“If you do not make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.” “In each of us there is another, whom we do not know.” These are both Jung quotes that are deeply Freudian. Karen the Psychoanalyst/MD is a woman who defines herself as being part of the heritage of Freud, more so than she is of other thinkers, such as Alfred Adler, who she seems rather similar to in this book (the application of psychoanalysis to sociology), and she’s doesn’t mention Carly so much—there are a lot of people who are more interested in sex and everyday neurosis (F) than religion and such and other cultures (J), and anyway, respectfully, especially at the time and even today, if you consider what people do and what they’re like rather than what they say, Siggy is the strong horse and Carly the dark horse, and sometimes people prefer the strong horse, right.

Of course, psychoanalysis is totally open to criticism of being elitist and overly rationalistic, you know—eg the thing about there being rational and irrational fear, whereas I’m telling you that life is always the way it is and we never need to be afraid if we but knew something beyond the mind, right. But the basic insight of psychoanalysis, that there is the unconscious, although it can have the ring of a good-sounding-thing-from-long-ago, that nobody likes as much as they pretend to or at least gets any use out of—it is still a good idea, the unconscious. If you believe that life gives us what we ask for—“ask and it is given”—that explains why people get things they don’t think that they asked for. They don’t understand what they have desired.

…. Freudians are often curious in that in this formal and therefore rather strange, in this context, way, they tell us that we should feel our feelings—that it’s safe to feel, you know. (And that if there’s something unsafe, it’s Not feeling your feelings.) Stylistically they tend to be a little ambivalent about their message, but.

…. Despite the title, I guess you could say that it is more personal than social, so it is more like Freud than Adler.

I suppose you could also see the ‘basic anxiety’ (and hostility) as the ‘faith’ if you like, that the world is an unsafe place.

…. ‘Climbing a tree for its own sake, vs doing it to escape an animal.’ ~ ‘normal’ (in the psychoanalytic sense) vs neurotic; “I like to be alone”, vs “I’m afraid to be with other people”~ “I like to be with people” vs “I’m afraid to be alone”; etc.

…. Aside from a few rather obvious marks of age—the issue of language and the one of exclusion—and the whole issue of analysis rather than simply feeling better: aside from those things, it can be surprising how well the old Freudians could understand things, the neuroses both of the man of affection, and the man who has turned from affection to power. Many of the basic points hold up pretty well. There is a sort of humiliating of others in prestige-seeking, for example, although it’s often masked and piously wished-away, you know. I know that I myself had this attitude like: you show me something good about yourself first, and then I won’t have to hurt myself by making fun of you to myself! I don’t want to have to kill myself, dammit! Don’t make me do it!…. ~That’s not the way, you know.

…. What she writes about neurotic guilt feelings—shame, if you like—is good. It’s fear of the self. (It’s very church-y.) It leads either to hypocrisy, insincerity—Oh, I am shit; I am shit…. How dare you say I could go to a meeting! I am the Czar of America! I will not stand for this!—or, in what is almost ‘sincere’ in a demonic way, yet almost the same thing, perhaps, one makes the most fantastic and weird accusations against oneself (and believes them): ‘I am Hitler; I crucified Christ; I must be annihilated for the sake of mankind; I am the Devil, and I must rule over Hell’—and that way lies suicide, obviously.

…. A lot of people are afraid of disagreeing with their parents over something that happened when they were fifty and the parent eighty, twenty years later, when they’re seventy, and the parent is dead. They’re still afraid, and totally in denial about that fact. They’ll literally die before they feel they’re old enough to say, “I’m grown now; I don’t need to be afraid.”

…. It’s hard not to bring to mind the generic Christian memoirist who, instead of making an honorable attempt to overcome the misery of life—it is true that the “acceptance” of suffering, properly done, can be understood, if one is inclined, to the fighting of a sort of long war, though one is always secure in the castle along the way—snuggles up to suffering and marries it, right. One can be optimistic about suffering not because it happens to be in the world, but because suffering in particular is something one finds useful—the sick bed of the mind, out of which one does not go, even for a moment, does not produce, indeed, strength, but it can lead to a sort of sense of importance. Most people aren’t sufficiently pilloried by life to feel, at the bottom, that they are not important, but often they don’t try to fight the play-battle of life, and feel that others have to fulfill the sense of importance they need in exchange for their weakness.

And, of course, all this is often considered proper, and even can be a jealously guarded state of affairs, to the point of the sick coming out of their beds being resented by the invalids who play at being the kings of the earth, no lie.

…. “incompatible strivings”: the prayers that no god can satisfy….

…. “Genuine surrender to a person or cause is a manifestation of inner strength; masochistic surrender is ultimately a manifestation of weakness.”

…. It’s a medium good book. If I could write a book with this ability to analyze that was a little more solutions-oriented than problem-centered, I would be proud. I would be a friend. Of course, I’m still my friend, you know. But you know what I mean.

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It's sad that the most insightful book on psychology is one of the most obscure. ( )

Charlotte Towle: Social Service Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Jun., 1937
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30010860

Kimball Young: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 4, Jan., 1938
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2768494