A beautiful warm summer day. The churchyard lies dreamily in the sultry noonday atmosphere. All nature seems to be possessed by the desire to imitate the sleep of those interred in the womb of earth. Suddenly there is heard a grinding sound in the fine gravel and a curly, rosy-cheeked, dark-haired lad is seen leaping over hedges and over mounds after a gilded butterfly....

Wondrous images loom up before me like large great question marks in the trembling air. Similar scenes from the distant mirage of my own youth come to mind. Like a hot, long-dammed-up stream my emotions break from the unconsciousness into consciousness. I am overcome by a long-forgotten yearning. Is not my heart beating faster? Is there not a wild pleasure in the melancholy that oppresses me?

How strange! A little while ago I lay lost in cheerful reflections in the tall grass, delighting in the noiseless pace of time, and now I am excited, restless, disturbed, and sad, but not unhappy. My mood has undergone a complete change. What has brought this transformation about? Surely, only the appearance of the beautiful boy who was trying to catch a butterfly [Pg 144]with his green net. Why did this scene excite me so? There must have been set up in my mind a thinking process of which I was not conscious. Some secret power that drives the wheels of the emotions had set into action a long-inhibited and hidden spring.

Gradually the shadowy thoughts came into the bright light of comprehension. The boy was to me a symbol of my life. An echo of my distant youth. And the slumbering cemetery, my inevitable future. My heart too is a cemetery. Numberless buried hopes, too early slain, unblown buds, longings goaded to death, unfulfilled wishes lie buried here within and no cross betrays their presence. And over all these dead possibilities I, too, am chasing a gilded butterfly. And when I catch it in my net I seize it with my rude heavy hands, doing violence to the delicate dust on its wings, and throw the lusterless remainders among the dead. Or it is destined to a place in a box, transfixed with the fine needle named “impression” and constituting one of the collection of dead butterflies which go to make up “memory.”

It really was an “unconscious” thought, then, that transformed my mood from dur into moll. And the truth dawns on me that all our “incomprehensible” moods are logical and that they must all have a secret psychic motivation. Moody persons are persons with whom things are not in order. Their consciousness [Pg 145]is split up into numerous emotionally-toned “complexes.” An unconscious complex is like a state within a state. A sovereign power, too repressed, too weak, and too tightly fettered to break into consciousness without having to unmask, but strong enough to influence the individual’s conduct. Moody persons have their good and their bad days. The bad days are incomprehensible puzzles to them. Simple souls speak of being under the influence of demons; poets share their pains with the rest of the world and “sublimate” their petty individual woes into a gigantic world-woe; commonplace souls place the responsibility for their moods upon “nature,” the bad weather, the boss, the husband, or wife, their cook, their employment, and what not.

In the grasp of an incomprehensible mood we are ill at ease and anxious, very much like a brave person who finds himself threatened in a dark forest by a vindictive enemy whom he cannot see. To muster up courage we deceive ourselves, just as the little child that falteringly proclaims: “Please, please! I am good. The bogey man won’t come!” But the bogey man does come, for a certainty. He always comes again because everything that is repressed must take on the characteristics of a psychic compulsion. If we do not want him to come again we must bravely raise our eyelids and look at him fixedly with eyes of understanding and realise that he is nothing but a phantom of our [Pg 146]excited senses, that he does not exist and has not existed. The bogey man cannot long endure this penetrating look; slowly he dissolves into grey shadows and disappears for ever.

Modern psychologists have pointed out the relationship between unmotived moods and the periodical character of certain phenomena of life. It is, of course, a fact that we are all subject to certain partly known and partly unknown periodical influences. But whether this alone is sufficient reason for attacks of depression does not seem to me to have been proved. My own experiences speak against it. Just as a stone, thrown into a body of water, causes the appearance of broad circular ripples which gradually get feebler and feebler until they disappear with a scarcely perceptible undulation of the surface, so does a strong impression continue to work within us, giving rise to ever wider but ever feebler circles. Only when these circles set a floating mine in motion does the water shoot up, the mud is thrown on high, and the clear surface is muddied. These floating mines are the split off, unconscious complexes. The secret thought must not be put in motion.

But enough of metaphors! Let us take an example from our daily life. A woman is suffering from frequently-recurring incomprehensible depressions. She has everything that a childish, spoiled heart can desire. And she is not a spoiled child, for she had been a poor seamstress when she made her husband’s acquaintance. [Pg 147]Now she lives in a magnificent palace, wears costly garments, has a houseful of servants, adorns herself with the finest laces; her husband clothes her like a doll, pampers and coddles her, treats her with the greatest affection—in short, worships her. And this woman, the envy of her associates as she rides by them in her splendid automobile, has days on which she cries for hours. Our first guess is she does not love her husband. You are wrong, you psychologists of the old school! She does love her husband, she is as happy with ............