Hans von Hattingberg

Dieterle, R.R. (1930): The Relation of Hans Von Hattingberg to Psychoanalysis: An Appreciation. Psychoanalytic Review, 17:268-273

It was at the International Congress for Psychoanalysis held at Bad Homburg in the autumn of 1925 that I first heard of Hans von Hattingberg. However, it was not until last year that I sought him out. Believing I had made a “discovery” in psychoanalysis, I underwent a teaching-analysis of six months‘ duration and now feel that it would be appropriate to introduce some of his teachings to others.

Dr. von Hattingberg had been denied membership in the Berlin Society because of his non-conformist views. Early in the psychoanalytic movement, as one of those who first gathered around the master was this outstanding personality who was an enfant terrible in the orthodoxy early perpetrated by Freud and which was destined to split up into the disharmonious trinity which obtains to-day. It was he who was one of the first to oppose the dogmas of early Freudianism, for deeper reasons than are ordinarily thought of. In the history of the analysis of the analysts, this outstanding resistance against the authority-complex which destroyed the early “psychoanalytic family,” setting up teachers out of pupils, is something which has occurred down to the present; and now as a pupil of two members of the original group of disciples, one orthodox and the other, individual by his very strength of personality, I write of von Hattingberg with a feeling that I have been peculiarly favored by my fortunate experience for I do not believe that anyone is better fitted to present the conflicts of the psychoanalytic movement from within and without than he is and to give what I term a comparative-psychoanalytic teaching-analysis. Proper orientation in any subject depends upon a thorough knowledge of its history and philosophy.

The most potent factors of his resistance to dogma emanate from two great factors of personality which are strongly represented in him, namely his racial and individual culture. Hans von Hattingberg, is a Wiener, a graduate in medicine of Vienna, and a doctor of laws and, more directly as an equipment of personal “Geist,”

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is he a gentleman of philosophy who has analyzed many outstanding Europeans personalities. At the IVth Allgemeine ärtzliche Kongress für Psychotherapie at Bad Nauheim in the spring of 1929, which I attended with Dr. von Hattingberg, it became apparent to me, as I sat in company with him and observed others present, that the internal strife of the psychoanalytic movement was a result of personalities with different racial and individual “Geist.” Since Charles Maylan published last year his open letter to Freud in his book entitled “Freud’s Tragic Complex,” the crises in the psychoanalytic movement narrow themselves down to a simple opposition between Optimismus and Pessimismus. It was von Hattingberg who pronounced the Freudian concept of the Ego as being the philosophy of a pessimist, an expression of introversion: the Ego, dissolved in the Id being thus passive to the forces of instinct and impulse, while in the individual-psychology of Adler the opposite prevails, the Ego absorbing the Id. It remains for Jung to decide upon the relative values. He, once partial to the extroverts as a social element, now looks upon them with some disdain and sees the introvert as the salt of the earth, and for himself, Jung is said to have rationalized the difficulty by a mechanism of adaptation, for in the summer he behaves extrovertedly and in winter, introvertedly; play and work being respectively related.

Such side-lights upon psychoanalysis are characteristic of von Hattingberg’s thought and humor. For that reason, one of his earlier important papers, entitled “The Analysis of the Analytical Situation,” did not gain publication until four years after it had been read. The orthodoxy of Freud early met obstacle in the man whose critical mind was already analyzing the analyst. In some such fashion has Freud’s “Totem and Taboo” met with resistance to acceptance from professional anthropological psychologists. In a soil as virgin as the American, where mental turgor and proceritas are acquiring their growth, psychoanalysis took root at the time when Clark University was the first to applaud the premiere of a new symphony whose first movement was only in the making. The evolution of American philosophy as an indicator of our spiritual growth is relatively proportional to the enthusiasm of James at the time of Freud’s Clark Lectures; and as crisis in spiritual evolution our present struggle with prohibition can be regarded as a political sore whose truer cause lies in the fact that morally we are not sure whether beer will ever develop an American school of metaphysics.

