ABSTRACT
Character is the fixed indi vidual form of a human being. Since this form is compoun ded of body and mind, a general char ac ter o logy must teach the signi fic ance of both phys ical and psychic features. The enig matic oneness of the living organ ism has as its corol lary the fact that bodily traits are not merely phys ical, nor mental traits merely psychic. The continu ity of nature knows nothing of those anti thet ical distinc tions which the human intel lect is forced to set up as aids to under stand ing. The distinc tion between mind and body is an arti fi cial dicho tomy, an act
of discrim in a tion based far more on the pecu li ar ity of intel lec tual cogni tion than on the nature of things. In fact, so intim ate is the inter ming ling of bodily and psychic traits that not only can we draw far-reach ing infer ences as to the consti tu tion of the psyche from the consti tu tion of the body, but we can also infer from psychic pecu li ar it ies the corres pond ing bodily charac ter ist ics. It is true that the latter process is far more diffi cult, not because the body is less influ enced by the psyche than the psyche by the body, but
for quite another reason. In taking the psyche as our start ing-point, we work from the relat ively unknown to the known; while in the oppos ite case we have the advant age of start ing from some thing known, that is, from the visible body. Despite all the psycho logy we think we possess today, the psyche is still infin itely more obscure to us than the visible surface of the body. The psyche is still a foreign, barely explored country of which we have only indir ect know ledge, medi ated by conscious func tions that are open to almost endless possib il it ies of decep tion. This being so, it seems safer to proceed from outside inwards, from the
known to the unknown, from the body to the psyche. Thus all attempts at char ac ter o logy have started from the outside world; astro logy, in ancient times, even started from inter stel lar space in order to arrive at those lines of fate whose begin nings lie in the human heart. To the same class of inter preta tions from outward signs belong palm istry, Gall’s phren o logy, Lavater’s physiognomy, and-more recently-graph o logy, Kretschmer’s physiological types, and Rorschach’s klexo graphic method. As we can see, there are any number of paths leading from outside inwards, from the phys ical to the psychic, and it is neces sary that research should follow this direc tion until the element ary psychic facts are estab lished with suffi cient certainty. But once having estab lished these facts, we can reverse the proced ure. We can then put the ques tion: What are the bodily correl at ives of a given psychic condi tion? Unfortunately we are not yet far enough advanced to give even an approx im ate answer. The first require ment is to estab lish the primary facts of psychic life, and this is far from having been accom plished. Indeed, we have only just begun the work of compil ing an invent ory of the psyche, not always with great success. Merely to estab lish the fact that certain people have this or that phys ical
appear ance is of no signi fic ance if it does not allow us to infer a psychic correl at ive. We have learned some thing only when we have determ ined what psychic attrib utes go with a given bodily consti tu tion. The body means as little to us without the psyche as the latter without the body. But when we try to infer a psychic correl at ive from a phys ical char ac ter istic, we are proceed ing-as already stated-from the known to the unknown. I must, unfor tu nately, stress this point, since psycho logy is the young est
of the sciences and there fore the one that suffers most from precon ceived opin ions. The fact that we have only recently discovered psycho logy tells us tion
it was impossible to study the psyche object ively. Psychology, as a science, is actu ally our most recent acquis i tion; up to now it has been just as fant astic and arbit rary as was natural science in the Middle Ages. It was believed that psycho logy could be created as it were by decree-a preju dice under which we are still labour ing. Psychic life is, after all, what is most imme di ate to us, and appar ently what we know most about. Indeed, it is more than famil iar, we yawn over it. We are irrit ated by the banal ity of its ever last ing commonplaces; they bore us to extinc tion and we do everything in our power to avoid think ing about them. The psyche being imme di acy itself, and we ourselves being the psyche, we are almost forced to assume that we know it through and through in a way that cannot be doubted or ques tioned. That is why each of us has his own private opinion about psycho logy and is even convinced that he knows more about it than anyone else. Psychiatrists, because they must struggle with their patients’ relat ives and guard i ans whose “under stand ing” is prover bial, are perhaps the first to become aware as a profes sional group of that blind preju dice which encour ages every man to take himself as his own best author ity in psycho lo gical matters. But this of course does not prevent the psychi at rist also from becom ing a “know-all.” One of them even went so far as to confess: “There are only two normal people in this city-Professor B. is the other.” Since this is how matters stand in psycho logy today, we must bring
