when a happy married couple laughingly assures me that the heaven of their marriage was always cloudless and that there were no thunder-storms and no lightning flashes i accept it as self-evident, but to myself i think: they are lying. when two friends assure me that they have never quarrelled i think the same thing. i know that they have not been telling the truth. that is, they are liars without the consciousness of lying. they are firmly convinced that they were telling only what was true, because they have “repressed” the unpleasant, the painful, the objectionable. and thus it comes to pass that lovers forget all the “scenes” that had occurred between them, and that friends become oblivious of the little unpleasantnesses that had caused them so much suffering, and that they can assert, with the utmost conviction, that they had never quarrelled. we do not quaff the lethe-potion of oblivion at our life’s end. no, we sip it daily, and it is this that enables us to maintain that optimism which ever looks hopefully into the future and anticipates thornless roses.
there are people who must always be quarrelling, whose exuberant energy must be discharged in this way, to whom life does not seem worth [pg 172]while if it runs along smoothly. these are the everlastingly unsatisfied who have not found the ideals of their youth, who have not attained their dreams. they project their discontent, their internal distraction, upon all their daily experiences. that is why they so often appear to be overcharged with emotion; that is why the intensity of their excitement is incomprehensible to us. for it is a fact that they fly into rages about trivial matters. but it is this very intensity of emotion that shows that there is more behind these little rows than they will ordinarily admit, that the quarrel derives its fuel from a deeper source than appears on the surface.
it has struck many observers that the external provocation to quarrelling is often very trivial. of course we frequently hear a man or his wife declare that they would gladly avoid a quarrel if it were possible to do so. either one says something that seems to be quite innocent, and yet it will be the occasion for a heated altercation, a great domestic scene with all its unpleasant consequences.
this is due to the fact that most persons do not distinguish between cause and provocation. the provocation to a quarrel is easily found if hidden unconscious forces seek for it, if a deeper cause, acting as a driving power, sets the wheels of passion in motion.
a somewhat careful investigation of every quarrel easily brings the conviction that it is [pg 173]invariably the secret, unconscious emotions that bring about the conflict of opinions. where this deep resonance of the unconscious is lacking we playfully pass over differences. unfortunately there are probably no two human beings whose souls vibrate so harmoniously that there never occurs a discord. this phenomenon is altogether too deeply rooted in human nature for an exception ever to occur. and paradoxical as it may sound, it is lovers who love each other most who cause each other the greatest pain. the great intensity which their emotions attain is due only to the fact they have repressed a series of experiences and feelings. they are blind to the faults of the beloved because they do not wish to see these faults. but the suppressed forces have not yet lost their power over the soul. these bring about the quarrel, and are capable, even if only for a few seconds, to transform love into hatred.
but a few practical examples will do more to make this subject clear than all our theoretical explanations. mr. n. s., a pious, upright man, asserts that his present ailment dates from a quarrel that had been frightfully upsetting him for months. he had inherited from his father a large library rich in manuscripts, and had also succeeded him in his position. one day his brother came to him and stormily demanded the return of the books. but inasmuch as he was the older he felt himself entitled to be the sole heir. a violent quarrel ensued, during which [pg 174]he exclaimed: “i’ll die before i give up any of these books!” after the quarrel he became very neurotic. he tortures himself with self-reproaches; he is convinced that with that exclamation he had been guilty of an act of impiety; he is very unhappy and finds no rest, no peace, either at home or in his office.
many persons may be satisfied with the superficial explanation offered by the patient himself that he is an ardent bibliophile and collector of ancient manuscripts. but the physician who treats sick souls must not be so easily satisfied.
we know that every collector is an unconscious don juan who has transferred his passion from an erotic upon a non-erotic sphere. but we also know that the passion with which the collected objects are loved emanates from the erotic domain. and what did our psychoanalysis of the above case bring out? remarkably enough a rivalry between the two brothers which went back all the way to their youth. the older one had the privileges of the first-born and was a good-for-nothing. the younger one was a pattern of what a child ought to be. from their childhood they had been rivals for the affection of their parents, and more especially of the mother. we encounter here the so-called “oedipus motive,” a son’s love for his mother—a motive whose instinctive force and urge are still too imperfectly appreciated. the two had been rivals, the older one being jealous of the parents’ preference for the [pg 175]younger one, and the younger jealous of the older one’s privileges. in this we have the first of the deeper motives for the quarrel. further investigation brought a second and a third motive to light. the older had, very naturally, married first, and repeatedly boasted in the presence of his younger and unmarried brother of his wife’s charms and virtues. in fact, he had even led him into his wife’s bedroom that he might see for himself what a treasure he possessed. (you see the motives of such stories as “gyges and his ring” and “king candaules” occurring even nowadays.) at that moment a great passion for his sister-in-law flared up in the younger brother’s breast. here we have then a second cause for dissension. but other factors are also involved. our pious young man married a beautiful woman and would have been happy if he had not been the victim of a jealous passion. jealousy always has its origin in the knowledge of one’s inferiority. he thought he noticed that his older brother was too devoted to his wife. and during an excursion into the country they had been in the woods a little too long, as he thought, and it occurred to him—and here we have the fourth motive—to tempt his sister-in-law. he is a don juan who runs after every petticoat and wants to drain life in large draughts. n. s. was a pious virtuous man who knew how to turn his sinful cravings to good account for the success of his business and to bad account as far as his health was concerned. the brother whom [pg 176]he despised openly he envied in secret. but we could mention still other motives for their quarrel if mrs. grundy considerations did not bar the way....