Due to his broad views, von Hattingberg was selected by Birnbaum

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to write the section entitled “Psychoanalyse und verwandte Methoden” in that author’s “Die psychischen Heilmethoden.” In those one hundred and sixty pages is found a better analytical and philosophical presentation of psychoanalysis than can anywhere else be found, because of the author’s understanding objectivity. The meaning of the psychoanalytic movement as an evolutionary crisis in the spiritual and intellectual development of man, its relation to medicine and outgrowth from the methods of suggestion, hypnosis, and psychocatharsis are admirably presented. If one desires orientation and if the future student wishes to choose critically, he should read this exposition.

In it, the neuroses are contrastingly discussed as disturbances of balance and as developmental disturbances of the personality. This viewpoint of interpretation laid the foundations of von Hatting-berg’s later expressions. His paper, “Psychological Types,” read at the above-named Congress last spring, is the forerunner of a book to appear this year under the title of “Schematic Psychology.” This work will reflect the thought of an experienced and creative worker who has had more than twenty years of psychoanalytic practice. He writes recently that he has finished the first chapter which is concerned with “Verzweiflung am Denken.” It contains the author’s disappointment with the so-called school-psychology, with Ludwig Klages (who last year had published his long-waited-for book), with the analysts (I understand the orthodox ones) because of their school-measured narrowness, with Keyserling’s philosophy, and finally with his own thought as his greatest disappointment. Of two chief parts, this volume will contain parts dedicated to the Problem of the Instincts, the Problem of Neurotic Types, Characterology, and finally, the Doctrine of the Neuroses and Psychology, all under the viewpoint that it thereby treats of a miscarried attempt of what he will call “Thinking from the Right.” The second chief part will deal with a new coinage, “Thinking from the Left.” It is foreseen that it will be a philosophical treatise from which he will draw conclusions at the end. The chapter on Characterology will contain a development of Jung’s psychological-types as mechanisms, in contrast with the psychological-types of other writers (Schiller, Worringer and Gross), with the character-types known as empirical or theophrastic, and with the ideal—or structure—types (Dilthey and Spranger, and the function-types of Jung), with the species A, B, and C, of Klages and the ground-rhythm-types of Nohl, and the physiognomic types of Kretschmer and of Rutz.

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Besides these works, “Marriage as an Analytic Situation” appears in Count Keyserling’s “Ehe-Buch,” in which the chief theme concerns the similarity of marriage to the analytic situation: that is, between husband and wife and vice versa, as between analyst and patient. This thought follows from von Hattingberg’s analysis of the analytical situation.

His two most important separate articles “Analytic Shock” and its further development in “Types of Neurotic Crises” are the ones that have come to the attention of only the wide readers in this country. The first-named is a significant paper dealing with foundations laid in the introductory portion of the section written for Birnbaum’s book. In it he develops the idea of the authority-complex, in relation with the psychoanalytic strife-from-within the movement. As a contribution to technique, he explains what is meant by shocking the patient and defines the extent to which the analyst dare shock him, in dependence upon the types of neurosis (extroverted or introverted) and the depth of fixation or regression. The significance of analytical shock is brought into relation with the doctrines of taboo and of catharsis.

“Psychoanalysis was the making conscious of that which was already known as catharsis. In the further development of psychoanalysis Freud’s pupils became concept-scholastic and were led far away from the true character of analytical shock. The basic conflict or authority-conflict is this analytic shock or injury. That also obtains in the case of the analyst who, himself not analyzed, becomes uncertain, not having finished with the transference, and thus gets strangled in an analytical crisis with the analytic situation. Every intellectual and especially every internally motivated advance away from the binding with authority, constitutes a guilty-feeling. Neurosis is a “tormenting” by the primary fear of freedom or loss of union. Morbid anxiety is a basic symptom of analytical shock. In the neuroses the nucleus of the personality is not struck by the shock and thus the self-guiding quality of the personality leads to a restoration of balance. The greatest shock to the personality is the momentary subjective critical symptomatology never objectively elicited. The clinical manifestation of analytical shock is the phenomenon of doubt which arises as the shock deepens, causing the patient to doubt the analysis and the analyst. Despair is the severest manifestation of it and is comparable in the analytical crisis with the crisis of puberty and neurotic crises in general. It may be accompanied by bodily symptoms of biologically mechanized resistances

