September 14, 1915 Dornach

YESTERDAY I inserted a talk on psychoanalysis into this lecture series, since that subject is of concern to all of us at the moment because of the case at hand. You will have noticed that I first characterized the psychoanalytic view as distinguishing between consciousness and the unconscious in our inner life. I then went on to describe, if only briefly, how the psychoanalytic point of view as a whole is swimming in sexuality, and you could see that with this second aspect, an extremely unfortunate (you might even say “terrible”) element has entered our culture. This points to something characteristic of current intellectual trends in general.

There can be no doubt that in distinguishing an unconscious that exists alongside the conscious mind, psychoanalysis has made a legitimate contribution to our culture. We can look at it like this: These people are on the right track in thinking that the human soul goes beyond what our ordinary consciousness encompasses. However, these same people have also taken their materialism to extremes. It has done more than engulf their thinking, which is what happened in the case of what is now erroneously known as monism. The materialism of the psychoanalysts, however, also pulls the lower human drives into their theory and incorporates them into it. As a result, sexual drives, the most subjective element possible, become the motivating impulse in scientific activity.

We must look particularly closely at such modern cultural phenomena, because they show us that something independent of human individuals is compelling even the crassest materialists among us to recognize a higher spiritual element than the one we are immediately aware of. After all, the followers of Freud are deeply rooted in materialism, in their intellect as well as their instincts; yet the objective world compels even them to investigate something beyond the scope of ordinary consciousness. That is the objective side of the matter.

On the other hand, the subjective aspect is that these people are so tangled up in materialism that their lowest and most subjective drives are immediately drawn into the business of formulating their outlook on life. That is part and parcel of materialism just as much as the left hand belongs to the right hand or the left eye to the right eye. And tumbling right down into the very lowest human drives is the inevitable consequence of getting stuck in materialism if people really let themselves go.

However, my friends, we can really understand this way of looking at the world only if we can get to the bottom of many a riddle of the world order. The dangerous thing about philosophies like psychoanalysis is that people are on the right track, but drag their impure instincts into what is true. It is much less harmful when impure instincts are incorporated into something completely erroneous than it is when they are incorporated into a partial truth. And the truth in the psychoanalytic view lies in its recognition of the fact that so much of what is at work in human life is unconscious, truly unconscious. That is where psychoanalysts are on the right track and have come upon many things that are true and correct.

Let us follow up how psychoanalysts stumble onto the right track. In the book I told you about yesterday, the head of the psychoanalytic school of thought attempts to explain certain customs among primitive people on the basis of certain psychoanalytic theories. He does so in accordance with connections he assumes to exist between early childhood and neurotic conditions later in life.

We saw yesterday how the element of sexuality plays into these theories. In his book Totem and Taboo, in the essay “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,” Freud compares some of the views and ideas of primitive people with certain infantile characteristics of civilized human beings that manifest in neuroses, in certain types of nervous or psychological disorders. [ Note 1 ] From what we discussed yesterday, you will recall that psychoanalysts explain many things as the result of impulses that affect people in the early years of their life and then retreat to islands in these people's psyche where they work on in the unconscious. This means that infantile psychological activity is still going on in civilized adults. According to this view, neurotics, or at least a certain type of neurotics, are walking around at age forty with psyches in which earliest childhood experiences, infantile experiences, are still especially influential.

Freud then compares certain primitive beliefs with the experience of neurosis. For example, he says:

A Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief's breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die. [ Note 2 ]