F psychoanalysis it may be said

literally, at least in one sense, that it is such stuff as dreams are made of. Some of us may be tempted to expand the sense of stuff to the significance of stuff and nonsense. But it is more moderate, and more exact, to say that this new scientific notion, like many such notions, divides itself into a smaller element, which may in a more serious sense be called stuff, and a much larger element which might more correctly be called stuffing. Psychoanalysis can no longer be dismissed as a fad; it has risen to the dignity of a fashion, and possesses all that moral authority and intellectual finality which we associate with a particular pattern of hats or whiskers. It stands now in the open street, visible to the man in the street, like some florid and magnificent tailor's dummy outside a tailor's shop. And it is borne in upon me, as a humble passer-by, that it is time that somebody kicked the stuffing out of it.1

a psychoanalyst? The psychological

professor might appear to me in a dream, not to say a nightmare, and my whole life might be poisoned by obstructed passion and the sense of opportunities lost. It is far better to yield to the natural nervous stimulus, and liberate the natural human impulse, which may be done either by doubling up suddenly with laughter at the sight of the professor, or possibly by doubling the professor up, with some outward gesture appropriate to the occasion. But these suggestions may seem to some to be a little exaggerated, and even to savor of levity; so I will return to my main object in this essay-an object which, like the professor's, is quite serious, though perhaps not so solemn.

In current controversy the most sincere and convinced Darwinians are those who do not know what Darwinism is; and doubtless many are already practising psychoanalysis, with the utmost confidence and commercial success, in a similar condition of nescience about its nature. But in neither case, curiously enough, is it necessarily our first duty to decide what the word means or ought to mean. We are actually more concerned with the wrong use of such names and things than with the right use of them. The right use of them is a comparatively thin and theoretic

business, quite logical and legitimate in its place, but confined in that place to a very small company of competent specialists. The wrong use of them is a huge historical event, a revolution, a thing affecting thousands. The story of the South Sea Bubble is not told by tracing something that happened in an island in the South Seas. The important thing was not any faroff fact, but the central and civilized fable or delusion. Indeed, this is just as true when the excitement is not altogether a delusion. A man might live for a long time unperturbed by popular excitement about polar expeditions if he had taken the precaution of living at the north pole. But, in any case, a theory is only a thought, while a fashion is a fact. If certain things have really taken hold of the centers of civilization, they play quite as much a part in history whether their ultimate origin is a misapprehension or no. If certain mahatmas are being worshiped by everybody of importance in Paris and London, it is in practice a lesser matter whether they are suspected of heresy in the interior of Tibet. And if certain society dances, admittedly of African origin, are regarded as graceful and alluring by the aristocrats of Europe and America, it will make little difference that they would be regarded as obscene and degrading by the very cannibals of Africa.

The truth is that the nucleus of genuine psychological study has little or nothing to do with the fashion of psychoanalysis, just as the nucleus of genuine biological study had very little to do with the pantomime popularity of the missing link. In so far as that strictly scientific science really does exist, it has amid its high merits

certain marks which unfit it to be a fashion of this kind; just as a really subtle medical diagnosis could never express itself in a patent medicine. It has one mark, especially, which I have described more fully in another article, but which is fatal to it as a fashion. It is a characteristic of sincere scientific speculation that it cannot at any given moment be applied generally to public affairs except with the utmost caution and the most copious dilutions of common sense. This is because of the very nature of scientific inquiry, which, even when it does advance, advances by a sort of self-correcting curve that often brings it back almost to the place where it began. Considered as a process, it may be only fulfilling itself; but considered as a practical answer to a problem, it may come near to contradicting itself. To take this case of psychology in its most elementary example, science might incline to the view that counting does send a man to sleep; and then science might explain this by the fact that the first numerals are short words, or are very familiar and flowing ones, and science would be bound to add that these first numbers are very few, that the opposite examples are infinitely more numerous (the infinity being literal), that the expression "one thousand five hundred and ninety-seven" is not strictly speaking a monosyllable, and that few of us are familiar with the habit of asking for one hundred and seventy-three hats or two hundred and seventeen railway tickets. So science, following the same line of logic, would probably begin by telling us to count and end by telling us not to count. Similarly she would probably find special deflections in every special variation of it, as in

the common advice to the sleepless to count the sheep climbing a fence and falling into a ditch, or to count the society ladies going to call on a psychoanalyst.

