Ideas resemble coins which have a certain exchange value according to written and unwritten laws. Some are copper coins, so defaced and dirty that no one would suspect from their looks that they had once sparkled like bright gold. Others shine even to-day, after a lapse of a thousand years, and a commanding figure proudly proclaims its origin. One might even more aptly say that ideas resemble securities that are highly valued to-day and may be worthless to-morrow; one day they promise their possessor wealth and fame, and the next day there comes a spiritual break, he is impoverished, and is left with an apparently worthless piece of paper....

There is as yet, alas! no standard by which the values of different ideas might be measured. Every man constructs for himself without much ado a canon whereby to value his own thoughts. As a rule he swims with the tide of current opinion; more rarely he goes with the minority and very rarely he independently makes his own measure wherewith to judge matters. Strange! In the end the conflict of minds turns altogether about ideas and their estimation. What else do geniuses, the pathfinders of mankind, accomplish but to disseminate a hitherto neglected or even unknown idea and cause it to [Pg 153]be generally accepted or to cause ideas that have hitherto stood high in the world’s estimation to topple from their thrones?

Just as everything else in life runs a circuitous course, in which beginning and end touch, so is it also with the valuation of ideas. Not only the genius, but the fool also strips old, highly esteemed ideas and overvalues others that he has created for himself. The genius and the fool agree in that they permit themselves to be led by the “overvaluation” of their ideas. This expression was coined in a happy moment by the psychiatrist Wernicke. It tells more in its pregnant brevity than a long-winded definition would. Formerly it was the custom to speak of the “fixed ideas” of the sufferers from the peculiar form of insanity which physicians call “paranoia,” the mental disease which the laiety knows better and understands less than any other psychosis. A delusion was regarded as a fixed idea which neither experience nor logic could shake. To-day we have penetrated deeper into the problems of delusions. We know that ideas differ from one another tremendously. Some are anemic and colourless, come like pale shadows and so depart. Others have flesh and blood and scintillate in brilliant colours. Long after they have vanished, their image still trembles in our souls in gently dying oscillations. The explanation for this phenomenon is very simple. Our attention is dependent upon our emotions. Pale thoughts are indifferent and have no emphasis. [Pg 154]Coloured ideas are richly endowed with emotions, being either pleasurable or painful.

As a rule ideas are in continual conflict with one another. The instincts surge upward from the depth, the inhibitions bear down from above, and between them—owing to stimuli from within and without—the sea of ideas rocks up and down, during which time another idea rises to the mirror-like surface of consciousness. Suddenly one remains on top and becomes stationary, like a buoy anchored deep to the sea’s bottom. This is the “fixed idea” of older writers and the “overvalued ideas” of modern psychotherapeutists.

This idea is really deeply anchored. At the bottom of the unconscious lie the great “complexes” which impart a corresponding accent to our various ideas. An overvalued idea is anchored in a “complex” which has repressed all other “complexes.” It is accompanied or invested with a powerful affect which has stripped other ideas of their affects.

A very old example—if one may so call it—of physiological insanity is the condition known as “being in love.” A German psychiatrist has taken the wholly supererogatory pains to prove anew that a lover is a kind of madman and he designates love as “physiological paranoia.” But, unfortunately, he makes no distinction between loving and being in love. But it is just through this distinction that we are enabled precisely to define the conception of an [Pg 155]overvalued idea. Like an example from a text-book. For love is an idea whose value is generally acknowledged. We love our parents, our teacher, our country, art, our friends, etc.

But as regards being in love it is quite a different matter. As to this the environment does not accept the exaggerated valuation of the emotions. Here love becomes an overvalued idea. Arguing with one who is in love about common sense, religion, education, station, or politics will not affect him in the least. He is dominated solely by the love-complex. This alone determines the resonance of his thoughts and feelings. The attraction to the chosen object has attracted all the other affects to it, has placed all the impulses at the service of one overvalued idea. He loves life but only if he be together with his beloved; he is jealous, but only with reference to the love-object; he is interested only in such matters as are in some way related to that object. The fool who is being dominated by an overvalued idea acts exactly in the same way. The lunatic who imagines himself the king of the world, and in whom a childhood wish had overpoweringly established itself as a fact in his consciousness, has interest only for such things as find access to this wish; the victim of ideas of persecution discovers in the news items of the daily papers the important communication that his enemies are laying traps for him; the unfortunate love-sick youth who imagines that Princess X wants to give him her hand in marriage [Pg 156]sees in all sorts of advertisements of love-hungry ladies secret communications from his princess.

These poor fools bring everything they see and everything they feel into relationship with the overvalued idea which, projected outward in the shape of an hallucination, sounds to their ears like a spiritual echo and blinds their eyes like a vision.

A lo............