ourselves to admit that what is closest to us, the psyche, is the very thing we know least about, although it seems to be what we know best of all, and further more that every one else prob ably under stands it better than we do ourselves. At any rate that, for a start, would be a most useful heur istic principle. As I have said, it is just because the psyche is so close to us that psychol-ogy has been discovered so late. And because it is still in its initial stages as a science, we lack the concepts and defin i tions with which to grasp the facts. If concepts are lacking, facts are not; on the contrary, we are surroun dedalmost buried-by facts. This is in strik ing contrast to the state of affairs in other sciences, where the facts have first to be unearthed. Here the clas si fica tion of primary data results in the form a tion of descript ive concepts cover ing certain natural orders, as, for example, the group ing of the elements in chem istry and of plant famil ies in botany. But it is quite differ ent in the case of the psyche. Here an empir ical and descript ive method merely plunges us into the cease less stream of subject ive psychic happen ings, so welter
ourselves are psyches, it is almost impossible to us to give free rein to psychic happen ings without being dissolved in them and thus robbed of our ability to recog nize distinc tions and make compar is ons. This is one diffi culty. The other is that the more we turn from spatial
phenom ena to the non-spati al ity of the psyche, the more impossible it becomes to determ ine anything by exact meas ure ment. It becomes diffi cult even to estab lish the facts. If, for example, I want to emphas ize the unreal ity of some thing, I say that I merely “thought” it. I say: “I would never even have had this thought unless such and such had happened; and besides, I never think things like that.” Remarks of this kind are quite usual, and they show how nebu lous psychic facts are, or rather, how vague they appear subject ively-for in reality they are just as object ive and just as defin ite as any other events. The truth is that I actu ally did think such and such a thing, regard less of the condi tions and provisos I attach to this process. Many people have to wrestle with them selves in order to make this perfectly obvious admis sion, and it often costs them a great moral effort. These, then, are the diffi culties we encounter when we draw infer ences about the state of affairs in the psyche from the known things we observe outside. My more limited field of work is not the clin ical study of external char ac-
ter ist ics, but the invest ig a tion and clas si fic a tion of the psychic data which may be inferred from them. The first result of this work is a phenomen o logy of the psyche, which enables us to formu late a corres pond ing theory about its struc ture. From the empir ical applic a tion of this struc tural theory there is finally developed a psycho lo gical typo logy. Clinical studies are based on the descrip tion of symp toms, and the step
from this to a phenomen o logy of the psyche is compar able to the step from a purely symp to matic patho logy to the patho logy of cellu lar and meta bolic processes. That is to say, the phenomen o logy of the psyche brings into view those psychic processes in the back ground which under lie the clin ical symp toms. As is gener ally known, this know ledge is obtained by the applica tion of analyt ical methods. We have today a working know ledge of the psychic processes that produce psycho genic symp toms, and have thus laid the found a tions for a theory of complexes. Whatever else may be taking place in the obscure recesses of the psyche-and there are notori ously many opin ions about this-one thing is certain: it is the complexes (emotion allytoned contents having a certain amount of autonomy) which play the most
uncon scious do behave in a way I cannot describe better than by the word “autonom ous.” The term is meant to indic ate the capa city of the complexes to resist conscious inten tions, and to come and go as they please. Judging by all we know about them, they are psychic entit ies which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from conscious ness and lead a separ ate exist ence in the dark realm of the uncon scious, being at all times ready to hinder or rein force the conscious func tion ing. A deeper study of the complexes leads logic ally to the problem of their
origin, and as to this a number of differ ent theor ies are current. Theories apart, exper i ence shows that complexes always contain some thing like a conflict, or at least are either the cause or the effect of a conflict. At any rate the char ac ter ist ics of conflict-shock, upheaval, mental agony, inner strifeare pecu liar to the complexes. They are the “sore spots,” the bêtes noires, the “skel et ons in the cupboard” which we do not like to remem ber and still less to be reminded of by others, but which frequently come back to mind unbid den and in the most unwel come fashion. They always contain memor ies, wishes, fears, duties, needs, or insights which somehow we can never really grapple with, and for this reason they constantly inter fere with our conscious life in a disturb ing and usually a harmful way. Complexes obvi ously repres ent a kind of inferi or ity in the broad est
sense-a state ment I must at once qualify by saying that to have complexes does not neces sar ily indic ate inferi or ity. It only means that some thing discord ant, unas sim il ated, and antag on istic exists, perhaps as an obstacle, but also as an incent ive to greater effort, and so, perhaps, to new possib ilit ies of achieve ment. In this sense, there fore, complexes are focal or nodal points of psychic life which we would not wish to do without; indeed, they should not be missing, for other wise psychic activ ity would come to a fatal stand still. They point to the unre solved prob lems in the indi vidual, the places where he has suffered a defeat, at least for the time being, and where there is some thing he cannot evade or over come-his weak spots in every sense of the word. These char ac ter ist ics of the complex throw a signi fic ant light on its origin.
