24/12/2025
✨The passage is from Freud, Sigmund 1933a [1932], New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trs. James Strachey from Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse: SE 22, GW 15.
✨It suggests that just as a broken crystal shows its internal structure, psychological breakdowns expose truths about human psychology that are normally invisible.
✨Here’s the interpretation step by step:
1. The crystal metaphor
⭐️When a crystal breaks, it doesn’t shatter randomly.
⭐️It splits along pre-existing internal lines (cleavage planes) that were already there, just invisible.
⭐️The break reveals the crystal’s inner structure.
2. Applying this to the mind
⭐️ Freud argues that when a person develops severe mental illness, their mind doesn’t fall apart randomly either.
⭐️Instead, it “breaks” along pre-existing psychological structures.
⭐️Mental illness exposes underlying conflicts, patterns, or divisions that exist in all human minds but are usually hidden.
3. What this means
⭐️The implication is that everyone has these inner structures.
⭐️Mental patients are not fundamentally different; they reveal, in an exaggerated form, things that exist in everyone.
⭐️Their condition makes visible what is usually concealed in psychologically healthy people.
4. Reverential awe
⭐️In the past, people sometimes treated the insane as possessing special insight or closeness to hidden truths.
⭐️Freud says we still feel a version of this awe—not because mental illness is mystical, but because it offers access to deep psychological realities.
5. Turning away from external reality
⭐️When one breaks down, there is a withdraw from shared, external reality.
⭐️But in doing so, one may gain heightened access to internal, psychic reality—emotions, drives, fears, and conflicts that others repress.
6. The core message
⭐️Breaking down is also a revelation.
⭐️What seems like chaos actually follows meaningful, underlying rules.