination of the
future - when I indulge in this encouragement of the unconscious
to play, to make itself fruitful in a serious production, in a
narrational meeting of psychology and myth, which is at the same
time a celebration of the meeting between creation and analysis.

And now this word "future". (I have used it in the title of
my address, because) it is this idea, the idea of the future, which
I instinctively like best to connect with the name of Freud. But
even as I speak I have been wondering to myself whether I have

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not been guilty of a cause of confusion. Perhaps, so far as I have gone, a better title might have been say, Freud and the Myth. And yet I rather cling to the other combination; I would like to justify it and make clear its relation to what I have thus far said. I make bold to believe that in that novel, so akin to the Freudian world, making as it does the light of psychology play upon the myth, there lie hidden germs and components of a new and emerging sense of our humanity. No less firmly do I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud's life-work the corner-stone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today: the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity. This physicianly psychologist will, I make no doubt at all, be honoured as the path-finder to a new humanism of the future, which we dimly divine and which will have learned much that earlier humanisms knew not of. It will be a humanism standing in a different relation to the powers of the lower world, the Unconscious, the Id: a relation freer, blither, productive of a riper art than any possible in our neurotic, fear-ridden, hate-ridden world. Freud is of the opinion that the significance of psychoanalysis as a science of the unconscious will in the future far surpass its value as a therapeutic method. But even as a science of the unconscious it is still a curative method, a supra-individual one, and in the grand style. Call that, if you like, a poet's dream. But after all, the thought is not unthinkable, that the resolution of our great fear and our great hate, their conversion

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into a different relation to the unconscious, something more like
the artist's attitude, more ironic and yet not necessarily
mocking - may one day be the healing result of this very science.

The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it
a cheery scepticism has come into the world, a doubt which unmasks
all the little schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once
roused and on the alert, this cannot be put to sleep again. It
will infiltrate life; will undermine its crude naïveté, take from
it the burden of its own ignorance, de-emotionalize it, as it
were. It may inculcate a taste for understatement, as the English
call it; for the deflated rather than the inflated word; may breed
a cult which gets its effects by moderation, by modesty. Modesty!
Bescheidenheit! What a beautiful word! In the German it had
originally to do with knowing, and only later got its present
meaning of modestia, moderatio. Modesty, coming out of knowledge -
let us hope this may be the fundamental temper of that more cheer-
fully objective and peaceful world which the science of the
unconscious may be called to usher in.

Its mingling of the pioneering with the physicianly spirit
justifies such a hope. Freud once called his theory of dreams
"a bit of scientific new-found-land won from superstition and
mysticism." The word "won" expresses the pioneering spirit and
significance of his work. "Where Id was shall be Ego," he
pithily says. And he himself calls psychoanalytic work a
cultural labour comparable to the draining of the Zuyder Zee.
Thus finally the traits of this venerable man merge into the

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lineaments of the grey-haired Faust, whose spirit urged him
"to shut the imperious sea from the shore away,
set narrower bounds to the wide water's waste.

Then open I to many millions space
where they may live, not safe-secure, but free
and active. Such a busy swarming I would see,
standing amid free folk on a free soil."

The free folk are the people of a future freed from fear and
hate and ripe for peace.