Rationalization in Every-Day Life

Ernest Jones read this paper at the first psychoanalytic congress, in Salzburg in April 1908, and printed it that summer in Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It is where the term ‘rationalisation’ enters psychoanalysis. Jones starts from Freud's demonstration that many mental processes, in the normal as in the ill, have causes the person neither knows nor will admit. He sorts the mechanisms that hide these causes into two classes. In the first class the person holds that a thought or act needs no explanation. Slips and chance actions are put down to accident. Choices shaped by hidden motives or by custom, such as a number picked ‘freely’ or a tie worn every day, are claimed as acts of will, so that asking where they come from seems absurd. Jones reads this resistance to inquiry as a sign that the real source is unacceptable, and finds it behind many fixed religious, ethical and political beliefs. In the second class the person offers an explanation, but a false one, because everyone needs to give a connected and rational account of themselves. False explanations formed mainly for oneself he calls evasions; those formed with an eye to the opinion of one's circle he calls rationalisations. There is no sharp line between them. His examples are a young man who believes he chose his family's sect after weighing the evidence, and physicians who still prescribe valerian for hysteria. The remedy was once justified by the theory of the wandering womb and is now explained as an ‘antispasmodic’. Jones closes by arguing that the new psychology will show how opinions are formed and how true but unwelcome ideas can best be spread, since restating the evidence is not enough.