FREUD AND THE IMAGE OF MAN
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nor visitations of degeneracy, but products of a delicate balance of
forces that, under different circumstances, might have produced
normality or even saintliness. Good and evil, in short, grow from
a common root.
Freud's genius was in his resolution of polarities. The distinction
of child and adult was one such. It did not suffice to reiterate that
the child was father to the man. The theory of infantile sexuality
and the stages of psychosexual development were an effort to fill
the gap, the latter clumsy, the former elegant. Though the alleged
progression of sexual expression from the oral, to the anal, to the
phallic, and finally to the genital has not found a secure place either
in common sense or in general psychology, the developmental con–
tinuity of sexuality has been recognized by both. Common sense
honors the continuity in the baby-books and in the permissiveness
with which young parents of today resolve their doubts. And the
research of Beach and others has shown the profound effects of in–
fantile experience on adult sexual behavior-even in lower organisms.
If
today people are reluctant to report their dreams with the
innocence once attached to such recitals, it is again because Freud
brought into common question the discontinuity between the ra–
tional purposefulness of waking life and the seemingly irrational
purposelessness of fantasy and dream. While the crude symbolism
of Freud's early efforts at dream interpretation has corne increasingly
to be abandoned-that telephone poles and tunnels have an invariant
sexual reference-the conception of the dream as representing dis–
guised wishes and fears has become common coin. And Freud's
recognition of deep unconscious processes in the creative act, let it
also be said, has gone far toward enriching our understanding of
the kinship between the artist, the humanist, and the man of science.
Finally, it is our heritage from Freud that the all-or-none dis–
tinction between mental illness and Plental health has been replaced
by a more humane conception of the continuity of these states. The
view that neurosis is a severe reaction to human trouble is as revolu–
tionary in its implications for social practice as it is daring in formula–
tion. The "bad seed" theories, the nosologies of the nineteenth century,
the demonologies and doctrines of divine punishment-none of these
provided a basis for compassion toward human suffering comparable
to that of our time.
One may argue, at last, that Freud's sense of the continuity of
