The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel - The Life Story of a Pioneer Psychoanalyst. Wilhelm Stekel
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it when in his Indian poem, Sidhartha, he writes the following dialogue: “Tell me my dear, you do not educate your son? You do not force him, do not hit him, do not punish him?”
“No, I do none of these things.”
“I knew it. You do not force him, do not hit him, do not command him, because you know that Soft is stronger than Hard, Water stronger than Rock, Love stronger than Force. But do you not bind him with the tie of your love? Do you not shame him daily and make it hard for him with all your goodness and patience?”
What is the most important duty of parents? To make their child apt for life, happy and independent. My parents were equal to the task. I look back upon my long life—I am now seventy-two years old—and ask myself, “If you were born again, what sort of life would you choose?” I answer, “I should gladly repeat the same life with its sufferings and joys, its disappointments and successes.” I should not wish for a different life, because, taking everything into account, I have always been a happy person. For this reason I believe that I have the right to handle the problems of education, and to advise parents. In doing this I am drawing upon my forty years of experience as a psychotherapist whose task has been to correct the results of faulty education.
I have learned through experience that most neurotics are victims of faulty education and unhappy environment. Many of my patients were the offspring of unhappily married parents. The well-known saying, “The criminal is the crime of the state,” can be paralleled by, “The neurotic is the crime of the family.”
The ethical influence of my parents was firmly planted in me. But it was ethics without religion. We were, with the exception of my sister, freethinkers. Looking back at her life I understand that she was an obsessional parapath.2 She shunned the cemetery, and, in contrast to the rest of the family, she was fanatically religious. She had a tattered prayer book and three times a day she would go into a corner of the room to say her prayers. She wanted me to become religious, and she paid me two kreutzers for every prayer I said. This sum supplemented the small income I received for taking piano lessons and the prodigious fee of two gulden which I was paid for tutoring a pupil in his school subjects. With the first gulden I earned, I bought a silver thimble for my mother.
Then came a radical change in my general outlook on life. I was fed up with the Red Indian stories, and started the Tales of Hoffman (now out of fashion). There was always the story of the boy who was in grave danger of becoming a criminal, and who, after divers adventures and misfortunes, turned out to be a successful and honest gentleman. There was a second-hand bookshop where for a penny I could exchange one little book for another. I used my money to get these books.
Now came another turning-point in my life. A cousin who was my age often came to visit me. One day he began to talk to me about bad boys who visit houses of ill-fame. We excelled in virtue, and together ran down these corrupt boys. But we repeated the same talk every day, and after a fortnight we went together to the house in question. When I returned home, I experienced my first sleepless night. I was then fourteen years old.
This episode had unexpected consequences. Before this expedition I was a stargazer, a daydreamer, a mooncalf, and I could not pay much attention to the teachers. Now I rose to the top of the class and became a teacher of boys who had been at the top in the lower grades. I became an idealist; the period of wildness was finished forever. It was then that I wrote my first poem. I longed for an ideal love with a girl, a love separated from the world of sex. Ideal love and gratification from a prostitute became opposite poles. I chummed with a youth who had the same ambition—to become a great poet. We exchanged good books, reveled in the beauties of nature, and read our poems to each other.
MUSIC
My financial situation was much improved. I earned some money and was able to afford my own expenses. Father was abroad, my sister was employed as a governess in Vienna. My brother worked as a clerk away from home. However, we had to be cautious on monetary matters.
Our lodging was too big for just Mother and me, so my mother advertised in the newspaper for a roomer. An old Czech school teacher with his son, a thorough scalawag, applied. The son had been expelled from school in Prague. His father, a Mr. Peck, was not well off, and so he bargained with my mother. Finally it was agreed that Mr. Peck would pay six shillings a month, and in addition Mr. Peck would continue my piano lessons. Mr. Peck could play some dances on the piano. His school salary was meager. By playing the piano and the violin at the nearby inn he earned the major part of his income. He asked me to play something and I responded with the not overly-difficult “Sonata in G Minor” by Beethoven. Mr. Peck was astonished. He rushed to my mother. “The boy plays the piano better than I do!” Mother was pleased. She had one of her typically glorious ideas: “Everything the boy learns will be of advantage in his future years.” She bought a cheap violin, and Mr. Peck started to teach me. I was rough on the poor man because I had no sense of pitch. The noise I made on the fiddle was nerve-wracking. But I made rapid progress. Subsequently, as a medical student, I played the violin in an amateur orchestra; later I learned to play the viola and participated in a string quartet. I am grateful to my mother for the many pleasurable hours my training in music has afforded me.
At the piano I first attempted the most difficult pieces, and neglected the bass. “You are climbing the rungs of the ladder too quickly.” It did not matter; I learned to improvise and this ability helped me over many hours which otherwise would have been arduous. I regret that I did not learn harmony and counterpoint, but once I began improvising on the piano, my inventive power seemed inexhaustible. I learned everything by myself. Had I possessed a trustworthy sense of pitch, I would have become a musician. I believe that the artistic gift is not one-sided. A creative mind can express itself in any branch of art. I also tried to draw, but I could go no further than the infantile beginnings. My son, by the way, is a distinguished composer and has a perfect sense of pitch; my daughter is an able painter.
THE HIGH SCHOOL
In the small town of Czernowitz there was only a German high school and a German university. The inhabitants of the town were of four nationalities: Rumanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and German. German was the colloquial language. Jews were considered as Germans, and we Jews felt that we were Germans. It never occurred to me that I was not a German. The word “anti-Semitism” was unknown in Czernowitz. In our class the students felt like brothers; the spirit of solidarity was so strong that it was impossible for the teachers to find a telltale if one of us misbehaved. There were many gifted boys of diverse nationalities. We founded a poetry club, met every Saturday night, and even arranged a poetry writing competition. The German teacher was the judge. Once I received the first prize for lyric and epic verses.
At school we were up to all kinds of pranks; we got together to drink beer and to joke and sing. We often frolicked until late at night. Then, on the following morning, Mother would come to breakfast with her head wrapped in a woolen scarf and complain of migraine. She would pretend that she had been unable to sleep until she heard me arrive. She gave me an unctuous sermon about the dangers of vice. I would reply with a laconical display of erudition: “Mother, two thousand years ago Socrates delivered the same lecture.” Once Mother changed the sermon, “You must understand me, I am not narrow-minded, but if an artist sees how the growing work of art is going to seed, he must try to prevent it from deteriorating completely.”
My fellow students were going to dancing school, but Mother refused to permit me to join them. I pretended that I had to visit a student to help him prepare for the next day’s school work. But I headed directly for the dancing school where I quickly became a good dancer. Prior to taking dancing lessons I often played at the dancing school when my sister, her friends, and other young people held impromptu dances.
The bond among the students in my class was so strong that the principal tried to keep us in check by assigning the strictest master to us. This schoolmaster endured much, but after six months he gave up. If we liked a teacher, we could be extremely well-mannered. There was, for example, Professor F., in the chair of mathematics. The students were fond of him because he was just and witty.