unconscious sexual motives lurk behind many quarrels, one might almost say behind most quarrels. we have already hinted that dissensions between brothers or sisters are due to rivalry. but even in the quarrels between parents and children we may frequently enough demonstrate the identical undertone for the disharmony. the infant son sees in his father a rival for the mother’s favour. the reverse also occurs, though not so frequently. i was once the witness to a violent quarrel between a father and his son. the father had, as it seemed to me, not the slightest cause for grievance against the son, and yet a little trifle led to a violent altercation that ended in a tragic scene. at the height of the row the father screamed to his wife: “you are to blame for it all! you robbed me of my son’s love!”
naturally one would think that this lava stream belched forth in a great burst of passion from a volcano would contain the truth in its torrid current. and so it does, but in a disguised form. the true reproach should have been directed at the son, and should have been: “you have robbed me of my wife’s love!”
we see in this a “transference” of a painful emotion from one person upon another. such transferences or “displacements” are extremely [pg 177]common in everyday life, and it is only with their aid that we can account for the many domestic conflicts. a man will rarely admit that he erred in the choice of a wife. the feeling of hatred that his wife engenders in him he transfers upon others. upon whom? the answer is obvious. upon her next of kin. most frequently upon her mother, the most immediate cause of her existence. this is the secret meaning of the many mother-in-law jokes, a never-failing and inexhaustible and perpetual theme for wits.
so that, for example, if we hear a young woman complain that she cannot bear her husband’s family but that she loves him beyond bounds we may with perfect safety translate this in the language of the unconscious thus: “i would not care a rap about my husband’s family if i did not have to love my husband.”
the rows with servants, well-known daily occurrences, become intelligible only if we know the law of transference. an unfaithful wife, who had been betrayed and deserted by her lover, suddenly began to watch her servant girls suspiciously, and to strike them on the slightest provocations. the woman had for years employed “help” without having had more than the customary quarrels with them. after a short sojourn with her husband the rage of the abandoned woman, who would have loved to give her faithless lover a good thrashing in true southern fashion, was transferred upon her servants. and exactly like this the resentment [pg 178]of many a housewife is discharged through these more or less innocent lightning rods, and thus is brought about the phenomenon so common in modern large cities which may be designated as “servant-girl neurosis.”
obviously the deeper motives slumber in the unconscious, and if they ever become conscious they are looked upon as sinfulness and bad temper. freud has become the founder of a wholly new psychology by virtue of his discovery of the laws of repression and of transference—a psychology which will be indispensable to the criminologist of the future. what is nowadays brought to light in our halls of justice as the psychological bases for conflicts is generally only superficial psychology.
this is strikingly illustrated by one of the saddest of legal proceedings of last year. i mean the trial for murder in the murri-boumartini case, in consequence of which an innocent victim—so i am convinced—the countess linda boumartini is languishing in prison. her brother tullio, who had murdered his brother-in-law, was accused of an illicit relationship with his sister, for otherwise the murder would have been inexplicable. one who has carefully read linda’s memoirs and her letters, which are now before the public, as well as the confessions of the imprisoned tullio, will be sure to laugh at the accusation, which unquestionably owed its origin to a clerical plot. what may have really happened is that unconscious brotherly [pg 179]love which deep down under consciousness in all likelihood takes its origin from the sexual but whose flowers appear on the surface of consciousness as the loftiest manifestations of ethical feeling. it was brotherly love, the primal motive which wagner immortalised in his “valkyrie,” that forced the dagger into tullio murri’s hand. he saw his sister suffer and go to pieces because of the brutal stupidity of his brother-in-law. what lay hidden behind his pure fraternal love may never have entered his consciousness.
oh, we unfortunates, doomed to eternal blindness! what we see of the motives of great conflicts is usually only the surface. even in the case of the little domestic quarrels, the irritating frictions of everyday life, the vessel of knowledge sails only over the easily excited ripples. but what gives these waters their black aspect is the deep bed over which they lie. down there, at the bottom of the sea which represents our soul, there ever abide ugly, deformed monsters—our instincts and desires—emanating from the beginnings of man’s history. when they bestir their coarse bodies the sea too trembles and is slightly set in motion. and we stupid human beings think it is the surface wind that has begot the waves.