Hence I am not concerned to deny that somewhere in the core of this craze, or more probably quite remote from it, there is some careful and solid work being done in the testing of memory, subconsciousness, and association of ideas. But exactly in so far as it is in this sense a fact, it is incapable of becoming in this sense a fashion. Nor do I deny, as will be seen later, that even the fashion itself is in some ways a healthy reaction against things even more unhealthy than itself. But for the moment I am writing of the only psychoanalysis of which everybody is talking; I might say of the only psychoanalysis of which anybody has heard. This is a reality, this is a thing of increasingly general experience, and this threatens to be a nonsensical nuisance and nothing else.

Before men analyze the uses of the unconscious mind, it may, perhaps, be well for them to discover the use of the mind; and before we come in this connection to any consideration of results, it may be well to say a word about methods. Now, the passages most eagerly quoted, from the thinkers most ardently admired, in this school of philosophy, are generally enough to show that whether or no they could theorize, they certainly could not think. One of them is admired and quoted for his theory of the character of Hamlet; according to which Hamlet not only hated his uncle (which even a mere literary critic, with no scientific training, might possibly be able to conjecture), but that he also secretly

hated his father simply for loving his mother. I know not what one is expected to do with this sort of thing except laugh, unless it be urged that it is inhumane to laugh at lunatics. The professor might just as well reconstruct the real, but rigidly concealed, character of Ariel, deducing it from the observed effects of hypnotism as probably practised by Sycorax. He might as well interpret the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" by psychoanalyzing the dreams of Moth and Cobweb. Few of us, I fancy, wish to be entangled in such cobwebs. Most of us would be decidedly relieved if Puck, another promising subject for psychoanalysis, would come with his broom to sweep such dust, not to say dirt, behind the door.

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There is another great phrase in the same play which will probably recur to the mind of any critic who thinks that criticism has any connection with common sense. "The best in this kind are but shadows," and Hamlet is only a gigantic shadow, even if he be the best in this kind. That a professor should earnestly attempt to dissect a shadow, to apply his scalpel to the inmost organs of a shadow, and show the hidden deformities of a shadow, is a sort of nightmare of unreality. It is a waking dream more monstrously incomprehensible than any of the sleeping dreams such doctors seek to comprehend. Even an unscientific scribbler may be permitted, as I say, to form his own opinion upon such a way of forming any opinions. He may be legitimately alarmed at the notion of such doctors applying their test to life as they apply it to literature. Another of

them noted some slip of the pen by a man who was putting off an unpleasant interview on the plea of "unforeseen difficulties" or some such phrase, and who found he had written "foreseen" instead of "unforeseen." This is gravely quoted as a proof of the existence and grand vigilant veracity of the great unconscious mind, which had suddenly snatched the pen from his hand and crossed out the negative prefix. In that case we can only say that the unconscious mind must be as bad a logician as the professor who is expounding it. For what the man really knew, in his conscience, was not that he had foreseen difficulties and neglected to remove them, but that he was going to tell a thumping lie in saying there were any difficulties at all.

