of ethics. Once I asked my mother, “Are there devils?”
“Wicked people are devils,” she answered. “Do right, and you will have nothing to fear.” Many times she preached to me, “Money doesn’t count in life. You can lose it. But no one can deprive you of your knowledge.” I was seventy years old when through the Anschluss I lost my home, my savings, my medical and musical instruments, my music, part of my library, but I could take this knowledge with me to London and create a new existence. As far as money was concerned, I was always the loser. I have lost my savings five times. But I never felt these losses deeply.
I remember an episode from a later period of my boyhood. Father had secured a position abroad and regularly sent a small sum home. Thus, thanks to the economy of my mother, we could live modestly without fear of starvation.
Every child is a little spy. I got to know that my father had an affair abroad with his landlady. Father came home for a holiday. He knew that my mother was aware of his adventure. He expected reproaches, but nothing happened. Then Mother, while cleaning his trunk, found a present he had purchased for his “other woman.” She upbraided him, not because he had had an affair, but because of the expense. She knew that father loved only her. Even as an old woman she was still receiving love letters from him. Reading these letters she would smile happily and say, “The old fool.”
Although she was economical, she was a spendthrift on education. My sister, a gifted pianist, had the best and most expensive teachers. I was advised to take piano lessons from my sister and Mother gave me two kreutzers for each lesson, otherwise I would never have learned to play. How thankful I am to my mother for this little premium! From the pedagogical aspect it was superior to coercion. I wanted to learn to skate. Mother gave me the tuition money and she was equally generous when I wanted to learn to swim. My sister and her friends spoke French. “Learn French,” said my mother, “then you will understand what the girls are gossiping about.”
I was always acutely hungry. I was never forced to eat, and for that I am grateful to Mother. I have never lost my appetite; on the other hand, I never became gluttonous.
Mother’s simple philosophical formulas were the guides of my life. “Never repent having to renounce pleasure,” she once said. Then she told me the story of a man who had a ticket for a pleasure trip by boat, but was prevented by urgent business from taking the trip. The boat sank and many persons drowned.
Mother was a wonderful woman. I dedicated my best book, A Primer for Mothers, to her.
She instinctively recognized what I learned after many years of psychiatric experience; the value of training by love. This kind of education automatically reduces hatred. It is a mistake to introduce hatred into school education as was done for patriotic reasons in France after World War I. French children were taught “not to forget.” To be able to forget and to forgive is a prerogative of noble souls. We see how often the punishment children receive from parents is not forgotten or forgiven. The task of the psychiatrist is to reduce the power of inner hatreds and aggressions. He must show the individual who cannot forgive his parents how often the parents themselves are unhappy people who project their personal woes into their children. I often quote the following touching scene from Dostoyevsky’s life. A stranger on the street slapped his face. The poet looked up to him with deep sympathy and said, “How unhappy you must be if you can hit a stranger.”
Training through love breeds love. The Swiss poet Herman Hesse1 recognizes 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.
