Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis

THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL LIBRARY No. 5 ESSAYS IN APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS BY ERNEST JONES, M. D. PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL ASSOCIATION AND OF THE BRITISH PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL SOCIETY THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO - ANALYTICAL PRESS LONDON MCMXXIII VIENNA COPYRIGHT 1923 CONTENTS THE ANNUNCIATION BY SIMONE MARTINI Frontispiece PAGE PREFACE vii CHAPTER I A Psycho-Analytic Study of Hamlet i CHAPTER II On 4 Dying Together, with Special reference to Heinrich von Kleists Suicide 99 CHAPTER ffl An Unusual Case of Dying Together. 106 CHAPTER IV The Symbolic Significance of Salt in Folklore and Superstition 112 CHAPTER V The God Complex. The Belief that One is God, and the Resulting Character Traits 204 CHAPTER VI The Influence of Andrea del Sartos Wife on his Art. 227 CHAPTER VII The Case of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland 245 CHAPTER VIII The Madonnas Conception through the Ear. A Con tribution to the Relation between Aesthetics and Religion 261 CHAPTER IX War and Individual Psychology 360 t CHAPTER X War and Sublimation 381 CHAPTER XI PAGE A Linguistic Factor in English Characterology 391 CHAPTER XII The Island of Ireland. A Psycho-Analytical Contribution to Political Psychology 398 CHAPTER XIII A Psycho-Analytic Study of the Holy Ghost 415 INDEX 431 PREFACE One fifth only of this book has previously been published in English. It has all been revised and the greater part largely re-written. The light which psycho-analysis is capable of throwing on the deeper problems of human thought and conduct is only beginning to be appreciated. The field over which it can be applied is almost indefinitely large. The parts touched on in the present volume constitute of course only a selection, yet they are sufficiently diverse political psychology, artistic and literary creation, national and indiv idual characterology, and the study of superstition, history, religion, and folk-lore. E. J. December 1922. ESSAYS IN APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS CHAPTER I A PSYCHO-ANALYTIC STUDY OF HAMLET 1 I PSYCHOLOGISTS have as yet devoted relatively little attention to individual analytic study of genius and of artistic creativeness, and have mainly confined themselves to observations of a general order. They seem to share the shyness or even aversion displayed by the world at large against too searching an analysis of a thing of beauty, the feeling expressed in Keats lines on the pris matic study of the rainbow. The fear that beauty may vanish under too scrutinizing a gaze, and with it our pleasure, is, however, only in part justified much depends on the nature of the pleasure and on the attitude of the analyst. Experience has shewn that intellectual appreciation in particular is only heightened by understanding, and to further this is one of the recognised social functions of the critic. Since, moreover, intellectual appreciation com prises an important part of the higher forms of aesthetic 1 This chapter is founded on an essay which appeared in the American Journal of Psychology, January 1910, an enlarged version of which was published in German as Heft 10 of the Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde under the name Das Problem des Hamlet und der Oedipus-Komplex, 1911. 1 2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED PSYCHO-ANALYSIS appreciation, a deepened understanding can but increase this also. It has been found that with poetic creations this critical procedure cannot halt at the work of art itself to isolate this from its creator is to impose artificial limits to our understanding of it. As Masson, 1 in defending his biographical analysis of Shakespeare, justly says not till every poem has been, as it were, chased up to the moment of its organic origin, and resolved into the mood or intention, or constitutional reverie, out of which it sprang, will its import be adequately felt or understood.