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such as fainting, vomiting, and dizziness or by typhlopsychically engendered affective states. The analysis disturbs the bondages (authority-conflict) which have previously supported the patient (function of the neurosis) in order to substitute a new union, namely the transference, which then becomes the single support of the doubter and which must be shocked in turn by the analysis of the transference. The analytical shock calls forth the ambivalent conflict. Abreaction is an hysterical attack, a technically induced and controlled crisis. The depth of the analytical shock must direct itself toward the deep levels of neurotic disturbance and hence goes deepest and strikes the personality-nucleus in the great neuroses characterized as developmental disturbances. The shock can lead to severe dangers to the relationship with the neurotic. The possibility of suicide and the theoretical chance of setting into motion a latent schizophrenic process must be considered. These dangers become magnified through the automatic disturbances aroused in the unconscious by the analytic process. Because this forces itself more deeply, or is more automatic than the psychologically understandable, it is fundamentally impossible to foretell sure signs of the too-deeply-gripping shocks. As a matter of technique the only schematic tool we possess is to use Jung’s types as diagnostic measurements and then to activate or passivate the transference from the analyst outward, according as the patient (introvert or extrovert) reacts to authority. It is here that the analyst must determine his choice of therapeutics; suggestion, hypnosis, or psychocatharsis, are to be considered as milder procedures and unsuitable cases must be thrown out.

The relation of the analytical shock to the general intellectual and spiritual crisis, like the conditioning of the neurosis of the individual through the environmental setting of our intellectuality and spirituality, opens up a series of important practical and theoretical questions. Why the intellectually sound are so often analysis-blind, while the neurotics among physicians are precursors of that which is new; why the one reacts to form by turning his back upon orthodox psychoanalysis in order to become its opponent under the “progressive” motto of “Freud to Adler”; why the one too tender, just as the other stouter nature suicides in the practice of analysis; why the one becomes an orthodox Freudian, the other a pure individual-psychologist; why the third never rises out of his method of simple abreacting psychocatharsis, these questions lead to the analysis of the analyst as to why he becomes a psychotherapeut at all. The

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self-analysis is the safest insurance against accident. One must experience what it is to doubt himself. This does not mean orthodox analysis, since it does not suffice in this world to swear by the law and word of the master. Self-experience is the measure of all pain and pleasure.”

These ideas lay the foundations for Hans von Hattingberg’s book which, I anticipate, will be a very important contribution, not only to psychoanalysis, but to philosophy and psychology.

Dr. von Hattingberg has been a resident of Munich for the past few years, where he is one of the leaders in the Psychotherapeutic Society. His time is devoted to analytical practice and to teaching-analyses and to writing. He is editor of the Zeitschrift fur Menschenkunde. As his first American pupil, I take particular pride in having “discovered” him and trust that by this inadequate summary some introduction to him and his work is given to the readers of this periodical inasmuch as his nature and his patient conscientiousness obscured his existence and withheld him from possible premature expressions of his ideas.

Bibliography
Hattinberg, Hans von (1924): Zur Analyse der Analytische Situation: IZP, 1924, 10, Heft I,
Hattinberg, Hans von: Psychoanalyse u. verwandte Methoden: Die psychischen Heilmethoden, Dr. Karl Birnbaum. Thieme, Leipzig.
Hattinberg, Hans von: Die Ehe als analytische Situation: Das Ehe-Buch, Graf Hermann Keyserling. Kampman, Celle.
Hattinberg, Hans von: Die analytische Erschütterung: Der Nervenarzt. 1. Jahrgang, Heft 6, pp. 329-337.
Hattinberg, Hans von: Die Typik der Neurotischen Krise: Der Nervenarzt. 1. Jahrgang, Heft 12. pp. 714-725.
Hattinberg, Hans von (1929): Psychologische Typen: Bericht Über den IVten Allegemeinen ärztlichen Kongress für Psychotherapie, Bad Nauheim, April 11-14, 1929.
Hattinberg, Hans von (1929): Schematische Psychologic: Personal Communication November 29, 1929. Volume in preparation.
Hattinberg, Hans von: Zeitschrift für Menschenkunde: Herausgegeben von Hans von Hattingberg u. Niels Kampman, Verlag, Celle. Jahrgange I-V.

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Redaktion: CD, 13.7.2011