But here again who can take such things seriously for a moment, or the judgment of anybody who thinks them serious? What does it matter how many facts the scientific specialist has collected, if these are the sort of facts he collects, and this is the sort of way he argues on them? The suggestion opens up a rather terrifying interpretation of the morality of misprints or clerical errors. Is any man who hastily writes "shooting peasants" when he means "shooting pheasants" to be looked on as a homicidal maniac? Is any careless or short-sighted person who puts "hat" instead of "had" to be treated as a sort of mad hatter, instead of a sane man momentarily talking through his hat? A misprint famous in Fleet Street made Mr. Gladstone say, "My honorable friend shaves his head" instead of "shakes his head"; was the printer a monomaniac not to be trusted with a razor? I myself have left out the second r in

"correspondent" in writing hastily about a respectable Nonconformist gentleman, so that it nearly came out in print as "co-respondent." Is it to be inferred that my subconscious mind was surging with a dreadful knowledge of his profligate life, or that the terrible truth ran through all my dreams, in which the Nonconformist was perpetually figuring in a dance of dissolute love-affairs and scandalous escapades? I give these merely as examples of an extravagant laxity in the mere process of reasoning, apart from its results; but we find very much the same untrustworthy logic and unconscious humor when we come to the results themselves.

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The mark of this sort of psychoanalyst is that he is always talking about complexes, and seems never to have heard of complexity. The first thing to note about the movement as a whole is that it is one of a historic series of such movements, which may be called the insane simplifications. Each of them took not so much a halftruth as a hundredth part of a truth, and then offered it not merely as something, but as everything. Having never done anything except split hairs, it hangs the whole world on a single

hair.

Perhaps the first forerunners of this modern type were the Calvinists, who dug out the deep and most mysterious matter of divine foreknowledge, and forced it to the destruction of every other divine attribute; and their modern descendants, the determinists, who so denied all choice as to make it impossible even to choose what they called truth in preference to what they called falsehood. But a more recog

nizable prototype was the disciple of the Utilitarians, who paraded their formula of universal self-interest with the same air of ruthless logic, though indeed the point was almost as verbal as a pun. Indeed, the Utilitarians used the word "self" very much as the psychoanalysts use the word "sex." The Calvinists, the Utilitarians, and all such men of one idea were preeminently intellectual bullies.

Their object in using these harsh and insufficient terms was a notion of making our flesh creep by giving ugly names to natural or ordinary things. It is obvious that the fulfilment of any ideal can be found only in a conscious soul, that is, in a self; and it tickled their vanity to make a sort of savage pun and call this selfishness. But it is obvious that if we so distend the meaning of a word as to say a man is self-indulgent when he wants to be burned alive, we are merely giving an illogical shock by using a bad word for what is better expressed in better words. In the same way it is obvious that if we spread an alleged atmosphere of sex over all natural expansion towards beauty and pleasure, we can really do it only by taking all the sting out of the word "sex," as the other took all the sting out of the word "self." In both cases the intellectual pleasure is on about the same level as that of a school-boy who frightens his little sisters by talking like an ogre about blood when he has cut his finger.

This same irrationality, which consists in taking what is at best a very minute, obscure, and doubtful part of the truth, and blazoning it abroad as the one all-sufficing truth, can be seen in the whole psychoanalytical business about the sexual character of all sorts of non-sexual affections. That the

sexual instinct is very strong is selfevident; and that it is often difficult to say how much it may faintly color other things is quite equally selfevident. But the way in which some psychoanalysts talk about the mothercomplex would certainly indicate that a mother is rather too complex a thing for their intellects to analyze. Their tone amounts to the implication, not so much that there is such a thing as the sex-instinct, as that there is no such thing as the maternal instinct. On this theory a hen must be entirely indifferent to pullets and exclusively interested in cockerels. The male swallow or sparrow, when bringing food to the family nest, doubtless stipulates that it shall be distributed first to the female birds, while the mother promptly proceeds to reverse the process. These examples appear absurd, but they are not an atom more absurd, to any one with any experience of human families, than the implication that mothers do not care much about daughters or that fathers never concentrate on sons. The fact is that the general parental feeling, which is the one force running through nature, is also by far the most powerful and determining force running through human nature, in this connection; and all we can put to balance it, in the realities of experience and common sense, is that there may be, under certain conditions, a sort of shadow of sex sentiment mingling with the romance of any affection in the perfectly innocent and even frivolous sense of an interest in the other sex. The proportions of it are imperceptible and probably invisibly small, but it is the whole point of such monomaniac schools of thought that they care nothing whatever about propor